New LMS Student Note-Taking Demo: Notes by LifterLMS

Allow students to capture key insights, ideas, and references through note-taking directly within your LMS to increase retention and engagement.

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How LifterLMS Notes Adds Student Note-Taking to Any WordPress LMS

LifterLMS Notes is an add-on that gives every enrolled student a private digital notebook inside your WordPress learning management system. Students open a floating “Take notes” button on any course page, write and format their notes in a pop-up editor, and find everything again from a single Notebooks tab on their dashboard. This demo walks through the student experience, the admin setting for the button, and the Q&A that came up on the live call.

What You’ll Learn

• Why note-taking inside your LMS increases engagement and platform stickiness
• How students open, write in, format, and save notes on any course page
• How to organize and delete notebooks from the student dashboard
• Where to move the “Take notes” button using the Notes integration settings
• How LifterLMS Notes compares to Quizzes, Assignments, and Private Areas

Key Takeaways

• Install the LifterLMS Notes add-on to give every student a private per-course notebook
• Choose a button position under LifterLMS Settings, Integrations, Notes, so the note button never collides with your theme
• Point students at the Notebooks tab on their dashboard so they know where everything they wrote lives
• If a workflow needs graded output, reach for Assignments or Quizzes and leave Notes as the personal notebook
• Grab Notes as an individual add-on or as part of the Infinity Bundle if you also want quizzing, groups, PDFs, and the rest of the advanced tools

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Add Note-Taking to Your Online Course Site

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this complimentary training. You have got Chris, Will, and Kurt from LifterLMS. In this training we are going to be doing a demo of the student note-taking plugin that LifterLMS has recently released called Notes. Basically what it is, think of it as a digital notebook. You can allow your students to take notes, capture key ideas and references through note-taking, and it helps improve their engagement and increases learning by getting them involved in capturing ideas.

Why do you need a note-taking plugin? Increasing student engagement is super important. It is not just about putting videos on the internet, having people play the video, click the mark complete button. That is fine, and there are great courses that are just like that. But ideally you want your students to engage with the learning process. You want them to not just consume content through their ears and their eyeballs, but to capture key ideas and take notes. Of course they can do that on a paper notebook or on a Google Doc, but having a note-taking solution directly baked into the learning management system just makes it easier and keeps things organized so they have a digital notebook for each course. All of that is organized on the dashboard.

How Different People Take Notes

Chris Badgett: I am a real messy note-taker. I have a graph paper pad here and I just work off one sheet. I tear it off every day and my notes are a little all over the place. Kurt, what do you use?

Kurt: I use the reMarkable 2 tablet. That way everything is searchable and it is all in one thing.

Chris Badgett: Will, are you a note-taker?

Will: I used to take notes on paper. I used to take them digitally. Now I have 660 notes in my Apple Notes and it is just all over the place. I am never going to go back to them. So I like things like LifterLMS Notes where I can keep my notes locally on somebody’s website instead of in my garbage pail of my own organization.

Chris Badgett: There was a time when we as a company did a training with a software education coaching program. We would get these paper notebooks in the mail for some of the virtual conferences and things that were part of that. I liked it, but my notes ended up all over the place and I really just wish I could capture it all on one computer screen while I am there. That is what LifterLMS Notes is.

The Business Case for a Student Notebook

Chris Badgett: Another benefit for you, the platform creator, is that having a student notebook solution makes your platform more sticky. Sticky means, especially if you are charging recurring revenue, that your users are going to stick around and stay with you, because they have got that valuable asset, their notes, as part of your LMS platform.

What Is LifterLMS Notes

Chris Badgett: So what is LifterLMS Notes? This is the LifterLMS Notes add-on. It is an advanced feature, which means you can get it as an individual add-on, or you can get it as part of the Infinity Bundle, which has all the advanced category of add-ons.

You can capture learner insights. There is a note-taking interface. There is the organization of it on the student dashboard. We also have some options for you on where you want the button that pops the notes for each course to display. We have documentation for that as well. It goes into really intricate detail of how you can set up Notes, how it works, and all of that. Go get the LifterLMS Notes add-on, or get it as part of the Infinity Bundle over at lifterlms.com/pricing.

