NoteStruct

Note-taking activities in physical classrooms are ubiquitous and have been emerging in online learning. To investigate how to better support online learners to take notes while learning with videos, we compared free-form note-taking with a prototype system, NoteStruct, which prompts learners to perform a series of note-taking activities. NoteStruct enables learners to insert annotations on transcripts of video lectures and then engages learners in reinterpreting and synthesizing their notes after watching a video. In a study with a sample of Mechanical Turk workers (N=80), learners took longer and more extensive notes with NoteStruct, although using NoteStruct versus free-form note-taking did not impact short-term learning outcome. These longer notes were also less likely to include verbatim copied video transcripts, but more likely to include elaboration and interpretation. We demonstrate how NoteStruct influences note-taking during online video learning.