I'm currently working on the Udacity "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree. In the past when doing a MOOC I would try to take notes using a text editor; this

I'm currently working on the Udacity "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree. In the past when doing a MOOC I would try to take notes using a text editor; this worked ok, but this time around I decided to see if I took notes "the old fashion way" (ie - by hand) if it would help with my retention of knowledge. For taking notes, I'm using 8.5 x 11 4-square/inch quad-rule spiral-bound notebooks of 100 pages; I figured that for the class, this would be useful, as there was certainly going to be graphs, charts, etc that might need to be reproduced in some manner; the quad-rule would help on this. When I started, I just took notes in my usual style - re-writing what was said by instructors in the videos, taking other notes from what I read on other pages (non-video). Very linear, paragraphical and full sentences. A lot of writing, in fact. Charts and other stuff were interspersed throughout. My wife noticed this and said I had a strange was of taking notes, and told me I should try something she had done before - splitting the page. She described the process, where one side (left) becomes "headlines" or "topics", and the other side (right) becomes "details" - where you right down terse small in-your-own words details about the topic to the left. She couldn't remember everything, though, so I did some research. I found that the method is called the "Cornell System" - and there are a ton of variants, but all share a common thread similar to the above. In the true system, you also have a header (for title and other info) and a "footer" (for a summary description). Ultimately I found that this style is working well for the lessons. While in many cases I can't make things super-terse (try to make a description of back-prop and partial derivatives terse while capturing everything needed to remember the equations - unless you're a whiz at calc - which I am not - it probably isn't possible - but if anyone has any suggestions, let me know!) - but in others I can. I've found that using this, as well as taking page-captures of the lessons (and organizing all of my data for the class on my computer), things have worked out well so far. I would suggest looking into this method - I don't know if it would translate well outside of handwritten notes (maybe using a spreadsheet? Maybe there's a note-taking app that uses the method?) - but I think knowing about it might inspire you to create something that works as well.