not yet too late in the actual text. The reader needs a
clue: electronic handout-notes, should it be, perhaps.
In our environment, notes refers to written material
teachers provide to students, not to the actual hand-
taken notes by students. The handout-notes, thus,
points to the material provided by the teacher. We
would like to leave out the very interesting (more clas-
sical (Bretzing, 1979; Bretzing and Kulhavy, 1981;
Brown, 1988) and more modern (Hembrooke and
Gay, 2003; Bohay et al., 2011; Mueller and Oppen-
heimer, 2014)) discussions related to the pulse be-
tween the hand-taken or typed notes. We think, as
many of the performed studies have shown(Stacy and
Cain, 2015; Bui et al., 2013), that the blind verbatim
typed notes give less comprehension of concepts than
the hand-taken notes, for which a selective process for
the written sentences facilitates the medium and long
term comprehension of concepts and recalling of data.
In fact, we encourage or students to type their notes in
the hand-taken fashion, selecting, as if they were writ-
ing, to ensure the mentioned benefits, but, at the same
time, to acquire an electronic personally enriched ver-
sion, so personally suited, of the standard teacher’s
linear threat notes. This is the innovation aspect of our
proposal, in our view: With these notes, the disadvan-
tage of the sole verbatim typing is discarded and the
advantage of the selective writing is retained, so that
the positive of the two worlds meet. The linear stan-
dard threat of the subject is personally decorated by
the student in-situ, where she/he decides it is worth,
so that there is no break of the threat; in-vivo, while
attending the class, or ex-vivo, while studying, prepar-
ing the exercises etc. The NB sharing capability gives
the possibility for further enrichments, so that grupal
contributions from students in a one step or in succes-
sive refining steps, can be added.
The tool we are proposing is not a mere document
management tool Moodle, as we understand it. In
a sense, it could be thought also as that, but, then,
the concept of document should be considered in a
broader sense, because in the linear threat of the sub-
ject, both the standard provided by the teacher or the
personalized by the students, nearly any kind of object
can be included, as mentioned before: videos, links,
executable programs, text, figures, visualizations, in-
teractive visualizations etc.
We would like to mention that the proposal is
in its initial stage: we do not have yet results of
the improvements generated by the use; for the
moment, we have restricted ourselves to the pro-
posal/implementation stage. The aim of the present
paper is to share with the community the idea and
its implementation via the Jupyter Notebooks, so that
the remarks, observations and criticisms shape both
the concept and its actual implementation, so a better
tool arises. We are convinced of the benefits of the
proposal, but, of course, it needs a deep evaluation
of the achieved results, which we postpone for a next
stage.
In the classroom teaching sessions (which in-
cludes all teaching modalities), and in our reference-
system, the teaching reference-system, a lot of re-
sources are used: slides (handmade, on the computer,
with links to web pages. ..); Blackboard, for plot-
ting reasons, for instance: Schemes of devices, sys-
tems etc, graphical representations of functions (qual-
itative, of course), conceptual schemes, reminder
tables; Demonstrations, developments. . . ; Complete
exercises, exercises approaches; Distributed photo-
copies, with concepts to deepen, with exercises; Ex-
aminations, five for each part (statement sheets and
answer sheets); Computer, to show complicated be-
havior of some functions; etc. All these resources
constitute a set of ordered elements (in the order we
have decided, as said), but which of course do not
have a common support. Our proposal is to place the
complete list of elements on the same medium, an
electronic medium: The http://jupyter.org/Jupyter
notebook version of the Notes, which we have de-
veloped and given to the students at the beginning
of the subject, let’s say. There could be a lot of ap-
proximations, since the electronic resource could be
made public, when the previous topic has finished, so
that the students have the possibility to start down-
loading it and have a look at it before starting with the
topic. All them could be published at the beginning
of the academic year; Could be published by mod-
ules, taking into account the examinations that will be
proposed during the semester, so that it is structured
in a natural way in its sub-blocks.
This electronic medium in which a block of the
subject is made public, has an essential advantage: it
is dynamic, it is editable. It is not a mere list of el-
ements, of pedagogical resources offered, but a list
of pedagogical resources that can be altered both in-
situ and in-vivo, by ourselves, the teachers, and by
the students themselves. The point that the students
can edit it, is as remarkable as that we can edit it on
the fly, while we are explaining. Mind the point: As
important as the above is that it can be saved and, in
addition, versions also can be saved.
The fact that it is an editable electronic notes
makes it dynamic. We alter it, while giving class,
in-vivo, at the point where we need to do it, in-situ:
because we really have to do at that moment or, be-
cause it has been prepared it to do it that way. But in
the same way students can do: while we explain, we
show the figures, we connect to the internet, we show
Electronic Notes Via Jupyter Notebooks
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