3. Software Requirements

The Goal of the Project

To provide a flexible and extensible document viewing and editing platform that can be used in class (during lecture) and out of class (revision) to allow lecturers to provide a more effective and comfortable learning experience to students, so that students can learn more effectively.

Requirement Gathering Process

This section records the process of how we have gathered feedback, opinions and suggestions for formulation of our project requirements. As students ourselves, evaluation for student requirements were easily gathered through observations and word of mouth due to the constant close interaction with NUS students in our daily school life. However, our unfamiliarity with lecturers'/professors' difficulties and views resulted in problems drafting accurate and important requirements for them as users of our product.

1. Interviews
2. Field Observations
3. Word of mouth

1. Interviews

To tackle the aforementioned problem relating to lecturers and professors, we decided to set up interviews with some NUS professors and students to learn about their difficulties in creating lecture notes, slides, course materials, and document editing/viewing. Below are questions used for the interviews.

1.1 Questions

To understand the nature of the content they are teaching What modules are you currently teaching? To understand the technology they are using What are the tools you use to create your notes or presentation slides? What do you like about the current tools that you are using? Are there any limitations to these tools? What are the contents inside your slides? Do you use a lot of graphics, text or a mixture of both in your slides? Which aspect of the creation part is most time consuming? Is animation a feature you use often? Is there anything you wish that could be added into your existing tool to help you with doing the task? Do you use LaTeX, markdown or other similar tools to create your document instead of PowerPoint? Why is it so? Do you conduct e-learning lesson or tutorial during e-learning week? What tool(s) do you use for conducting the lessons? How was the experience with using such tool(s)? What do you think can be improved about the tool(s)? End of Interview Could our proposed product be useful to you?

1.2 Results

We have highlighted some of the points taken from Professors we have interviewed.

1.2.1 Tools used to create lecture materials

1. PowerPoint
2. LaTeX with Beamer
3. Jupyter
4. PowerPoint Labs
5. PeerQuestions by CIT NUS for Live Lecture SMS feedback feature

1.2.2 Difficulties/Problems

1. Time consuming to prepare multiple versions with different show content, difficult correct errors in all versions
2. Draw diagrams externally before inserting into document
3. PowerPoint slides animations take a lot of effort and steps
4. Limited diagram transformation capabilities
5. Page breaking have to be done manually for LaTeX
6. LaTeX might be hard to pickup for beginners
7. New products must be easy to switch over too, or else they would prefer to stay put with tools they are familiar with
8. Students helping each other during lectures depends on cohort

1.2.3 Suggestions

1. Use Plugins to support Mathematical symbols
2. Recording/Webcast feature for lessons
3. Single source to multiple format capability

2. Field Observations

Our team have made use of our lecture time to observe and understand more about how students are coping with the current lecture and documentation formats. Below are the observations we have noted down:

2.1 Student Behaviour

During lectures, students liked to:

• refer to a digital copy of the lecture notes only (using phones/laptop/tablet)
• refer to a digital copy of the lecture notes and annotate using third-party software (using phones/laptop/tablet)
• refer to a digital copy of the lecture notes along with a hard copy for writing down notes
• refer to a digital copy of the lecture notes along with foolscap/notebook for note taking
• refer to a printed copy of the lecture notes and write directly on it

2.2 Problems/Difficulties

Problems/Difficulties students faced:

• Handwritten annotation only limited to those with tablets/laptops supporting stylus
• Error-prone process for printing the correct format/pages (e.g. sometimes prints slides instead of the note format)
• During some lectures that does not use PeerQuestions, it is hard/difficult for a student to have his doubts clarified
• Technical difficulties in recording lectures result in static and muffled sounds in webcast or no webcast at all, students find it hard to revise/revisit lessons should they not understand parts of the lecture or are absent for valid reasons

3. Word Of Mouth

In addition to our Field Observations, friends and relatives of our team members have also provided some inputs on some of their problems faced with the current lecture and documentation format. Below are their inputs:

1. Annotation features lacking.

• Annotation requires third-party apps (paid and free) and do not have lecturer's annotations
• Students whose laptop do not support touchscreen or stylus have to resort to typing out instead of writing
• This seems to be a popular problem students face, many solve it through printing out the notes and writing on it
• However, those without printers or exhausted their print quota have to live with it.

2. Printing formats.

• Some lecture slides use dark background and are almost impossible to print as printer fails to convert the changes made, and just prints the original copy (printer ink is wasted, content hard to see on printed paper)

Requirements

1. Functional requirements
2. Non-functional requirements