10 Pro Tips on How to Make Study Notes Online

Whether or not you’re taking an online class from beginning to end for the first time, one thing is for sure: how we interact with the course materials, including taking excellent notes, counts.

Here are 10 expert suggestions for creating study notes online to assist you to make effective study notes this term:

3 activities to complete before the lecture

1. Review the pre-lecture readings

Making sure you comprehend the material as soon as you can help it become more ingrained in your memory after repeated exposure, which is a key component of taking effective notes. Therefore, if your lecturer posts pre-lecture presentations for the upcoming class, get one head start on the material by looking up a few new ideas and words.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to jot down any questions you have as you watch this sneak peek. To understand the subject better at first, try looking up solutions and answers on your own.

Check to see whether your pre-lecture questions are answered in class, and if not, utilize the chatbox feature to ask your professor to elaborate. When you can, try to finish this by the conclusion of the semester, but if not, ensure that you follow up after your professor’s office hours.

2. Select a note-taking strategy and stay with it

Online notes will help you to access it anywhere. According to this study, students who opt to type their notes rather than write them down don’t exhibit appreciable differences in their ability to remember knowledge. But people who write by hand are better at remembering concepts; they do better when confronted with conceptual questions.

The truth is that typing up notes typically results in students copying them verbatim, providing a lesser cognitive processing level than writing notes by hand. The latter makes it simpler to recognize the most crucial components of the lesson by requiring you to consider the data you are receiving more critically.

Nevertheless, there are advantages to typing up notes, such as the ability to quickly look up a certain term using a rapid search query. PDF notes will help you through this. Keep track of all the locations where you made notes, plus store them safely.

3. Make final adjustments soon before the lecture starts

Assemble the tools you require and ensure you are in a conducive environment for concentration by:

Clearing all unused tabs
Take a comfortable position
Keep any technology that isn’t needed for the lecture

Three activities for the lecture

You could view the lecture video once to get acquainted with the material, then rewatch while taking notes when you have the time and the professor has agreed to post the recorded lecture following class.

Add the lecture’s title and date to your notes so that you can a) discover and explore them more conveniently in the future and b) more easily compare them to the uploaded lecture materials (like lecture slides).

Here are some pointers for taking successful class notes:

4. Concentrate on the emphasised aspects

Refrain from removing everything. Instead of copying straight from the slides throughout the class, note whatever the instructor says that’s not covered by the presentations or noted anywhere else. Make these specifics noticeable. Focus on the professor’s repeated data, and look for signals.

If your professor takes notes during class, you don’t have to duplicate everything they write down. Instead, think about rewriting the professor’s written notes using your style, language, or structure. This is comparable to copying up notes verbatim, which is why people occasionally forget to write down certain notes when they return to them later.

5. Annotate your notes

Connect to something you already know or have learned (such as subjects addressed in other classes). Developing prior knowledge keeps you grounded as well as assists you in remembering new information better.

Note any inquiries that arise. If your professor provides you with those hints, winks, or nudges, mark particular details as extremely examinable.

6. Use techniques to stay on top of what is being said

a) When taking notes, and truncations, use abbreviations and shorthand to more easily keep up with your professor’s speaking pace. Irrespective of the course, employ symbols to conserve paper, space, and/or computer storage.

b) Remain focused and look up information after the lecture to ensure that you don’t miss anything your professor is now covering.

b) If there are diagrams on the slides and you don’t have time to remove them, keep track of where they are in the slide deck (for example, see slide titled…). When you do this, you would fill in these gaps in your notes and make it easier to locate them later.

What to do after the lecture?

Reviewing your notes following your class will help you reinforce what you learned. The following tips will help you recall your lessons more clearly:

7. Rewrite and summarise your notes

Review uploaded documents or recordings to help compensate for what you lost while you’re still conscious of it. Add relevant words and ideas from some of the other sources to deepen your comprehension.

8. Rearrange your notes in the manner that will be examined

For instance:

Use bullet points or flashcards to concentrate on key information for multiple-choice exams. You should be required to compare and summarise the material for exams that are needed for essays.

A piece of advice: When your class permits cheat sheets for exams, start working on them now.

9. As quickly as you can, give answers to any questions you might have

Before any exam or test, contact a study partner or your professor to get any questions answered.

10. Manually arrange your notes

Arrange manually by sorting them into folders or notebooks; some programs are also referred to as notebooks. Afterward, they become helpful when you wish to investigate a certain topic of notes, such as all of the recipes.

What kind of study notes you take plus how you utilize them will determine what folders you make and what names you give them.

Conclusion

Taking notes is a crucial learning approach, even with the plethora of data available in technological formats. Furthermore, Student notes taking techniques have an impact, and not all provide the same outcomes. You can build a set of notes that will help you remember the most crucial ideas from lectures and exams and aid you in your exam prep by carefully examining your note-taking techniques.