Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Guided notetaking 
Guided notetaking is where you add to existing notes, usually pro-
vided by your lecturer. Tese notes outline a lecture or summarise 
an area of research or some reading material. You can read those 
notes to accompany the lecture or textbook and then annotate 

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Online notetaking 67 
them with additional information that will help you understand 
the essentials. For my students, I provide them with some notes 
on Microsoft OneNote. Tey can add to these with highlights, 
comments, underlines, and so on. See Figures 4.2 and 4.3. 
Figure 4.2 
A set of notes for students to annotate 
Figure 4.3 
An annotated set of notes 

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68 Studying online 
For people studying online, guided notetaking is particularly help-
ful. Lecturers provide summary notes in electronic form, and stu-
dents can then add to those notes with annotations and additional 
notes of their own. However, one of the problems with guided 
notes is that you are dependent upon lecturers creating the notes 
in the frst place. Furthermore, if the lecturer’s notes don’t click 
with you because they write notes in a diferent way to you, then 
you will fnd it harder to use them. 
Mind maps 
Another prevalent method of notetaking for students is mind 
mapping. Tis is a highly visual method of making notes. You can 
see an example of a simple mind map in Figure 4.4 which is the 
summary mind map of this chapter. 
Traditionally, you start your mind map with a central idea in the 
middle and then start drawing lines for each idea with a few words 
to remind you of the information. Te lines start at the one o’clock 
position and then go clockwise around the central concept. Tey 
have very few words on them, as the mind map is meant to be a 
trigger to remind you of stored memories. However, people do