Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Online notetaking 85 
chapter to help you remember what you read. Indeed, if you have 
audio notes like this, you can revise while you are in the gym or 
walking down the road to the pub ...! However, there is a prob-
lem with audio notes. Finding what you want within them can be 
time-consuming. Tis is where transcription software can come 
in useful. Services such as Otter.ai and Notiv can take your au-
dio fle and turn it into text. Tey can also monitor online video 
calls, for example, and transcribe them. Tis means that you will 
have a text-based version of the audio fles you have recorded. 
Tese text fles can be more easily searched than an audio fle. 
You can add the audio and the transcription to your notetaking 
system, and there you will be able to search for specifc elements 
you might need. Both Otter.ai and Notiv have free options for 
students. 
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KEEPING NOTE OF REFERENCES 
All academic work requires references. Tey show where you 
obtained the information and allow your readers to check the 
integrity of what you are saying. Your essays, reports, and other 
assignments will all need referencing. Whenever I talk with stu-
dents about referencing, I realise that they waste a great deal of 
time on it. Tat’s because they don’t store or note down references 
accurately in the frst place. When it comes to writing their as-
signment, they often have to look up their sources again to write 
their list of references. Or they fnd that they haven’t kept a note of 
their source, and they need to do the research all over again. Te 
answer to this is to make a note of your references every time you 
access a source. 
Some students jot down their references in a separate word pro-
cessor document as they work on each assignment. Te problem 
with this is that the document only applies to one assignment, and 
so if a source is used in more than one piece of work, the student 
has to recreate the reference all over again. Plus, searching for 
a reference across multiple word processor documents is time-
consuming and not fun ...! 

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