A Brief History of Note-Taking

Chris Badgett: Just for a fun history lesson, I want to talk about the history of notes. One of the things that makes us unique as humans is communication. Words, when we found language, and then we started capturing language. Note-taking is a fundamental part of human history. It started with the Sumerians and Egyptians who started taking notes in the form of hieroglyphics that we find in the Egyptian pyramids and all that stuff. Early Greek scholars, note-taking became a thing where they started recording notes on wax paper. It just keeps evolving through history, and you will find that today you out there watching this or listening to this can take notes on your WordPress LMS website with LifterLMS, with a lot more technology and ease than carving out hieroglyphics on a tablet or in stone.

Before I do the demo, Notes is a digital notebook. There is one for each course. You can pop it from a button. If you are on a course, there is a notebook associated with that. You can manage them from your student dashboard. You can delete them. You can find them. You can access them. You can control some settings around where the notebook displays.

Can Instructors Read Their Students’ Notes

Chris Badgett: One common question we get is, can I read my students’ notes? You could, if you got creative. The pro tip is you could use the switch user plugin, switch to their user, and see their notes. But the way Notes is designed is really meant to be the students’ notebook. It is their notes. If you want to review stuff they make, then you could use LifterLMS Assignments or the Quiz upload question type for that. We even have another tool called Private Areas where you can have a conversation around some content, and talk to each other. So there are lots of avenues for communication.

The philosophy behind LifterLMS Notes is that it is really for the student. It is their personal notebook. It was not designed for the traditional school scenario where the teacher reaches into your backpack, takes your notebook, and checks it out. They give you homework or assignments or quizzes if they need to interact directly with you.

How Students Take Notes During a Lesson

Chris Badgett: So let us drop into the demo. On my demo site here, I have got a note popped up here. Students can actually move this thing around. It is opened by this “Take notes” button up here. In this website design we will move this button around and show you how to do that.

Imagine if I am on this course and I am watching a video and I hear something really interesting. I can pause the video, pop my notebook, and put my thing that I learned or a note to myself to deal with later. It is just going to continue to build on itself. You can edit anything you wrote in the past. You want to be sure to save your changes.

If we start in a new course that I am not enrolled in, say I am in the LifterLMS quick start course, and if you have not taken that yet you should check it out. Let us say you were watching this video “Why LifterLMS is Awesome.” You can take your notes. I have already got some notes on this one. You can grab links you want to go back and visit, or sign up for the LifterLMS free plan, or whatever. You can take whatever notes you want.

What You Can Format Inside a Note

Chris Badgett: There is some basic formatting on the notebook. You can do things like headings, ordered lists, bullet points, and text alignment such as centering. So there is some formatting you can do there as well. The editor also supports bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and blockquote.

Finding and Managing Notes on the Student Dashboard

Chris Badgett: The cool thing is if we go to our dashboard, you can see where our notes are over here. There is an option for the Notebooks tab, and you can see all my notebooks here. I can go grab whatever I want to find. Let us say you are in twenty different courses and you are just like, oh, I just wanted to find that one note I took in this course. You could find it really easily. If you made a mistake or just do not want a notebook anymore, you can delete it and it is gone. There is some multi-select here. If you are in a really large LMS, there are LMSs out there with thousands of courses. You could search for certain courses and surface the note that you want.

Where to Place the Take Notes Button on Your Course Pages

Chris Badgett: In the beginning we were looking at how, when we are on a course, we have got the “Take notes” button up in the top right. In this particular design there is a little bit of overlap with the menu. Depending on how big the screen is, you could change that. It kind of depends on your layout. Let us say we want to move this button to the bottom where it was more out of the way, which is actually my preferred position to put it if I do not have a chat widget down there. I like to put it at the bottom.

