Professors Sharing Course Materials

The Semester Prep Weekend

If you teach at a university that runs on Google Workspace, you've probably experienced this: you spent the summer building a well-organized course in Notion — lecture notes, syllabi, reading lists, assignment rubrics, a course wiki — and now you need all of it in Google Docs so students can access it through Google Classroom.

The copy-paste marathon begins. Tables from the syllabus schedule break. Code blocks (if you teach CS or data science) lose their formatting. Numbered problem sets restart at 1 after every paste. By Sunday evening, you've spent an entire weekend on what is essentially a reformatting exercise.

For adjuncts teaching 3–4 sections across multiple departments, multiply this by the number of courses. It's a real time cost, and it comes at the worst possible moment — right before the semester starts, when you should be finalizing content, not fighting with document formatting.

Why Not Just Use Google Docs for Everything?

Plenty of instructors do, and it works fine for simple courses. But Notion offers things Google Docs doesn't: database views for tracking which readings go with which lectures, toggle blocks for hiding detailed explanations that only some students need, linked databases that connect assignments to learning objectives.

The issue isn't whether Notion is the right planning tool. For many instructors, it clearly is. The issue is that the last mile — getting materials into students' hands through Google Classroom — requires Google Docs.

Making the Handoff Work

Kami converts Notion HTML exports to Google Docs. For course materials, the relevant formatting elements are:

• Syllabus tables (week, topic, readings, assignments) maintain their column structure
• Numbered problem sets keep their numbering sequence
• Code blocks preserve indentation and formatting (important for CS courses)
• Headings create a navigable outline in Google Docs

What doesn't convert: Notion databases, calendar views, and board views. If your course wiki uses a Notion database as its backbone, you'll need to export individual pages rather than the database view itself. Linked content (like a reading list database that populates into each week's page) won't carry over as live connections — you'll get static text.

The process: export your Notion pages as HTML, upload to Kami, and get Google Docs back. For a full semester's worth of materials (15–20 pages), expect the conversion to take a few minutes. Upload the resulting Google Docs to Google Classroom or a shared Drive folder, and students have access.

Mid-Semester Updates

Here's where this approach actually pays off most. You update a lecture note in Notion on Tuesday evening after a class went differently than planned. Re-export that one page, re-convert, and replace the Google Doc in Classroom. Students have the updated version by Wednesday morning.

Without a conversion tool, mid-semester updates are painful enough that many instructors just don't bother. The materials drift out of sync, and students end up with the September version of a document that was revised in November.

One practical note: when you replace a Google Doc in Classroom, existing student comments and highlights are lost. If students have been annotating a document, consider uploading the new version alongside the old one rather than replacing it, at least until the end of the relevant unit.

Upload a sample lecture note or syllabus to the demo to see how your formatting converts. The free tier covers enough conversions for most individual courses. For a full walkthrough of exporting and converting, see the migration guide. If your department distributes standardized materials across multiple sections, the operations use case describes a similar distribution workflow.