The course Introduction to the Mathematics has just started as a pilot course for the recently created program of electronic annotations, named UOClet. UOClet will be soon available to all students and advisers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and to any user interested in it due to its open source nature. In fact, the aim of UOClet is to become a widespread e-learning tool that enhances communication among the educational community during the learning process.

UOClet allows the user to underline and make notes as digital posts on a html in addition to a word document. The underlying text as well as the comments made can be both shared with other people, so that there is no longer need to send emails when discussing a document among different people. UOClet also collects all the comments and underlined texts and generates a summary of links to websites followed by their corresponding annotations.

The way UOClet works it is simple. Firstly, the user must install at the browser bar the UOClet tool provided by the UOC. Once the tool is already installed, the user only has to select a particular text, press the icon “Mark” to underline it, and make the corresponding comment. The selected text changes automatically color to indicate that it has been referred to a comment.

Currently, this digital annotation tool is optimized for Firefox 3 and Explorer 7 browsers  but several adjustments are being developed for using UOClet with other browsers. Would you like to check how UOClet works? Then, you may want to access to the demo here.