One-click access to Jupyter notebooks online with noto

Called noto, EPFL’s JupyterLab centralized platform for education allows teachers and students to use Jupyter notebooks online without having to install anything on their computer.

Named after the Japanese term for notebook, “nōto” or “ノート”, noto is designed to provide easy access to anyone who wants to create, modify and run notebooks with a simple web browser for teaching and learning purposes. The currently supported programming languages are Python, R, C JavaScript and Octave.

The JupyterLab environment on noto
The JupyterLab environment on noto

Who can use noto?

Noto is accessible to all members of the EPFL community upon simple authentication with Gaspar login. Noto is also open to users from all Swiss Universities in the SWITCH network, who can log in with their academic account. See the list of partner institutions here. If your institution is not in this list, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Start using Jupyter notebooks right away.

Without configuring your computer or installing libraries, you’ll get a private workspace and free computing.

Find out how to use noto in your classroom

Which libraries are installed? How can you share notebooks with students? Discover noto’s features for your course / your MOOC.

Discover how notebooks can help your students learn

Explore the different uses of Jupyter notebooks: virtual demonstrations, interactive textbooks, exercise worksheets, assignments…

How does noto work?

Architecture of the noto JupyterLab platform for education
Architecture of the noto JupyterLab platform for education

As illustrated by the diagram above, our infrastructure includes a JupyterHub in front of multiple JupyterLab backends. This architecture allows us to provide a service that scales up easily with large numbers of users. Noto interfaces with the other learning tools at EPFL, in particular moodle and MOOC platforms. Our servers are hosted at SWITCH. We can offer a more detailed presentation and/or a demonstration to interested parties upon simple request.

Please note that noto is dedicated to education and that other alternatives such as Renku may be more adapted to specialized or computing intensive tasks for research for instance.

 

Technical or pedagogical questions? Our support team is here for you!