Nota Bene V2 - Understanding and Implementing Methods for Synchronous and Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Students have always been encouraged to learn collaboratively as a means of learning from their peers in order to ask questions, build relationships, and receive feedback. Nota Bene (NB) is an online learning and annotation tool that allows students in a course to annotate web documents to foster online discussions. With the current version of NB that relies only on asynchronous annotations, we have decided to add synchronous features to the tool. After initial user research, we implemented various features, such as notifications and chat-like features, to help keep students engaged when learning online. Afterward, we ran a user study experiment to understand the user engagement and usability aspects of our project, and how those metrics compare between the original NB and the NB with synchronous features.