Notes - Current State, Gaps, and Opportunities
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Currently, the Open edX note taking tools allow users to take notes on in-course content, provided the functionality is enabled across the site.
As shown, each note can be assigned tags by the learner, and appears as a yellow highlight on text. The notes themselves are then accessible from a centralised notes page. Unfortunately, the documentation is outdated, so this screenshot does not display all current functionality of the Notes page, but I also do not have access to a site running Notes in order to grab my own:
Notes can be viewed by tags, searched, and the sidebar on the right provides access to the location that the notes were taken in.
Overall, this is an adequate note-taking experience that is extremely valuable to learners, but could be dramatically improved.
Current Gaps & Potential Improvements
Notes must currently be associated with text within HTML components on a page. It is either awkward or impossible to take notes on images, PDFs, and other assets.
The fact that the ability to take notes is inconsistent by element makes the user experience for learners inconsistent in turn, which is undesirable.
Notes also cannot be associated at higher levels, such as taking notes on a page of content. This means Open edX notes are essentially just a way to save text, and not take freeform notes.
Only text can be stored as a note, not course assets like diagrams, which would be useful to keep for further reference.
Notes cannot be accessed outside of courses, meaning learners can’t collect notes between all their courses.
Notes are always stored within the course context, so if access to a course is removed for whatever reason, learners lose access to their notes, and learners who move to a new course run lose their notes.
Notes from other pages cannot easily be accessed without navigating away from the current page (or opening a new browser tab), making it difficult to use notes in future content.
Staff have absolutely no interaction with notes - they cannot see the notes of learners, they cannot see what notes learners have taken, they cannot see what content garners the most notes, etc.
Essentially, the annotations that the Notes tool currently provides are pretty good at what they do, but they only serve one small part of the Notes use case, and they are extremely restrictive and inconsistent. Improvements to this would likely require a wider notes infrastructure, of which annotations are a sub-feature.