The pandemic has radically transformed education around the globe. With social distancing measures and lockdowns forcing schools and universities to shut down physical campuses, remote learning has become the new normal. Both students and teachers have had to hastily adapt to this online education system. However, the transition has not been easy. Lack of human connection, technical glitches, and privacy concerns have made remote learning stressful for many.

Benefits for students

For students attending online classes or watching pre-recorded lectures, taking notes electronically has become a necessity. Cloud-based note-taking apps allow them to do so in a structured and efficient manner. Features like annotating PDFs, and adding text, drawings, graphs, images, and hyperlinks make the note-taking process much more versatile. Voice transcription even allows them to dictate their notes hands-free.

Since the notes reside safely in the cloud in their encrypted accounts, students need not worry about accidentally losing them or leaving their devices behind. They access the notes 24×7 from any device with internet access. Most services also provide backup and version history, safeguarding against data loss. Seamless synchronization across devices gives students flexibility as to which device to use for reading or updating notes. Collaboration features let students discuss notes with classmates or instructors in real time via threaded conversations. Easy organization with notebooks, sections, page hierarchies, and tagging results in structured notes that are much easier to comprehend later. Search makes it a breeze to locate that one particular piece of information among thousands of notes.

Portability is another major advantage of cloud notes over traditional pen-and-paper methods. Students carry their entire semester’s notes on any Internet-enabled device rather than hauling around heavy textbooks and loose sheets of paper. A few cloud apps even allow offline access to notes for situations with unstable connections. privnote is a privacy-focused app that provides students with complete data ownership and zero-knowledge encryption for their notes. Without worrying about the service provider accessing or exploiting their data, students make private notes related to sensitive assignment topics freely. Such privacy protection is especially relevant as per General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws.

Features to look for

While basic note-taking apps suffice for personal use, students and teachers need enhanced capabilities from their cloud services for educational needs, especially remote learning. When evaluating such apps, rich support for annotating PDF texts, e-books, lecture slides, and images is mandatory. Equally vital are versatile note-creation features like freehand drawing, typing, embedding media, linking, tagging, etc. Collaborative abilities enabling live comments, version history, and moderation are desirable too.

Deep search, robust organization, and smart sync across devices provide efficiency during note access. Secured encryption, strict access controls, and zero-knowledge privacy architectures provide data protection. Reliable architectures, robust backups, and redundancy, and multi-data center deployments ensure around-the-clock uptime. For supreme focus, choose services dedicated solely to notes rather than those trying to cater to many functions. However, education-centric products from companies like Blackboard, YuJa, and Panopto are optimized better for remote classrooms. Most provide free tiers or discounted academic pricing for students and faculty.