NB

Usage

Making it Work

• Students read before class
• Requirement to comment
• Faculty adapt lecture to discussion

NB Faculty Survey

Ratings (1=lowest, 7=highest)

Satisfaction

Student comment quality

Reuse NB?

NB Improved Online Discussion

Students were much more comfortable than they ever are in class with asking one another questions and providing answers. There were more real debates on NB than I've ever been able to conjure in a classroom.

The quiet students had really good things to say that they never would have said in class. The loud students in class that aren't always right, were told when they weren't necessarily correct.

Students did establish dialogue among themselves via comments, which delighted me because even in class this not always happen.

Students did post several good questions about the material, which I've never had happen on traditional discussion boards (on those, I've only gotten questions about the assignments).

It's a definite improvement over traditional discussion boards, which I have tried previously without success.

NB Improved In-class Discussion

The quality of the in-class discussions was much higher than when I had taught the course previously.

I could address the smaller questions online and devote the class time to discussing bigger, more extended issues.

Class sessions changed from regular teaching to discuss NB posts. Of course it had become possible much better to focus on important and difficult points.

It puts more onerous [sic] on the students. They don't just come to class and listen and go home. They know something when they come to class and can participate and ask GOOD questions in class. We went faster some days. Other days we were able to have deeper and more thought provoking discussions where in the past we couldn't even have a discussion.

It was obvious that the vast majority of the class was reading prior to class. This was very different than prior years.

Know Your Students

Students came much more alive than in usual class teaching (even with discussion time). I suddenly noticed their way of thinking, personality, struggles with the material, determinedness to solve big and small problems.

Being able to respond directly to a student meant that even the shy ones got a personalized learning experience, which never would have happened ordinarily. I think this is extremely beneficial.

I felt more connected to the students and what they were thinking.

NB has certainly helped me make my classroom more student-centered.

Better Lectures

I could get student feedback ahead of the lecture, so I could use the lecture to discuss what they were most confused about.

It helped uncover misconceptions and areas of confusion that I did not expect. I never would have known about many of these things otherwise,

The students' comments allowed me to notice when they were misinterpreting something from the reading, which I could follow up in class.

It really did enable me to tune a lecture to the students' needs.

I was surprised by how difficult some ideas were for students. For example, one reading had an estimate of the number of bits stored on a CDROM. That whole section was dripping with questions and anxiety in the comments. Thus, I spent the following class helping students get a feel for the physical parameters (e.g. highest frequency of human hearing), which was very helpful, and I wouldn't have known to do that if it weren't for NB.

I used flipped-classroom teaching, and NB was essential for that.

New Features

• Annotate HTML
• Create and manage sections
• (Experimental) Annotate Video