3 Ways to Take Notes During an Online Lecture

Online education has become popular since the COVID pandemic but many international schools and universities offer online courses to students all around the world, thanks to the internet.

The major concern of students in online lectures is taking notes because they are not well-prepared for the online education system.

In an online environment, students are likely distracted more easily compared to the physical environment so try to get a good sleep before your online class and sit in a good spot so that you won’t get distracted while taking lecture notes.

Also, in online lectures, there are no repeating criteria which means what is discussed is discussed you need to speed up your notes taking skills to match the speed of the lecture.

If you are thinking to join an online international course but are confused because it is your first time then we got you covered.

Though every student has his own way of taking lecture notes, some ways might work with online lectures therefore, we decided to help you.

In this post, we are going to discuss the three ways to take lecture notes during an online lecture.

So, let’s get started!

3 Ways for Students to Take Online Lecture Notes

1.      The ‘Outline’ Way

In online lectures, you don’t have time to write each and everything said or discussed by your professor which means you need to pick an optimal way to write your lecture so that you won’t miss any important points from the lecture.

We suggest you use the outline way to write your lecture notes on the text editor online. You can also use a pen-paper approach for taking notes but, online text editors are viable and safe for students to use.

The benefit of using an online editor is that you can resume your work where you left it off. Even if your computer happens to shut down or if your internet connection happens to get interrupted, you won’t have to worry about your work getting lost.

Don’t know how the ‘outline’ way works?

If you are a good student you don’t need to write every word said by the teacher in your notes, you can go with writing down the main outlines of the lecture.

What you can do is, just write the outlines discussed in the lecture and leave some space after every outline so that you can write within that outline once the lecture is finished.

This will save you time and you will not miss any information, your outlines will help you revise the whole lecture when it is done.

Example:

This is how you can write outlines of the lecture so that you don’t miss any information and later you can use the outlines to revise the whole online lecture.

2.      The ‘Tabular’ Way

Another optimal way to take notes during online lectures is the ‘tabular’ way. Many students love to learn and memorize their lectures by writing them in a table format.

If you roughly draw the table and fill the columns with all the information you think you must note down from the lecture, it will not just help you with taking complete lecture notes but also with later learning.

You can draw a table on an online text editor and quickly type key points, abbreviations, scientific terms, formulas, and whatnot.

You can also edit the information you put in the tables easily once the lecture is finished. Many text editors allow students to insert links, you can insert a link to the relevant source for better learning all within the table.

It’s a terrific way to gain an overview of the lecture in your own words, especially if the material is complex or presented quickly.

As an added bonus, this method of note-taking might aid memorization for students who learn best through the use of visuals.

Example:

From this example, you can understand clearly what we meant by the ‘Tabular’method of taking notes during your online lecture.

3.      The ‘Mapping’ Way

Last but not least, we have a ‘mapping’ way for students to take notes during their online lectures.

Students need to decide on a note-taking way that they can follow so that their learning and success can go smoothly.

In this method, students can create a map of their every lecture starting with identifying the main topic and writing it at the top and sub-topic below forming a top-bottom tree with arrows identifying supporting ideas.

This method is very fine for online lectures because it will not take much time compared to writing complete sentences.

For better understanding, students can use different shapes like rectangles, circles, or ovals for different topics.

Example:

You can use a circle for the main topic, rectangles for the sub-topics, and ovals for other relevant information.

You can also use different colors to highlight different headings or topics so that when you revise your lecture notes you won’t stuck.

In short, we can say that the ‘mapping’ method is very effective to see things clearly and saving time for better learning in the virtual learning environment.

Final Verdict

If you are going to step into the virtual environment of learning, you can use guidance on taking notes during online lectures because without taking notes you can not attempt great in your online course.

Therefore, in the above sections, we discussed three ways for students to take notes during their online lectures.

If you can’t pick a notes-taking method on your own then you can definitely review the three we discussed above. Hope it will help.