The Project
NexText is a prototype for an online student workspace, created as a project for SI 682 at the University of Michigan School of Information. Given the assumption that "all the world's textbook information" is available in digital form, our project explores the opportunities that the digital medium offers to make the textbook and other course materials more valuable educational resources.
The Nextext Solution
Our solution is a unified environment where students interact with all course materials that support learning. It brings together course texts and other required resources, lecture slides or other resources created by the professor, and complementary content on the world-wide-web, with tools through which students craft personalized study materials such as notes and study guides. Most critically, NexText enhances the integration between these complementary resources. It enables students to more readily combine related information from multiple sources to construct the sort of organized schema of content, with relationships between concepts, that is necessary for effective learning.
With NexText, you can:
Engage with and customize existing course resources
- Highlight critical information within texts, articles and lecture slides
- Create custom annotation colors and styles to categorize important content
- Add short notes within provided source materials
Craft complete, organized note
- Use customizable display to view and compare multiple source materials
- Drag and drop content from course materials into a notebook, with linked citations
- Use unified set of key concepts to identify related important information across resources
- Search across resources, notebooks and annotations
Study collaboratively and communicate challenges to the professor
- Share notes and annotations with classmates
- View professor's annotations
- Label topics in texts and lecture for extra help and transmit requests to professor or TA