NB 2.0: The Crowdsourced Textbook

Nb is a system that allows students to collaboratively mark-up online lecture materials (lecture notes, slides, primary sources) with discussion, questions, and clarifications. Its early use at MIT has revealed the potential for a Crowdsourced Textbook that helps the teacher leverage student participation to make the textbook (and their course) improve. To achieve this we need to improve the teacher's ability to gather explicit and implicit feedback on what is not working in their teaching materials, and help them exploit that information to make improvements. Teachers need to determine where students are focusing their attention, identify what material is particularly confusing or interesting, and collect advice from students on how to improve the content.