Instructor Testimonials

"...U.Va. faculty members are helping public interest organization Fairness.com to test and develop NowComment, a web-based tool...which can help the professor then generate more in-depth discussion during class time."

"I used NowComment in two Spring 2012 courses. Especially in the larger 50-student class, the online discussion was remarkably lively and useful, better in fact than the in-class discussion. I love the software and will definitely be using it again in the Fall!"

Professor Bruce Williams (UVA)
Media Studies Department

We are using the Now Comment in a large lecture course of several hundred students and have found it easy to use, elegant, and powerful as a means to facilitate intellectual exchange amongst large numbers of students through the medium of a primary source."

Prof. David Germano
Director of UVA SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives), co-director of the UVA Tibet Center.

"Students' second draft essays were measurably improved after using NowComment to give peer feedback on the first drafts. NowComment's design encourages "close reading" comments on specific sentences and paragraphs, which produced concrete, helpful suggestions. Using NowComment was a breeze; we used no class time teaching its use."

Dorothe Bach, Asst. Director, UVA Teacher Resource Center (TRC)
John Alexander, Assoc. Director, UVA Center for Emerging Research, Scholarship and the Arts (CERSA)

"I used NowComment software in my British Romanticism class and was gratified to see how easy it was to use. My students were all able to add comments and questions to a common text... producing a whole range of interesting interpretations and points of departure for the class discussion that followed. The students were overwhelmingly impressed by the NowComment interface, and remarked on its ease of use and the ways in which the exercise elicited more thoughtful conversation; they had only positive things to say about it. Students too shy to participate in class discussion were particularly enthusiastic about the venue that the NowComment exercise provided for their contributions."

Professor Andrew Stauffer (UVA)
Director, Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (NINES)

"My students enjoyed NowComment. The quality of the discussion was comparable to face-to-face verbal discussion, but NowComment made the logistics of document sharing and collaboration within and between groups so much easier!"

Prof. Ruth Ferree (UVA)
Curry School of Education

"NowComment worked well to help the students in my Italian literature survey course prepare for discussion of assigned texts in Italian. I had the students enter comments into NowComment [in Italian] before class; even without specific instructions the students naturally responded to one another's comments as they made their own. This online social interaction primed them very effectively for in-class interaction. I also projected the NowComment webpage during class discussion so the students could see the text integrated with everyone's comments. NowComment worked reliably, and the students didn't need any training to use it."

Jessica Otey (Duke University)
Italian Department (adjunct)

"The software was excellent. The quality and quantity of the student's comments on the speech were outstanding, much better than I expected; their ability to see and respond to each others' comments in context was the best part. They were very enthusiastic about the software."

Prof. Brian Balogh (UVA)
Miller Center Of Public Affairs

"I had my students use NowComment within small groups to peer review each other's papers. I was really impressed with the quality of the online comments; they were often much more constructively critical and substantive then I was expecting."

Prof. Scot French (University of Central Florida)
History Department

"For the last three months, subgroups of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars from the International Society for Scriptural Reasoning (SSR) have used NowComment to study one another's sacred literature. NowComment has given us a new capacity to share scriptural commentary and analysis with one another in the cyberspace equivalent of a face-to-face discussion. The results have been very exciting and productive."

Professor Peter Ochs (UVA)
co-founder, Society for Scriptural Reasoning

"as a professor teaching 100+ students, it gave me a sense [of] student understanding and personalities that I would never had otherwise obtained, and as a consequence, I feel like I know my students better and can teach them better....[in a second course] On the final exam students demonstrated a great familiarity with the material covered using NowComment, so it clearly made a difference in an important way."

Professor Jennifer Burns (UVA)
History Department