Researching and supporting student note-taking: Building a multimedia note-taking app

Abstract

In late 2014 collaborative research was undertaken between colleagues in the departments of Computer Science, International Communications, the Centre for English language Education (CELE), and the Language Centre at a global higher education institution (HEI-A), located partly in mainland China. This research aims to explore student note-taking habits, especially in the context of more multimedia-intense content. As part of this, student note-taking habits have been observed and studied, and a software application is being developed which will both support student multimedia note-taking, and facilitate research into note-taking habits. An interesting aspect of this project has been the inclusion of HEI-A undergraduate computer science students as software developers. This paper outlines some findings of our research in terms of defining student note-taking habits, describes some of the issues we faced during the first stages of the project and gives a short description on how this application could be used for teaching and research purposes in the future.