{"id":1955,"date":"2020-12-09T11:32:47","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T11:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microsites.ncl.ac.uk\/casestudies\/?p=1955"},"modified":"2025-07-16T14:48:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T13:48:02","slug":"using-onenote-class-notebooks-as-a-digital-logbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microsites.ncl.ac.uk\/casestudies\/2020\/12\/09\/using-onenote-class-notebooks-as-a-digital-logbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Using OneNote Class Notebooks as a Digital Logbook"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Andrew Lovatt<\/strong><\/h4>\n

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School of Engineering<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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What did you do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Professional engineers use physical logbooks to document and record their work, from thoughts, design ideas, calculations and sketches, through to literature readings and lab results. This serves as a permanent record of their work, and helps them to plan future projects and, perhaps more importantly, reflect on past decisions, achievements, and lessons learned.<\/p>\n

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For ENG1002, Sustainable Design Creativity and Professionalism, we created an electronic version of this logbook \u2013 designed specifically for use on student-owned mobile devices. Referred to as a \u2018Digital Logbook\u2019, this used a Microsoft OneNote Class Notebook \u2013 a simple note-taking tool that is part of the University\u2019s Microsoft Office 365 subscription.<\/p>\n

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To encourage students to attend and complete tutorial sessions and laboratories, we also introduced a range of digital badges. Initially intended as a bit of fun, these were simple images \u2013 created in PowerPoint \u2013 that students could copy and paste into their digital logbooks. Loosely based on gamification theory and designed to reward participation, these badges quickly became an important driver for student engagement (especially for online content), with students keen to complete their collection.<\/p>\n

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Who was involved<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr Andrew Lovatt \u2013 Lecturer<\/p>\n

Professor Peter Gosling \u2013 Module Lead<\/p>\n

Dr Terry Charlton \u2013 LTDS Support<\/p>\n

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How did you do it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We used the Microsoft OneNote Class Notebook<\/em> app, available in Canvas, to automatically provision a OneNote notebook to every student registered on the module. It was a simple enough process to configure the app and set up the \u2018master\u2019 notebook, after which students simply needed to follow a link on Canvas to self-enrol. Their notebooks were created in a few seconds, with module teaching staff added automatically in order to review and assess student content. Once set-up, students could access their logbooks at any time via the OneNote app on any synced device.<\/p>\n

Importantly, the master notebook acted as a template, which we used to create a custom notebook for each student \u2013 featuring general guidelines and advice, as well a framework of sections and pages to help them get started. We were also able to \u2018push\u2019 new content into the notebooks during the academic year, simply by adding extra pages to our master notebook.<\/p>\n

Although students were free to add anything relevant to their logbook, we explicitly asked them to record the following information \u2013 which formed the basis of their final module assessment:<\/p>\n