Recently I’ve been taking some online courses at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This is part of my “leveling up” to get into a doctorate there. Since I’m pretty busy, I’ve decided to use Evernote to organize my classes. It’s pretty easy. I thought I’d show you what I’m doing. Using this system, you could use Evernote to organize any online course you’re taking.

What is Evernote?

If you don’t know what Evernote is, I would suggest that you take a look at this video. Basically, Evernote is a service that lets you save everything, with the idea that, with it, you can, “Remember everything.” That comes in pretty handy for a Seminary student. Plus it’s available on every format. Watch the video below if you’re not familiar with the service. If you already know what it is, keep reading.

Now that you know what Evernote is, let me show you how I am currently using it to organize my Seminary classes.

Seminary Stack

First of all, I have created an Evernote notebook for each of the courses I’m taking. They are in my handy “SBTS Courses” stack. A stack is just a collection of notebooks. I have a lot of stacks in Evernote, because I have begun to use it for everything. My “SBTS Courses” stack contains (right now) five notebooks. One is for general Seminary information, and the rest are each class. Each class gets its own notebook.

Course Notebooks

For each course I’m taking, I set up a separate notebook. In that notebook, I place all the files I will need throughout the semester. Sometimes, I download the video lectures and place them in Dropbox (they are too large to save in Evernote). Then I create a checklist for the class, which includes a link to the individual note for every assignment and lecture for the entire semester.

My checklist note looks like this (click the image to see it bigger):

As I listen to the lectures, I keep my notes in separate Evernote notes. After I listen to a lecture and take notes, on the checklist, I link to the lecture notes so I can easily find them and search through them when I’m studying for an exam. With Evernote Premium, I can search PDF files, which makes it easier to search through the reading assignments that have been given in a certain class.

Reading Assignments

Many of my classes assign readings of articles, which are typically given in PDF format. The good thing is that I can drag and drop a PDF into Evernote, link it to the assignment on my class checklist, and then, when it’s time to read that particular article, I just click the link and it shows up on my iPad or whatever I happen to be using at the time. I don’t have to go to my class website to access it again. It’s just right there in Evernote.

I also have the ability to annotate the PDF, which makes it easy to highlight or underline important parts of the articles. Below is a screenshot of an annotated syllabus for my hermeneutics class.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very satisfied with how Evernote has helped me stay organized and on top of my classes. It’s a handy tool that I have come to love, and I think any student could use it to be very organized in class.

What do you think? Could you use Evernote for class? How could I improve my use of it for my purposes? Comment below with your thoughts.