Notes Comparator Research

Owned by Matthew Harrington
Oct 23, 2023
3 min read

General Lessons Learned

  • Not many learning tools feature innate note-taking functionality.

  • The ability to take notes in content is a potential differentiator.

  • Notes being bound to a single-course context is a problem for learners that we should solve.

  • Simplify Note basically has the user experience for taking notes that I’d consider close to ideal, and their site linked above is worth reviewing rather than pasting all the information here.

  • Simplify Note is a third-party notetaking extension designed for taking notes across the internet, and is commonly used by students. It has the following features of note:

    • Notes it grabs are sent straight to a Google Doc

    • It can grab:

      • Images

      • Text

      • Selection snapshots

      • Text from images via OCR

  • While it has no native notes feature, Moodle does have a supported Notes plugin that is part of the wider paid Learning Tools plugin (plugin page) that allows learners to take notes on pages across the entire Moodle site by accessing a menu in the bottom right corner of the browser:

    • Once selected, this presents a simple modal window with a text editor:

    • In the top right menu, there’s a link to the Notes page, which is the user’s repository of notes across the site as part of the learner profile:

    • Notes on this page are stored by date, and are filterable by course and by activity:

    • As these notes are part of the user’s profile, their notes are visible to staff according to their permissions and course membership (it is possible to make it so that staff can only view notes associated with the course that they have staff permissions on).

  • Canvas has integrations with OneNote and OrbitNote, but does not appear to have a native tool otherwise.

    • OneNote allows the quick creation of a shared Class Notebook for all learners in a course. It doesn’t appear to have any particular in-app integration other than making it simple for learners to join the shared notebook.

    • OrbitNote seems to be primarily intended for assignments, where the assignment is to take notes on a PDF, and thus does not actually answer the same need. I’ve kept it because this commonly comes up as a solution when users ask their community for note-taking functionality, which is then followed by “thanks, but this isn’t actually what I meant”. Both forms of annotation are apparently useful, but serve different needs.