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I’m teaching an introductory programming course using the Moodle platform and I find that the forums are not used as extensively as they could be. Especially, students ask duplicated questions, have a hard time formatting their code correctly, and don't organise their questions and answers in a very structured way (e.g., they ask a new, unrelated question using the “Reply” button while reading another question).

I would be greatly interested in a web-based tool that would allow me to do this: divide my window vertically into two large columns. In the left column, I could post code snippets, my slides as PDFs, my exercises as PDF or HTML online, etc. In the right column, student could ask contextualised questions related to a particular line in the exercices or in the slides. The advantages would be:

  • All previously asked questions related to this same point would already be shown on the left. This would considerably lower the the probability of duplicated questions.
  • While asking a question, no need to copy and paste a code snippet to inform the reader about the context — the context is shown right there in the left column.
  • A voting system similar to the StackExchange system would be great.

Are there any such tools out there?

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    See Stack Exchange Clones: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/stack-exchange-clones
    – mankoff
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 15:40
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is a shopping request. Software Recommendations would be the right place to ask, but please follow their guidelines.
    – 410 gone
    Commented Jul 17, 2014 at 15:47
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    While I appreciate that too many software requests would be irritating in the Academia forum, it is highly unlikely that education experts hang out in the Software Recommendations forum. I found the tag "Educational" with 14 posts, but very few are by instructors. If an instructor seeks a tool to aid instruction, this seems the best place to get experienced answers.
    – Adrienne
    Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 16:28
  • @Adrienne the community at Software Recommendations has worked very hard on gathering and enforcing guidelines for both questions and answers that lead to those being useful for the OPs and for a much wider readership. They're the experts on doing this type of Q&A well.
    – 410 gone
    Commented Jul 19, 2014 at 3:44

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This is likely my shortest answer ever. Check out NB (formerly "nota bene") via MIT http://nb.mit.edu/welcome

Instructors upload pdfs and students can highlight particular sections of it and ask questions.

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  • NB is almost a perfect match! Thanks a lot for the link, Adrienne.
    – Jean-Philippe Pellet
    Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 7:06

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