Taking notes for online classes is surprisingly easy

This is probably more of a tip than anything else. As you know, I am taking an online class from Coursera and have been using OneNote to take notes.

And I was diligently watching the teacher write on the whiteboard and was happily inking away in OneNote. And then I had to pause a lecture (nice to be able to do online, doesn't work so well in real life :) ) and when I came back I happened to notice my notes looked like what the instructor was showing in the paused video. Then things started to click in my mind. I did not need to transcribe everything the instructor wrote - I could just get a screenshot and know I had it all right!

Here's what I wound up with:

Now I can actually pay more attention to the description of the equation and only need to add a few notes to amplify what are the key points to me. This goes much quicker. The only piece of the traditional lecture I am missing is the amplification of the material I get when I actually write the formula myself. But it is a tradeoff I am willing to make.

Did you notice the instructor’s finger pointing to ‘t’ in the top image?  Heh – I need to get my timing down better for capturing these images.

I'm still looking for ways to improve this experience, though. One struggle I am having is screen real estate - docked notes certainly help here. I'll keep working through this and seeing what lessons I learned and then seeing what we can do to improve the experience in the future. If you have opinions here, definitely let me know what you think!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John