Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Online notetaking 73 
the student was listening to merely type what I was saying. When 
students were moved to online-only lectures due to the Covid-19 
pandemic, I recall one of them saying how grateful they were that 
the lectures were now all on video. “Why is that?”, I asked. “It’s 
because it means I can stop and start the recording so that I can 
type everything you say. I couldn’t have done that in a live lecture, 
so the recordings are great”. When studying using a computer, it is 
too easy to think that notetaking is just typing up what you have 
been listening to or reading. Te problem, though, is that your 
mind focuses on the creation of the notes. When you take notes 
on paper, there is a greater tendency to listen, think, interpret, and 
then make the notes. When people are making notes on paper, 
they tend not to write things down verbatim. Tis gives them the 
mental opportunity to process the information rather than just 
record it. 
Researchers at Washington University in St Louis, USA, carried 
out a set of experiments investigating digital notetaking (Bui, My-
erson, and Hale 2013). Tis series of experiments showed that 
when students just took down everything that was said in a lec-
ture, their ability to recall information dropped of after 24 hours. 
Te students who had been asked to type up structure notes, 
though, had a more long-lasting recollection of the lecture con-
tent. Tis suggests that it is not necessarily the use of a computer 
to make notes that is the potential problem. Rather, it is the kind 
of notes that you take on a computer. If all you do is type up what 
you hear in a lecture or read in a book, your short-term memory 
is excellent for the material you have studied. However, that mem-
ory efect reduces over time. Hence, if you really do want to use 
your laptop to type up lecture notes, then you will gain a better 
understanding of the subject if you use one of the structured no-
tetaking methods rather than just typing what you hear.