How to improve peer note taking accommodations

Welcome to the second session of Genio's 15-Minute Fixes, the webinar series that takes one problem your office or your students face and shows how Genio Notes helps solve it.

Today's problem: "We need a better peer note taking system."

Peer note taking is one of the most common note taking accommodations, and one of the hardest to run well. Volunteers need recruiting, training and chasing, and students still get notes that are late, incomplete or inconsistent.

In this 15-minute session, Paddy Heaton from Genio shows how Disability and Accessibility Services teams can move away from that coordination with; Study Notes built from the student's own class recording, Cornell Notes for active recall, and admin controls that decide which students get access.

What will you learn from this session?

• Why does peer note taking keep breaking down for Disability Services offices?
• How can students generate Study Notes from their own class recordings?
• How do Study Notes and Quiz Me work together to support active recall?
• How do Cornell Notes help students with dyslexia, working memory difficulties or fatigue conditions?
• How can blank Cornell cues and summaries keep students actively engaged with their notes?
• How can Disability Services' teams control which students have access to Study Notes?

Find the full session and questions answered, below.

Questions answered in this session:

Why is peer note taking hard to run as an accommodation?

Peer note taking is hard to run as an accommodation because every class needs a volunteer who is recruited, trained and followed up, often after term has started. Offices stay accountable for the accommodation but have little control over note quality, and some students find relying on a classmate exposing.

How do Study Notes in Genio Notes work?

Study Notes in Genio Notes turn a student's own class recording into a full set of notes, built from the class transcript rather than one peer's interpretation. Students can choose Bullet Notes or Cornell Notes, and receive the full set of notes as soon as class ends, then test themselves with Quiz Me.

Can Disability Services control who uses AI study tools in Genio?

Disability Services offices can control who uses AI study tools in Genio through Manage Features in Genio admin. Admins can switch Study Notes, Quiz Me and Outline on or off for the whole organization, or use groups to give Study Notes only to the students who need it.

Full transcript:

Paddy Heaton: Welcome to this Genio webinar, this 15-Minute Fixes webinar. Today, we're going to be diving into a problem and looking at how Genio Notes helps you solve it. It's a 15-minute webinar, and we're going to do nothing but look at the Genio Notes product. So I hope that's okay. No slides, no waffle.

We're just going to look at solving the problem. And that problem is one we hear from people regularly: we need a better peer note taking system. So let's start at the beginning.

Why does peer note taking keep breaking?

Peer note taking is one of the most common note taking accommodations that offices offer, and it's one of the hardest to run well. If you think about the time that goes into it, there's recruiting volunteers. You've got to find a volunteer in every class every semester, often after the term has already started. You've got to train people and explain what good notes look like to people who aren't note taking specialists.

You've got to chase people: follow up with peer notetakers, and follow up with students to make sure they're coming to collect their notes. And after all that work, the student often still gets notes that are late, incomplete and inconsistent. The hardest part for your office is probably that you have very little control over the quality of those notes. You're accountable for the accommodation, but someone else decides what the notes look like when they're delivered, how complete they are, and whether they're in the format the student wants to receive them in.

And there's a student-side cost too. Relying on a peer can feel exposing, and relying on someone else's notes doesn't build independence for the student. So today, I'm going to show you three fixes. As I go, think about what part of your peer note taking process each one would take off your plate.

Recording a class in Genio Notes

So we're going to hop into Genio now. Here is Genio Notes, and we're going to look at a class that a student has already recorded. Just quickly, this is how a student would record one. They'd open a new event and click record. Once the class starts recording, the student can mark the areas that are important, or something that confuses them. If they want to add a quick text note, they can type it in. At the end of class, they stop recording, and they have their recording and their notes, and they can generate a transcript from that audio.

Here's what a recorded class might look like for a student. They've got their recording down the side, and on that recording they've got notes they've made. Some are important, some are questions, sometimes they're confused. You can see there are some notes here, but they're not really filled out. They haven't been refined yet. They've also got slides, graphs and drawings.

Fix 1: Generate Study Notes from the student's own recording

Up here is Study Tools, and here we can go to Study Notes in Genio. This is a feature that's been brought in relatively recently. When a student comes to this page, they get the option to create Bullet Notes or Cornell Notes from the recording. The key thing here is that there's no middle person. A student can quickly access a full set of notes from their own recording. There's no volunteer to recruit, no volunteer to train, no volunteer to chase. There's no delay and no coordination.

Let me hop into another recording to show you how quick it is to generate. This is what the student would see: Bullet Notes or Cornell Notes. We're going to generate some Bullet Notes. The important thing is that this is grounded in what was actually said. Study Notes are built from the class transcript, so they reflect the lecture, not one peer's interpretation of it. And it's ready when the student is.

The notes are there as soon as the class is finished, not days later when the moment to study has passed. This is an hour-long lecture, and it's already created my notes. You can see formulas in there, because the formulas are in the transcript, along with the outline and quizzes.

