NB: Collaborative Annotation and Discussion of Online Lecture Notes

NB is a tool that enables and encourages students and faculty to collaboratively author and discuss questions, comments, and answers in the margins of online lecture notes. Like an online forum, NB leverages the insights of all students to clarify ideas and answer questions at a scale that a lone teacher cannot achieve. Unlike a forum, situating these insights in lecture-note margins makes them available and draws student attention to them at the specific moment those insights are needed. At the same time, NB offers faculty a new, detailed view into student questions on the lecture material, and lets them focus their question-answering where it matters most. NB has been piloted successfully in two MIT courses of moderate size. Using d'Arbeloff funds we propose to improve the design of NB,"supervise its deployment to a larger set of courses, and evaluate its effectiveness in improving discussion.