3 Provide Note-taking Support
Why is this important?
Taking notes helps students better understand main concepts and study more efficiently. However, many students struggle to take clear, concise and effective notes. Note-taking accommodations, including computerized notetaker, are among the most common accommodations for students with disabilities. Proactively providing note-taking support can support all students to have complete and comprehensive notes about course lessons.
There are a number of ways to provide note-taking support to all students:
Posting lecture notes
Lecture notes can include:
- Complete notes,
- Notes that include blank spaces where students can complete notes during the class,
- A series of questions about the lecture that students can answer in class or using weekly readings or discussions,
- Presentation slides with speaker notes and/or
- A detailed outline of the lecture with completed notes to be posted after the class
Sharing notes in accessible HTML or Word on eCentennial will ensure that students can use a text-to-speech tool such as ReadSpeaker to listen to the content.
Crowdsourcing lecture notes
Crowdsourcing lecture notes involves having students who are attending classes share their notes. It can encourage students to improve their notes and note-taking skills. It is a also great way to ensure that every student can access quality notes with minimal additional effort for the faculty.
You can start crowdsourcing lecture notes from your students by:
- Requesting for volunteer note-takers among your students
- Creating a schedule among volunteer note-takers to share the labour of taking notes
- Creating a place on eCentennial where students can share their notes (e.g., Adding Discussion to each Module where students can upload or type in their notes) and/or
- Creating a shared Word document and sharing the link with the students in the corresponding module on eCentennial.
Providing Lecture Summaries
You can support or supplement students’ note-taking efforts with alternative asynchronous recordings that capture main ideas, concepts and examples covered during class.
You can provide lecture summaries by:
- Creating a lecture overview video or audio recording that highlights important concepts and key takeaways, and/or
- Creating a recording of your presentation with voice-over features. You can follow step-by-step instructions in PowerPoint with Voiceover
Recordings can then be uploaded to eCentennial and made available to all students to access.
Specially-trained Note-takers transcribe dialogue in the classroom/lab to a computer monitor for students to read in real-time. They also provide students with an edited copy of the notes within 24 hours.