How NotebookLM can help students build the foundational background knowledge required to engage with dense scholarly articles and critically apply political science concepts.
As CDIL’s recent article details, CDIL’s GenAI programming is all about providing space for faculty members to experiment with GenAI tools in a curious, education-oriented community. CDIL is intentional about taking a flexible and nimble approach to programmatic design to keep pace with the rapid development of these tools. BC provides access to several different GenAI tools, including NotebookLM. NotebookLM is one of the most accessible tools for faculty to experiment with as it combines the data summary benefits of an LLM without the drawbacks of potential misinformation because it only pulls from the sources that the user uploads.
In this article, John FitzGibbon, Director of Digital Learning Innovation & AI, highlights how he used NotebookLM in his MCAS undergraduate course, Populism and the Rise of Anti-Democracy, and how it facilitated critical thinking in the classroom.
Can you speak more about NotebookLM? For those who are unfamiliar with the tool, how would you describe it?
NotebookLM is a research and notebook tool originally created by Google and is currently offered for free to all Boston College faculty, staff, and students. What is unique about NotebookLM is that, unlike ChatGPT, you choose where you want it to pull information from and upload your selected sources. It then pulls from those materials, cites them, and brings you to the passage it pulled from.
Why did you decide to integrate NotebookLM into your course?
In a political science course like mine, there’s so much context to cover. For the midterm exam, I wanted them to apply course concepts to a novel and real-world situation – the upcoming Chilean presidential election. I asked them, using concepts from the course, to make a prediction about who would win and to justify their analysis. Something that’s been very challenging in the past for me as an instructor is that students will misapply course concepts because they simply don’t have a deep enough knowledge base about international politics. To help students gain the contextual knowledge I knew they needed to be successful, I created a specific Notebook containing articles just about Chilean politics. While incredibly useful, these articles are often dense and difficult to understand, and given the scope of the class, there is not time to unpack everything. Using NotebookLM helped me to get students up to speed on the contextual knowledge they needed so we could jump into engaging with course concepts.
How did you incorporate NotebookLM into your midterm project?
I asked students to use NotebookLM to ask questions about the context of politics in Chile pertaining to their approach to answering the relevant section of the midterm exam . They then used these questions as a starting point to help answer their questions and break down the complex information in these articles.
By using NotebookLM to break down the complexity of these articles, students were able to get the big ideas of political context and scholarly articles that we did not have time to cover in class, but that would provide useful context for their midterm.
Students did really well at this and quickly realized that in order to get good information, they had to craft solid, complex questions, which was a lot more challenging than they initially realized.
What are your takeaways from this experience?
The students performed especially well on the longer, open-response questions on the midterm exam. For those questions, they were required to input complex questions and form their own argument based on the context provided. These are the takeaways I discovered as a result of this:
- Notebooks with a small number of sources focused on a very specific topic for a specific purpose can be very useful.
- Giving students ownership over learning activities that connect directly to major assignments allows them to use AI as a thinking partner that enhances their learning.
- Always give students guidance in your thinking on how to use AI.
What do you recommend to faculty members curious about learning more about NotebookLM?
Join CDIL’s NotebookLM Sandbox! The Sandbox provides a way for faculty to try out this technology in a synchronous community setting. There are two workshops, and each workshop includes a brief introduction explaining NotebookLM, dedicated time for individual work to test out the program, help with technical questions if needed, and time to report back on your discoveries.
By experimenting with NotebookLM in a safe, community-oriented space, you can explore whether an LLM may be a useful addition to your course. Even if you decide it is not for you, you will have a better understanding of the GenAI tools Boston College provides, and therefore, be able to hold conversations on GenAI with your students from a more educated perspective.
