How to take notes for an online course

9 November 2026 · by Mito

Online courses are easy to start and easy to forget. You watch a lesson, nod along, and a month later little of it is left. A few simple note habits change that, and none of them takes long.

One note for each lesson

Give every lesson its own note, named after the lesson. When the course says "as we saw in lesson 3", you know exactly where to look, and your notes follow the shape of the course instead of turning into one long scroll.

Write while you watch, in your own words

Pause the video when an idea lands and write one or two lines about it, the way you would explain it to someone else. Rephrasing is what makes it stay: copying a slide word for word feels thorough but does much less for your memory.

Turn what you learn into questions

At the end of a lesson, write two or three questions it answered. "What does justify-content move?" or "When does a glacier crack?" Questions are the most useful notes you can write, because of what comes next.

Test yourself, then read again

In a well-known study, Roediger and Karpicke (2006) had students either read a text several times or read it once and then try to recall it. A week later, the students who had practised recalling remembered clearly more, even though rereading had felt more effective at the time. The finding, called the testing effect, has held up across many studies since.

So before the next lesson, look only at your questions and answer them from memory. Then check your notes. A few minutes are enough.

Keep the course in one place

Collect all of a course's notes together, and mark each lesson as done when you finish it. Seeing how far you have come is a good reason to keep going.

How Glacier helps

Glacier has a layout for this, called Course. Mark a collection as a course and its notes become lessons: numbered along the edge of the paper, with your progress on top and Previous, Mark as done and Next lesson at the bottom. Each lesson's note sits right beside the course page in your browser's sidebar, and opens again whenever you come back to it.