The use of the annotations in a collaborative activity of reading an online hypermedia course document

In this paper, we deal with collective distance learning and in particular for the use of communication tools in the context of a collaborative activity of "reading and comprehension of an online hypermedia course document". In general, to create a collaborative situation between learners and/or with the tutor, the majority of the existing systems for e-learning use primarily the traditional communication tools (email, chat and/or discussion forums). These tools constitute an important means to exchange ideas between learners, to validate and enrich their training [1]. However, when the exchanges between learners are numerous, learners find difficulties to read all that was exchanged, to distinguish between the most important messages from those which are less, and to associate a message to the corresponding part of the course. To solve these problems and in order to encourage and stimulate the interactions, we think that the association of messages, transcribed by learners or tutor (comment, question, answer, etc), with the corresponding parts of the course, will facilitate their reading and will motivate the learners to use them as a mean of validation of the course concepts and of collaboration. We propose in this paper, a solution based on a collaborative Web annotation tool called SMARTNotes, allowing all learners as well as the tutor to be able to collaborate together for either a part or the globality of the course.