How to Study While Commuting

In 2019, the average one-way commute time for American students and workers hit an all-time high of 27.6 minutes. That means that on any given day, most people are spending an hour in their cars or on crowded public transportation. Since the pandemic hit, and more and more people have been leaving cities to settle in the suburbs, that wasted time seems to be growing.

As a student, I hated the time that I spent stuck in my daily commute. Those were hours that I could have spent studying or reading or catching up on the news. But from behind the wheel, my options were limited. It felt impossible to study while commuting.

Two tools to help you study while commuting

Plenty of people have tried to tackle this problem in the past, to mixed success. There are a few blogs and Reddit posts out there about how to learn from recordings or related podcasts. But each of those solutions have their drawbacks. Not every course comes replete with audio recordings, and even those that do weren’t specifically designed for hands-free listening. And while podcasts are great and entertaining, they’re rarely rigorous enough to help students study for exams.

The CEO of Alpe Audio, Yehoshua Zlotogorski, was completely familiar with those frustrations. Stuck in traffic the night before a major exam, he couldn’t believe that there were no apps out there to turn his written notes into an audio lesson he could listen to in his car.

Finding no solutions, he decided to make one of his own. The Alpe Audio app. And I want to tell you about two tools that we’ve developed at Alpe specifically to address how to study while commuting:

Alpe’s Audio Courses and our all-new Conversion Kit

Audio Courses for your Commute 

Alpe’s audio courses are similar to podcasts, in that they cover a wide range of topics – from product management and marketing to cryptocurrency and mindfulness. But they are a much better resource for people hoping to study while commuting, because they’ve been designed from the ground up to teach material in a hands-free, on-the-go, format. 

Lessons are all about twenty minute long – the average length of the US commute time – and are optimized for audio learning. They use timed repetition, audio cues, and all sorts of other educational tricks to help you retain information.

In addition, they also come replete with editable summaries and flashcards to help learners review once they’re not behind the wheel or out walking the dog.

Study anything while commuting

The Conversion Kit, on the other hand, is a totally new way of learning on the go. It takes your articles, notes, or papers, and uses AI to turn them into full-fledged audio lessons. With the Conversion Kit, learners aren’t limited to Alpe’s course catalogue. Anything can become an audio course. 

And just like the rest of Alpe’s content, each Conversion Kit lesson comes complete with its own summaries and flashcards. 

While this new feature is still undergoing some changes, so far it has been used to help students learn about topics in medicine, engineering, and business. 

What would you use the Conversion Kit for? 

Audio Learning is the Future

At Alpe Audio we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can be lifelong learners. By far the easiest way to build a learning habit is to build it into your schedule, and audio learning is perfectly suited to that task. So we set out to make it easier to study while commuting. 

What other tools would you like to see?