That involves going into the back end of WordPress. Go to LifterLMS Settings, then Integrations, then Notes. You will see the “Note Button Position” setting, and it has four options: Floating bottom, Floating top, Floating top and bottom, and None if you want to place the button yourself with the shortcode. I will stick it on the bottom and save my changes. Now when I go to the front end of the website and jump back into my courses, you will see it is now down at the bottom. If something is in the way or it is covering something up, I can move it around and close it as needed.

That is a quick demo of LifterLMS Notes. It is pretty straightforward in terms of what it does, but it adds a powerful tool for your students to get better results and to capture what they are learning from you. I recommend you get it as a single add-on or get it as part of the Infinity Bundle. If you are already an Infinity Bundle customer, just go to your account at lifterlms.com and you will find it sitting there waiting for you in your dashboard.

Does LifterLMS Notes Work With Any WordPress Theme

Kurt: First question. Do I need to use any specific WordPress theme for this plugin, or does it work with any theme? Specifically about BuddyBoss.

Chris Badgett: Yes, it will work with any theme. You just need to have the LifterLMS plugin installed and the LifterLMS Notes add-on installed and you are good to go. The demonstration I was doing was using our theme called SkyPilot, but we have tested Notes across Astra, Cadence, Divi, BuddyBoss, and many other themes. It will work great with any theme.

Notes vs Quizzes vs Assignments in LifterLMS

Kurt: What is the difference between Notes, Quizzes, and Assignments?

Chris Badgett: This is one of those language and terms kind of questions. A Quiz in LifterLMS has something like eleven different question types. You get more if you are using our Advanced Quizzes add-on. One of those quiz question types is a short answer, a long answer, and an upload where somebody could upload a note like a Microsoft Word document or a PDF. Assignments are similar to Quizzes. They can also be graded and there is an upload option there. You could request people to upload their notes.

But LifterLMS Notes, the add-on we have just presented today, is more like a personal digital version of a personal notebook, just on your LMS website, so that students can take notes as they go through your learning. If you want to collect a graded assignment or a quiz-type notes thing, a student could always copy out all or parts of what is in their student notebook, paste it on a Google Doc, turn it into a PDF, and upload it as an assignment. You can use these things together. Just think of Notes as a digital notebook.

Will: When I use Notes, especially when you go into the dashboard and you see all your different notes, to me it looks like Microsoft Notes or Evernote. You go in there and everything is already segmented for you, so you just go to what it is you are trying to focus on and there it is.

Chris Badgett: The organization piece is key. Especially with LMSs that have multiple courses, it is an easy way to keep track of all your stuff.

How to Print Your Notes From the Student Dashboard

Kurt: How do I print my notes?

Chris Badgett: We may add a feature in the future to LifterLMS PDFs, another add-on included in the Infinity Bundle, to easily generate a PDF from your notebook that you could then print. But for right now there are lots of ways to print your notes. You can copy the notebook, paste it into a Word document or a Google Doc, and click print. What is cool about that too is if you do not necessarily want to bring all your notes over, or just parts and pieces, you can copy out the parts you want and print that.

Another thing came up on one of our calls. I have got my notes up here in the upper right on the dashboard. If I click on the Notebooks tab and I do Command+A, I select all of my notes. If I right-click and print, my print dialog comes up with my notes on the page. I can just save it as a PDF. That is a cool solution as well.

We are bridging worlds here. A notebook used to be a little spiral thing or loose-leaf paper with the clippers binder thing. Many of us, even though we live digitally, sometimes we still like to print stuff and go into the physical world. There are many ways to do that.

Best LifterLMS Plan for the Notes Add-On

Kurt: What is the best LifterLMS plan to get Notes with?

Chris Badgett: If you are just using the free plugin, you do not charge for your courses, you are not doing anything advanced, and you just want the student notebook, get the individual add-on. There is a bar in the footer of our site to get the first year at fifty percent off, so that is the most economical way to get into it. But if you have a real serious LMS and you are doing a lot of things, you are probably going to want to get the Infinity Bundle, which has Notes and everything we make in it. If you want advanced quizzing, we got you in the Infinity Bundle. Assignments, group enrollment in courses, PDF certificates, all our e-commerce and integrations with email marketing. All included in the Infinity Bundle.