So I have a complete set of notes for this class that I can start to study from. This isn't a replacement for studying, but it helps students who can't take their own notes in class, maybe because of a physical disability, processing speed or fatigue. It helps students who miss part of a class through illness or appointments, who would otherwise depend on whatever a peer happened to write. And it helps students who find it uncomfortable to rely on a classmate. Now they don't have to.

Study Notes are the first step of the study process, not a learning shortcut. Students can copy these notes into a Word doc or a Google Doc, print them to PDF, or print a physical copy to write their own notes on. Students can also hop straight into testing themselves with our Quiz Me feature. Once these notes are created, I can practice active recall by generating a quiz. I'm going to do a quick five-question quiz on key topics from this lecture.

These questions come from the lecture material. I've got some right and some wrong, and at the end it shows my results: three out of five correct, the questions I got right, and the correct answers for the ones I got wrong. I can then go back to my event, my notes and the recording itself, and hop into specific moments. So that's fix number one: getting students notes quickly, in a reliable format.

Fix 2: Cornell Notes in the format that fits the student

The second thing I want to show you is the second note format. We have Cornell Notes built into Genio Notes. This is an evidence-based format for note taking that helps with active recall. It separates the page into notes on the lecture, a set of cues to help students with recall, and a summary that helps students review the lecture in the round. The student can choose which format is best for them.

It's not based on what a volunteer decides to do, and it's consistent every time: same structure, every class. Compare that with five different volunteer notetakers across the different classes a student is taking. It can help students with dyslexia or processing difficulties, who often do better with a short, scannable set of notes. It can help students with working memory difficulties, for whom Cornell's cue column gives a structure to test recall against. And it might help students with fatigue conditions, who can pick the lightest format on a low-energy day.

Here I'm generating a set of Cornell Notes for this lecture, completely filled in. I've got my notes down the middle, which cover what was said in the lecture and the key points. The cues are questions I can ask myself to see if I can remember the answers. And the summary is what the lecture was about overall. You'll notice there was another option for Cornell Notes.

In a different lecture, I have two options: generate the full notes, or generate the notes and leave the cues and summary blank. This puts some of the work of engaging with the content back on the student. They have access to the notes, but they build their understanding by writing the questions for the cues and a summary of the lecture, making sure they understand what was said and testing themselves.

This works because it's active, not passive. A Cornell template gives students the structure and asks them to fill in the gaps from recall, and that's where the learning happens. It means they're the student's notes, not a peer's. Students can add their own thoughts, print them for offline study and turn them into something they own. It links with last week's session on students not knowing where to start studying. It's the same study loop: notes first, then Quiz Me to find out what hasn't stuck. It helps students working toward independence and students who struggle to start studying. Peer notes are something a student receives.

Study Notes can be that, but they can also be something a student works with. Because the cues and summary are blank, when I copy this into a new Google Doc, I can start editing: add my cues and write a summary. Or I could print it and use pen and paper if that's what I prefer.

Fix 3: Decide who gets access in Genio admin

But I hear you asking a question: what if I don't want all my students with Genio Notes access to have this feature? I want students to be independent and use it if they need it, but if they don't need it, I don't want them to have access. Well, boy, do I have good news for you.

Genio admin is the part of the product that you, the disability services office, have access to. In the organization area, you invite students, see how they're using the product and see insights, which is what we're covering next week in 15-Minute Fixes.

In here, we have Manage Features. This gives you the power to decide which AI features you offer to your students. There are three features, currently all ticked: Quiz Me, the quizzes feature we looked at earlier; Outline, which generates chapter titles for the lecture; and Study Notes, which we've looked at in detail today. I can untick Study Notes and say I don't want any students in my organization to have access to it. It's not something you have to have in the product, but if it's helpful, you can add it.

Maybe you have a subset of students. Say I've got 20 students who currently have a peer note taking accommodation, and we want to move away from manual peer note taking. I want them to have Study Notes, but not my whole cohort of 50 students who have Genio Notes. This is where groups come in.

When you add users to Genio Notes, you can add them to groups as well. Say I do want students to have access to Study Notes, but not my athletics department. I've got 10 users from athletics who don't need Study Notes. They have Genio Notes as an extra study tool, as part of our Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach. So for athletics, I untick Study Notes and save the changes.

Voila: they don't have access, but the main student body with Genio Notes does. So you decide who gets access, and you get control over the quality of the notes. Because it's all happening through Genio, you can see it working in the admin insights dashboard: who's accessing the feature and who's interacting with their notes. This shows zero because it's my demo account, but we'll dig into insights next week. So instead of managing volunteers, you're managing access, and you can see the result.

That was a whistle-stop tour of Genio Notes and the Study Notes feature. I hope it was useful. If you've got a question, drop it in the chat. Otherwise, we'll see you on another Genio webinar. 

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