The project is called Livenotes, which involves wirelessly networked Tablet PCs loaded with custom-built software that allows the notes that one team member writes to be seen in real-time by the other team members belonging to the same group. Students can exchange notes with group members using a shared white board and annotate the instructor's PowerPoint slides during an ongoing lecture.

"The motivation behind Livenotes is to facilitate small group learning in the large lecture class," says Matthew Kam, a graduate student involved in the project. "We wanted students to help one other learn the material. There have been over 375 studies since 1898 which show that cooperative small-group learning is more effective than individualistic or competitive group learning."

Kam and the research team, which includes John Canny, a professor in the Computer Science division, found that the process of using tablets for cooperative note-taking had benefits, as well as distractions, for students.

They found that when compared to individual note-taking, the collaborative process enabled students to compose more comprehensive lecture notes, engage in a greater degree of higher-order thinking and pay greater attention in class. They also found that the resulting set of notes reflected a higher degree of internalization of the lecture material.

The Livenotes team observed that undergraduate students were not used to discussing the lecture material with one another, as compared to graduate students who had previously used Livenotes. This made it a challenge to deploy Livenotes in undergraduate classes. "When using Livenotes, undergraduates tend to focus on taking down everything that the instructor says in case it might be on the exam. We had to coach them to engage in small-group discussions by pausing lectures a couple of times, during which we gave students some questions to discuss with their neighbors," says Kam. Some students also found it distracting to focus on both the small-group dialogue and the lecture at the same time, even though they became better at coping over time.

The research team continues to experiment with, and make improvements to, the Livenotes system, both in undergraduate and graduate courses. They are adding features that enable more interaction between students and instructors, such as students being able to tell the lecturer anonymously and in real-time if he or she is going too fast, as well as the instructor being able to pose questions electronically to students during the lecture.