Share a lesson without creating an account

Sharing that does not require a Novus Learn login

Most study apps treat sharing as an account feature: save to the cloud, generate a permissioned URL, hope the recipient also signs in. Novus Learn takes the opposite route. From a guided lesson, flashcard deck, quiz, or visual, choose Share and the app packs a compact, self-contained payload into the link itself. Anyone who opens that link can see a server-rendered preview with source attribution — without creating a Novus Learn account and without Novus Learn storing a private copy of your device library.

That model fits the rest of the product. Projects live in IndexedDB on your browser. Progress, review schedules, and uploads stay local. Sharing has to move a finished artifact, not your whole workspace. Encoding the artifact into the URL keeps the recipient experience portable while leaving the private project where it belongs.

The share page is deliberately narrow. It shows the artifact you chose, the provenance Novus Learn can prove, and — when a public Wikipedia editor path exists — a way to open related material in the app. It is not a second library, a comment thread, or a collaborative editor.

What actually travels in the link

A share token is a versioned, base64url-encoded JSON payload prefixed for detection. Encoding validates the schema and rejects oversized artifacts instead of minting a broken URL. Decoding on the share page validates again, so a tampered or truncated token fails closed rather than rendering half-true study material.

Builders copy only the display text the recipient needs: card fronts and backs, quiz prompts and explanations, lesson narration, visual labels, and key-point summaries, plus compact attribution for the underlying source. They deliberately omit raw source blocks, full evidence quote tables, private file bytes, and live project claim IDs the viewer could not resolve anyway.

• Guided lessons, flashcard decks, quizzes, and visuals can be shared.
• Wikipedia shares keep revision URL, licence, and related Wikimedia attribution.
• Web, journal, and upload shares carry honest site or article provenance without shipping the original file.
• Unlisted links ask search engines not to index the page; Public marks open intent while indexing still waits on the optional publication layer.
• If an artifact is too large for a self-contained token, Novus Learn refuses rather than creating a truncated link.

Unlisted, public, and what those words mean today

When you create a link you choose Unlisted or Public. Unlisted is the everyday choice for sending material to a classmate, colleague, or student: only people with the address can open it, and the response tells crawlers not to index it. Public signals that you intend the artifact for open sharing, but Novus Learn still does not treat that flag as a guarantee of search visibility until the optional publication and quality-check layer is enabled.

Neither mode creates a Novus Learn user profile. Visibility is a property of the link and how the share page presents itself, not a permission matrix on a cloud document. Recipients do not “join” your library; they open one artifact.

Social previews use a branded card with the title and source revision where available, so a pasted link still communicates provenance in messengers that fetch Open Graph data. The underlying content remains the packed artifact, not a screenshot of your private project screen.

Keeping track of links on this device

Every link you create is recorded in a small device-local registry under Share links in My Library. From there you can copy an address again or remove it from the list. Removal only forgets the record on this browser. Because the token already contains the artifact, the address can still open for someone who already has it until server-side revocation and expiry arrive with the optional manifest layer.

That honesty is part of the privacy story. Novus Learn does not pretend a local “remove” is a remote delete. If you need a share to stop working everywhere, wait for revocation support or avoid distributing a link you cannot later invalidate. For classroom handouts and short-lived collaboration, Unlisted links plus careful distribution remain the practical path.

Private browsing, another profile, or cleared site data will also drop the local registry, just as they drop other local records. The share addresses you already sent are unaffected by clearing your own library list.

What sharing is for — and what it is not

Use a share when the recipient needs the finished study object: a lesson walkthrough, a deck to practise, a quiz to check understanding, or a visual to discuss. The preview is enough for reading and review; opening related material in the editor is available when the provenance points at a rebuildable public Wikipedia source.

Do not treat a share as backup for your whole project, progress sync across devices, or a way to publish private uploads. Uploaded files and device-local source text stay off the token. Spaced-repetition schedules, Hub history, and library indexes never travel with the link. If you need the raw material elsewhere, use the export paths on the project itself.

Accountless sharing is therefore a deliberate compromise: maximum portability for a bounded artifact, minimum assumption that Novus Learn hosts your private corpus. Combined with source attribution on every preview, it lets you hand someone evidence-backed study material without asking them — or yourself — to create yet another learning-app login.