Tsaap-Notes – An Open Micro-Blogging Tool for Collaborative Notetaking during Face-to-Face Lectures

Franck Silvestre, Philippe Vidal, Julien Broisin IRIT, University of Toulouse III, France !ICALT 2014 July 7 2014

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Context of research

• Notetaking during face to face lecture

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Context of research

• Notetaking during face to face lecture

• Collaborative notetaking

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The challenge

How to foster collaborative notetaking activity during lectures addressed to a large audience ?

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Notetaking during lectures

• 60 to 95% of students are used to notetaking

• Covers all disciplines

• A way to enrich the content of the lecture

• Improves the retention of information

4Steimle et al. 2007

Collaborative notetaking

• Collaborative knowledge building

• Better student engagement

• May act as feedback for teachers

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Kam et al. 2005,

O’Neill 2005

Kam et al. 2005,

O’Neill 2005

http://www.unishared.com/

Kam et al. 2005,

Drawbacks of current tools• « Single shared document» approach

• No personalized views

• Not designed for large audience

- Student side: hard to contribute

- Teacher site: hard to get representative feedback

• No« intelligence » in the tool

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How microblogging can help ?

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Social network approach for sharing and building knowledges

Cheng et Evans 2009

How microblogging can help ?

• Personalized views

• Designed for large audience

• « learning analytics ready »

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Social network approach for sharing and building knowledges

Cheng et Evans 2009

Personal Response Systems (PRS) can help too!

• All-round world champion in learner engagement and motivation

• PRS improve learner outcomes

• Designed to get feedback from a large audience

• Good at triggering confrontations and discussions between learners and teachers

9 Gauci et al. 2009

Our goal

Designing and experimenting a notetaking system

built on a microblogging approach,

extended with PRS features

in order to overcome the limits of current tools

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Tsaap-Notes

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https://notes.tsaap.eu/tsaap-notes/

Tsaap-Notes

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https://notes.tsaap.eu/tsaap-notes/

General featuresAs a user I can

• post notes with a max length of 280 characters

• add Hashtags, mentions in my notes

• answer to a note

• mark a note as favorite

• « follow » what’s happening on a scope

• be notified by email

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A scope ? What for ?

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A scope ? What for ?

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A way to link a list of notes to a course material published as a Web resource !

The concept of fragment

• a fragment is an identifier of a part of a web resource

• a note can be linked to a scope and to a fragment

• a note can be linked to a sub-part of a course material published as a Web resource

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Annotation of a Web slide

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Note as a question

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Note as a question

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Display of the results

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The first experiment

• Master course of Computer Science, University of Toulouse III

• Main topic of the course: collaborative development

• 40 students

• 62 slides presented during 4 hours of lecture

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PRS impact on notetaking

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Count of notes 23Count of contributors 10

Mean count of notes per slide 0,37

PRS impact on notetaking

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Count of notes 23Count of contributors 10

Mean count of notes per slide 0,37

Proportion of students answering questions 78 %

Proportion of notes taken on slides having question 65 %

Mean count of notes per slide having question 3

Conclusion

• Tsaap-Notes - collaborative notetaking system, microblogging, PRS

• Encouraging initial results

• Need more various and rigorous experiments

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Perspectives

• Semi-automatic generation of tests that use the student notes as feedback

• Learner production metadata

• The use of these metadata to improve adaptivity in learning management systems

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• Thank you for your attention! • Questions?