Given the increasing number of course pages available, and the increased use of computers in the classroom, it may be possible for students to take online notes on course pages during class. Second, an annotation system is also an appropriate way to share notes. For example, one might post questions about an assignment or suggest followup readings. For an annotation system to be successful, it must not only accommodate the needs, preferences, and habits of its users, but also predict and shape them. We report on these design issues and the user testing that guided our design choices in the subsequent sections.
Many systems permit only one type of annotation.
For example, CoNote provides only group annotations. Similarly, systems treat the different types of annotations quite differently. We chose to provide all three types of annotations with a consistent interface. When browsing annotations, readers can see the headers of all the annotations, but may only view the bodies of annotations for which they have appropriate permissions. We faced a more difficult problem faced when discussing at which points in the document annotations should or could appear.