[Feature Focus] Courseware’s Guided Notes

When learning something new, it’s often helpful to have a study guide by your side to help you analyze and retain information clearly. Courseware's guided notes serve as our version of study guides that support student engagement in courses by providing an interactive format to organize, understand, and apply lesson objectives. Since we introduced this feature, guided notes have become a fan favorite of educators and students alike. Let’s explore how students can use these guided notes to support their learning and studying habits in an engaging way.

Why Courseware Guided Notes Are Effective

Guided notes are interactive PDFs available in essential Courseware courses that students can complete to actively engage with their tutorial. The notes are designed to serve as instructional scaffolding and to challenge students to slow down; intentionally interact with the material that they’re learning; and break down information into smaller, consumable pieces for improved retention and reduced cognitive load.

Accessing Guided Notes

At this time, guided notes are available in select Courseware core content courses. Here are some of the courses in which we currently offer guided notes:

• All of our accelerate mini courses in high school math and English language arts (ELA)
• National and state-specific math and ELA courses
• National science and social studies courses
• Health and Physical Education courses

Students can access guided notes within tutorials by navigating to the student toolbar and clicking on the Resources button. Teachers can access guided notes by previewing a tutorial or from the Learn & Support page available through the Help Center. Guided notes answer keys are available for select courses, and educators can find them in the Help Center.

Watch this video to learn how to access guided notes and to view additional helpful features available from the student toolbar: 

Guided Notes in Action

The most common way that students use guided notes is to have their tutorial opened in one window and their guided notes opened in another to answer fill-in-the-blank fields as they make progress. We’ve received feedback that many students love that they can type into and save their guided notes directly from their computer. Other students have found that they prefer printing out the notes and writing on them as they work through their tutorial. Both methods allow students to keep their guided notes handy when it comes time to studying for their mastery tests.

In fact, we’ve had instructors share with us that they ask their students to keep a folder (physical or virtual) where they can save all their guided notes in one place for future reference. And if a student is stumped on a question on their guided notes, instructors can refer to their answer keys (when available) or preview tutorials and their accompanying guided notes to help. This is also a good check-in opportunity to gauge if the student needs additional support.

Read how a district leveraged Courseware’s guided notes as one of their keys to success during a summer school program!

Visit the Courseware Getting Started Resources page to learn more about the Courseware student experience, additional student tools, and access to step-by-step onboarding and implementation resources!

For more information on Courseware’s research-based learning design principles and to see how they’re applied within courses, check out Courseware’s 6 Foundational Learning Design Principles.