NotebookLM: Plus or Not?

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Welcome to AutomatED: the newsletter on how to teach better with tech.

In each edition, I share what I have learned — and am learning — about AI and tech in the university classroom. What works, what doesn't, and why.

Today, I take a look at NotebookLM — Google’s way of bringing documents and other source materials to life via summaries, audio overviews (podcasts) and chat experiences — and its new premium version (“Plus”).

📣 By the way, feel free to email me if you handle your department’s faculty-to-course or course-to-room scheduling and you’re interested in the AI tools I’ve developed to help improve your processes — saving you time and producing more optimal schedules, without requiring any new inputs from your colleagues. I’ve got only 2 more slots available for this semester.

📝 Save the Date: ($0) Webinar Next Friday

Want to learn more about on using AI to generate course content?

If so, just answer “Yes” in the below poll and you are thereby registered for my February Zoom webinar. It will be on Friday, February 28th from noon to 1:30pm Eastern. All registrants will receive the recording afterwards, even if they don’t attend live.

The rest of my webinars this semester will have an entrance fee, so this is your chance to get in on the action without cost.

If you select “Yes”, that’s enough to register. You’ll get a follow-up email on Monday of next week with more information.

🧰 An AI Tool For Your Toolbox: 
NotebookLM

Another month, another AI subscription to consider. This one, though, might be available to you for free.

Google One AI Premium ($20/month after the first two months) now includes NotebookLM Plus, an enhanced version of their document-focused AI assistant.

However, Plus now also comes as a part of Google Workspace and Google Cloud for businesses, schools, universities, and other organizations.

But price and availability aside, is Plus worth adding to our growing stack of AI tools?

The answer depends on how you work with course materials and research documents, and it depends on how you want to facilitate your students doing so, but I think it’s probably “Yes” for many of us.

While the free version of NotebookLM can already analyze documents and generate summaries and podcasts, the Plus tier adds features that might interest higher educators — particularly those who want to create collaborative AI workspaces around course content.

At its core, NotebookLM functions like an AI research assistant that thoroughly reads whatever sources you provide, from lecture slides and academic papers to YouTube videos and web articles. It differs from general-purpose AI chat tools by staying more strictly grounded in your uploaded sources, with inline citations for every claim.

The Plus version adds the ability to customize the AI's interaction style and, perhaps most interestingly, lets you share focused versions of your notebooks where others can interact with your curated sources through AI-powered chat.

How It Works

After creating a notebook in NotebookLM, you start by uploading your sources. The platform accepts a wide range: PDFs, Google Docs, slide decks, web pages, YouTube videos, or copied text.

Each notebook can hold up to 300 sources in Plus — a significant increase from the free version's 50-source limit.

Once your sources are loaded, NotebookLM generates an automatic summary (a “Briefing Doc”) and can quickly produce an Audio Overview of the sources, and you can chat with any subset of the sources in the middle window.

But the real power comes from the "Studio" panel on the right side of your screen. Here you can:

• Create Audio Overviews (i.e. podcasts) that convert your sources into engaging dialogues between AI hosts, and there’s a beta feature to join in with the speakers

• Generate study guides, FAQs, timelines, or briefing documents

• Take AI-assisted notes that link directly back to source material

Beyond enabling more Audio Overviews, notebooks, queries, and sources, the Plus version has three distinctive features:

1. You can share notebooks in two ways:

   1. full access, where collaborators can see all your sources and add their own

   2. chat-only access, where others can interact with your sources without seeing the raw documents (more info here, including sharing limits based on account type)

2. You can customize how the AI engages with your content through new "chat styles", like "Guide” or “Analyst”, and output length options, like “Longer” or “Shorter” (note: the button to changer these settings is easy to miss, but it’s the triple-slider-bar icon, which is in line with the “Chat” and “Studio” headers)

   • This means you can combine the prior feature, where you share a notebook with chat-only access, with the “Guide” setting to build something akin to a tutor for your students or colleagues (more on this below)

3. You can also view data on user access to your shared notebooks, including how many of them have used it and the queries they’ve made

How We Can Use It

For higher educators, NotebookLM Plus opens up several possibilities that go beyond basic document analysis.

First, it's a powerful tool for course preparation.

You could upload all your lecture slides, reading materials, past student feedback, etc. into a single notebook. The AI can help identify themes across materials, suggest ways to better connect topics, and generate review materials that accurately reflect your specific content. Since everything stays grounded in your sources — or, at least, the answers of NotebookLM require a lot less prompt engineering to remain well-grounded, and you can check the “citations” — you're getting insights based on your actual course materials.

Second, and this is where the Plus features become interesting, it can help create guided learning environments, as I foreshadowed above. For example:

• Build a notebook with supplementary readings and share it in "chat-only" mode, letting students explore complex topics through AI-guided discussion without getting overwhelmed by raw source material

• Create topic-specific study guides where the AI acts as a "Guide" (using Plus's chat styles) to help students understand difficult concepts, always citing specific passages from your course materials

• Use the audio overview feature to generate accessible versions of dense readings, which is particularly helpful for students who learn better through listening

Given that I suspect many students will already be using Plus on their own — whether you like it or not — it’s a serious question whether you should try to get ahead of them and provide more structure or just your own flavor to their studying experience.

The analytics feature in Plus also lets you see how students are actually using these resources, including which topics they're asking about most frequently and how deeply they're engaging with the material. This gives you formative information that can guide your in-class activities and topic coverage.

My Take

If you already use Google Workspace through your institution, you should definitely check out NotebookLM Plus since it’s included in your account.

If you don’t, Plus may still be worth exploring if you frequently work with large collections of course documents, have a source-focused course, or can envision using its sharing features. They might justify the cost.

Still, the free version offers solid functionality and you shouldn’t feel pressured to pay.