It’s an age old adage: successful students are the hallmark of a successful teacher. The concepts taught are learned and applied by students to get certifications, find new and exciting opportunities, and improve job prospects. With the success of their pupils, 5-star reviews and referrals naturally return to deserving teachers.

Accolades may not drive any instructor as much as the positive impact of their work. Yet, all these streams – impact, recognition, and more students – directly converge at students’ success. This brings us to potentially the most deliberate question in the profession of teaching: how can teachers help students become high achievers? Let’s try putting on the students’ shoes, understanding the learning journey for online courses, and how enhancing note-taking for students can help them get to the next level.

Phases of a student’s learning journey in online courses

As part of coursework, students understand concepts, study to retain them, and then test to correct their understanding. Across multiple courses, a toolkit of solutions is available to strengthen student’s learning and increase retention, as well as enable them to access the appropriate tool for real-world problems at hand they will encounter outside of any course.

While there may be no single solution to helping students through this learning pattern, note-taking comes close. In understanding concepts, notes help create mental maps that help with course subject matter retention. While studying, notes provide a reference of content that supplements instruction. Mapping what has been taught to notes written in a student’s own words helps ensure that the lessons are correctly retained, and gives students the added benefit of reprocessing (as well as reinforcing) course subject matter. During testing, summarized notes can also help to differentiate concepts, aiding in memorization and utilization applied to solve real-world problems. Using a highlight sheet for exams can help distinguish between what needs to be primarily retained (e.g. formulas) vs. primarily recalled (e.g. problems to apply them to).

It’s no surprise then that multiple studies have proven that taking notes help students learn more effectively. Yet in the rapidly growing world of online courses, how notes are taken needs to be rethought in order for learning techniques to be applied even more effectively. As online courses become more common, this is increasingly necessary as online learning is more purposeful and student satisfaction seems even more correlated to tangible outcomes.

Enter Beastnotes: a note-taking app designed specifically for online courses. From comprehension and retention to studying and application, Beastnotes helps students throughout their online learning life cycle. Evolving beyond the physical notebook and traditional note-taking apps, Beastnotes’ features are tailored to the virtual classroom experience.

With the easy to use Beastnotes browser extension with Chrome, students can take notes in context while watching video lectures or reading course materials. Beastnotes’ versatile functionality allows students to then focus on what is taught and capture key concepts in their own words.

Instead of pausing to take handwritten notes, Beastnotes operates seamlessly within the same browser alongside any online course, enabling students to more easily summarize key learning concepts and course materials in the same digital environment in tandem to taking online courses. In addition to saving time, online note-taking with Beastnotes also empowers students to process and grasp lessons more effectively than more traditional note-taking methods.

When it’s time to prepare for tests or apply lessons from courses, with Beastnotes students have easy access to notes organized according to any course’s curriculum structure. Not only are notes linked to the pages they were taken on, but video timestamps can also be captured allowing for effortless video playback. Conveniently, these links take students back to the context where they recorded the corresponding notes. Designed to streamline student’s studying, this functionality allows students to establish memory markers and study more efficiently while also enhancing increased visits to course content.

By helping increase student focus, retention, and application Beastnotes aims to improve course engagement, completion rates, and satisfaction. If any educator teaching online courses is interested in utilizing Beastnotes to give their students a leg up, please email [email protected], or visit Beastnotes’ website.