USING WEB-BASED NOTEBOOKS FOR BLENDED-LEARNING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE Jens Albrecht Technische Hochschule Nürnberg (GERMANY) Abstract The presentation discusses experiences with the use of web-based scientific notebook applications like Apache Zeppelin or Jupyter in the context of higher-level education. Notebooks created with these tools can contain a mixture of textual explanations, visualizations, and executable program code. Thus, besides being a platform for developing, documenting and sharing information on scientific problems, notebooks are also a great tool for education in computer and natural sciences as well as engineering. The notebook concept has been tested in lectures on databases and big data technologies. The prototypical teaching modules we developed show the great potential and some current limitations the notebooks. Keywords: Blended Learning, Notebook, Apache Zeppelin, Jupyter. 1 INTRODUCTION Today, e-learning plays a vital role in many businesses and educational institutions. A study conducted by Class Central in December 2016 states that over 700 universities are offering about 7.000 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with almost 60 Mio. registered students [1]. These course are a great possibility to get acquainted with new topics and are often used by individuals for continuing professional education. Many courses are excellently prepared by top-rated universities and show the great potential of interactive online trainings for higher education. Today, MOOCs even incorporate elements to of social collaboration among students [2]. However, MOOCs will not replace traditional teaching, because interaction with other students and instructors is still very important. One approach to combine face-to-face teaching with e-learning and focus on their relative strengths is blended learning [3]. Even though almost all academic institutions have initiatives to support blended learning, the actual adoption on the course level is still rather low, because the use of new tools and the redesign of new course material is challenging and time consuming [4]. To provide an e-learning module, a lecturer has to do both: learn the functionalities of the e-learning platform and create resp. adapt the content to new concepts. Thus, the usability of the tool from the lecturer's perspective and its fitness for the specific topic of the lecture is critical for a wider application in university courses. A common e-learning platform in many universities is Moodle [5]. Moodle is a mature learning management system and offers a large number of modules for different kinds of e-learning. However, several studies show that the usability of Moodle has a number of weaknesses (see [6] for an overview). While the system has been improved over the years, to set-up a good module and maintain it is still an intricate task requiring many mouse-clicks of the instructor. This maybe one reason, why e- learning modules still are missing in many lectures. In addition, e-learning tools for programming or data analysis require the possibility to write and execute program code in the required programming language. This is not supported by Moodle and similar platforms. 2 WEB-BASED SCIENTIFIC NOTEBOOKS Independent from e-learning and instead motivated by an increased need to interactively work with data, a new kind of data analytics tools has emerged in the last years: web-based scientific notebooks [7]. The tasks of data scientists and analysts involve a mixture of scientific programming, data exploration, experimentation as well as the preparation of visualizations and the sharing of results. In the end it's all about developing a story to explain not only the final results but also the principles behind. This is very similar to what a lecturer has to do in class. Thus, web-based notebook tools like Jupyter and Apache Zeppelin which were designed for data science also have a great potential to support teaching ([8], [9]). In fact, many inspiring notebooks, primarily on Machine Learning and Python, have already been published and are available for use in academic courses ([10], [11]). Proceedings of EDULEARN17 Conference 3rd-5th July 2017, Barcelona, Spain ISBN: 978-84-697-3777-4 5714