Cambridge Aspire vs FullRecall

Cambridge Aspire combines academic expertise with learning materials for instructors and students. Its Institutional eTextbook Collection gives institutions access to over 1,000 Cambridge eTextbooks, while individuals can purchase specific titles with perpetual access. Instructors can try a subject eTextbook Collection for three months at free. Cambridge Spiral is a web, desktop and mobile application for downloading and reading textbooks offline. It supports bookmarks, highlights, annotations and links, with an Annotations tab for managing and reviewing notes; instructor annotations are available through custom group mode. The eReader allows copying and printing up to 20% of an eTextbook, and text-to-speech turns eCollection textbook titles into audio. Library users may access books through IP verification, Shibboleth or Athens. Online read-only access does not include annotations, bookmarks or offline reading. The Cambridge Aspire website supports LTI 1.1 links to textbooks or chapters in Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, DSL and Sakai.

FullRecall helps users retain knowledge through scheduled reviews of question-and-answer pairs. Users can write their own material or import data from collections and other databases. After a review, users rate how well they remembered an answer; the software combines that feedback with prior repetitions to schedule the next review, using a neural network that learns the user's forgetting curve. The free plan has no limit on item count or total database size, but questions and answers are each limited to 8192 bytes and category names to 128 bytes. The PC version supports Unicode, open file formats, images, sounds, and text formatting, and includes backups, statistics, clipboard capture, keyboard controls, and search with regular expressions and fuzzy matching. Users can import tab-delimited Excel exports and ready-made databases from the maker's library. FullRecall can run without installation, including from a USB drive. Downloads are listed for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS (x86), PocketPC, Maemo, and Android; the listed platforms also include iOS and web. Its FAQ says it helps with remembering knowledge, not understanding it.