Notes User Stories
- Matthew Harrington
The ideal course note-taking tool includes the following user-stories:
As a learner, I want to be able to annotate text within a course with my own notes.
As a learner, I want to be able to make general notes and associate them with any level of the hierarchy (such as a subsection, unit, or the course as a whole, or an in-course asset).
As a learner, I want to be able to access my notes across different courses in a centralised location outside of courses in order to combine knowledge from multiple courses, and see which courses my notes are associated with.
As a learner, I want to be able to view my notes related to a single course from an in-course dashboard, and jump back to the content where the note was taken if that note is associated with content.
As a learner, I want to be able to browse my notes from other courses from within my current course.
As a learner, while in course content I want to be able to access my notes easily without leaving the content in order to cross-reference my notes with the content I am assimilating.
As a learner, I want to be able to save course assets as notes, such as images, paragraphs of text, or discussion submissions.
As a learner, I want an easy way to export my notes from my courses so that I can access them in external apps such as Notion, OneNote, or Google Docs.
As an instructor, I want to be able to restrict access to notes when a learner has an active timed or proctored exam attempt in progress to prevent learners from storing their answers.
This directly conflicts with the desire to export notes by learners. The easiest solution in my opinion is to simply leave the issue of external notes to be solved by proctoring, and not sacrifice the functionality of this feature, but to at least allow instructors to restrict in-app notes access to make it require deliberate cheating rather than incidental cheating.
As an instructor, I want to be able to see what learners are saving to their notes, and see which pieces of content are most frequently annotated or saved to notes.
As an instructor, I want to be able to view a specific learner’s notes to check what notes they are taking.
As an instructor, I want to be able to see metrics on which learners are and aren’t using the notes functionality, and to what extent (how many notes, time since last note, most recent note, etc.)