Supporting learning with a collaborative notetaking tool to work within a Jupyter Notebook environment.

At the moment M269 students work entirely within the Jupyter infrastructure. Notetaking is not built in to Jupyter, although a rudimentary plugin has been developed for students to do so. However, this is purely for the students’ own notes and the kind of collaborative notetaking/commenting popularised by the likes of Microsoft Word are simply not available. This means that students often work in isolation, repeating mistakes and misconceptions and asking repeated questions across forums. This project would aim to apply a tool developed by the PI externally to this project, and evaluate its effectiveness across three blocks within a single presentation of M269.

Specific aims are to: 

1. Investigate the impact upon learning by students that make use of the tool.

2. Identify future developments of the tool that may lead to further positive impact.

3. Evaluate whether making use of the tool, and hence the collaboration, has correlation with retention and results.

This leads to the research question “to what extent can collaborative notetaking be utilised, asynchronously, within the Jupyter environment to enhance learning opportunities?” with the sub-questions:

1. What impact does the tool, and access to the collaborative notes, have on the learning of students that use the tool?

2. What impact does the tool, and access to the collaborative notes, have on module results and retention?

3. How do students experience collaborating using the tool and what impact does this have on retention and module results? 

4. How can the tool be developed to lead to greater impact?