That is probably the way to go if you are at the point where you are literally building an online school. You are probably going to want some of those advanced features. This core free LifterLMS plugin is really powerful, so that is great for a lot of people, but for more advanced stuff, more engagement, more options come with the Infinity Bundle.

Coaching Workflows That Pair Notes With Private Areas

Chris Badgett: The other thing I should mention that has not come up yet is Private Areas. If you are doing coaching and you record a private one-on-one coaching session with your client, and you also have courses on your site, Private Areas is there. You could put the replay video of the coaching session in a private area. It is sort of like a private blog between instructor and student, and there can be private comments below that. That is another thing that is in the Infinity Bundle. If you are doing coaching, people are probably listening pretty carefully and really into your content, and they are going to want to take notes. Just another reason to get the Infinity Bundle.

Is There a Limit on Notes or Notebooks

Kurt: Is there a limit to how big or how many notebooks a student has?

Chris Badgett: The only limit is that we designed it to keep it simple, in the sense that each course has its own notebook. That is actually really good for helping keep that organization and finding what you are looking for later. Oh, I was in that course, where are my notes for that? You can just remember the course name and go find it. There is no limit. You could have a thousand courses and a thousand notebooks. You could have one course on your website and have a thousand scrolls of a screen of notes. It is essentially text content, which does not require a lot of resources to store. Notes are unlimited in that way.

Can Notes Include Photos, Videos, or Checkboxes

Kurt: Can Notes include photos, videos, PDFs, or checkboxes?

Chris Badgett: The Notes editor is a simple editor for people to take notes. It is not multimedia. It is pretty much like a notebook, but you cannot draw in it, you cannot add videos to it, and you cannot add images to it. Those are interesting ideas we could consider for the future.

Kurt: Also, can students share their notebooks?

Chris Badgett: As of the way it was designed, the notebook is a private interface for the student personally. That is certainly a feature request that is an interesting idea for the team.

Sharing Notes With the Social Learning Add-On

Chris Badgett: There is actually a solution for that if you get creative. LifterLMS has the Social Learning add-on, also in the Infinity Bundle. A student could copy all or some of their notes, post it to their social media or to their LifterLMS Social Learning timeline, and share notes and start conversations around them. It is kind of like just moving between the tools depending upon what you are trying to do. Notes is one vehicle to capture content, but there are a lot of different areas, whether it is between the instructor and the student with Private Areas, or Assignments and remarks. There are all kinds of options.

What is nice about that solution is Social Learning is also segmented by course, so there is an alignment to how people would be able to find and do things.

Why Note-Taking Matters for Learner Autonomy and Course Results

Will: One of the things I love about the LifterLMS suite of add-ons is that there are multiple note-taking products out there. There is Snap Orbital Notes. Now we have got LifterLMS Notes that comes in your Infinity Bundle. There are probably other ways to solve notes in WordPress. But I think the way LifterLMS approaches it, the whole suite of add-ons is about, what does this add to the learning experience? Course notes adds a lot of autonomy. The users are able to interact with their website and make it their own to some degree, even though they are not changing the content of the website for other people. They are taking their own notes within your platform, and it makes your platform more sticky like Chris was talking about earlier. It also creates a more autonomous learning experience. Looking at it from that perspective, what situations do we need to add autonomy to a WordPress website, when we need to engage our students more, this is a perfect solution for that.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for that, Will. One of our company values is Learner Results First. When we design software we are not just thinking about you, who is setting up the website for yourself or for a client. We are thinking about the end user. What does the learner want? Some of them just wanted a simple way to take notes on the website and keep track of them, keep them organized. That is what it is.

Go get Notes at lifterlms.com/product/lifterlms-notes, or get the Infinity Bundle and get everything we make for your LMS website. That is it for this complimentary training. Kurt and Will, thanks for helping put this on. I wish you out there all the best in building the most engaging learning management system website that you own and control with LifterLMS.