Seeking Annotation Solutions for Jupyter Notebooks in Higher Education

Notebook
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Hello Jupyter community,

I’m reaching out from a higher education institution where we’re working to promote the use of Jupyter Notebooks and JupyterHub in our teaching. After discussions with colleagues, we’ve identified a key feature that would significantly enhance our workflow: an easy-to-use annotation capability for reviewing student notebooks.

Specifically, we’re looking for functionality similar to:

  1. Highlighting and commenting on PDFs
  2. The annotation features available in Google Colab

Our ideal solution would allow instructors to easily highlight code or text within notebooks and add comments, facilitating efficient feedback and grading processes.

I’m aware of the jupyter-commenting project (GitHub - jupyterlab/jupyterlab-commenting: Commenting and annotation for JupyterLab), which seemed promising but unfortunately isn’t compatible with recent Jupyter versions.

I’d greatly appreciate any insights on:

  1. Existing extensions or solutions that provide this functionality
  2. Potential workarounds or alternative approaches
  3. Advice on implementing such a feature

Has anyone successfully integrated a similar annotation system in their educational setting? Any experiences or recommendations would be invaluable as we seek to enhance our use of Jupyter in teaching.

Thank you in advance for your help and expertise!

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Three thoughts occur to me:

  1. One solution we have used is to make use of the grading/commenting system within the LMS our campus uses. We have students output their notebooks to pdf files and upload both the .pdf and .ipynb files to the LMS. We grade and comment on the .pdf file using the LMS commenting system, but can put the .ipynb file into a jupyter instance if we need to check something. If they use data files, those should also be uploaded to the assignment.
  2. If you want to do it all within a JupyterHub, you could look at the tools in the Jupyter Physical Science Lab Suite. In particular, the instructor tools can be used to add protected code or markdown cells, plus highlight bars to markdown cells. I have used this to create notebooks to be used as worksheets. Note: this is blatant self-promotion as I am the primary author of the tools in this suite.
  3. I am assuming that nbgrader is not what you are looking for.
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