By hand or online: Should UW arts professors consider how students are taking notes in class?

With another study term starting in May, UW arts professors may want to consider whether students are actually engaging with course material based on their note-taking approach. The increased prevalence of technology in classrooms has made the rise of digital note-taking inevitable. From laptops and tablets to digital notebooks, students have moved away from handwritten note-taking and now rely on their devices for learning. However, is digital note-taking an effective method for learning and information recall, or should professors rethink how students learn in their classrooms?​

Hands-on learning as the key to building foundational skills

Associate professor Aimée Morrison from the English language and literature department urges students in her course ENGL494: By Hand: Embodied Humanities in the Age of AI to “make things by hand, engage with physical materials, and move in and through various spaces” to learn effectively. Currently researching critical and accessible pedagogy, Morrison aims to help her students thrive in post-secondary learning by exploring “different ways of teaching and different ways of structuring activities and assessments.”

In a time when everyday tasks are increasingly automated, it is critical that people continue to engage and learn by hand to exercise embodied knowledge and cognition. Morrison explores the idea of learning through the senses to translate knowledge into action. In an article published by Scientific American, they discuss the idea of materializing knowledge as a form of “reinforc[ing] the imagined concept” and committing it to memory. For students who take digital notes, there is often a disconnect between their learning and understanding, as they lack embodied knowledge.

While structuring her course to help her students regain an appreciation for hands-on learning, Morrison pushes them to adopt new skills and challenge their minds, both in terms of difficulty and ability. Specifically, she notes that seeking challenges or desirable difficulties is the key to skill and tolerance. Morrison lectures on the idea of the “flow channel,” an ideal state of progress in which people have sufficient skill to tackle challenging tasks. However, without basic material or measurable skills to tackle everyday challenges, this leads to an increase in anxiety and boredom, struggles that many post-secondary students are currently facing. As a study published in Psychological Science shows, “synthesizing and summarizing content rather than verbatim transcription can serve as a desirable difficulty toward improved educational outcomes” if only students were given the opportunity.

When asked about her motivation for the course, Morrison explained that she began noticing her students growing anxious and panicked when asked to complete tasks by hand, since they were accustomed to using “fingertips and eyeballs.” Morrison believes that living in a world where everything is digitized, with limited object permanence, is concerning, which is why she considered “rematerialization” in the classroom. While life is so fast-paced, Morrison chose to center a course on teaching students “to slow down to the scale that your own body can manage.” Morrison notes that “the computer encourages us to do 10 things at the same time, to find a shortcut or a workaround, to avoid frustration and to be efficient,” but our bodies are not meant to function as machines. Living and working in a society that supports and pushes the idea of working “more, better, and faster” is not how humans were ever meant to function, nor is it sustainable. Learning is meant to be frustrating, difficult and time-consuming, and Morrison encourages students to return to this mentality.

Professor Fraser Easton from the English and history departments has turned to more in-class handwriting-based assignments to “help ground the learning process in the direct experience of students” and encourages students to slow down and “not only listen but process and digest the content.” Author and journalist Oliver Burkeman argues, “there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.” So Morrison questions why we overwork and burn ourselves out to keep up with this unrealistic lifestyle society is so aggressively pushing, when there is very little that people are actually absorbing.

Strategic course selection for targeted skill building

In a statement made on Feb. 17 addressing public outcry over cuts to OSAP funding for post-secondary students, Doug Ford states that students must “invest in [their] future, into in-demand jobs.” He urges students to veer away from “basket weaving courses” and instead “go into jobs of the future, focus on STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics… [as] those are where the jobs are.”

Although many STEM courses teach students a variety of topics critical to related jobs, these courses alone often lack foundational and transferable lessons that are monumental to students’ adaptability. As Morrison shares, “[i]t’s not enough to be good at coding. You need to know how to think…There is no career that you can pick a degree in that’s going to guarantee you a good life. There just isn’t. The best you can do at university is to challenge yourself…[and] build a broad base of knowledge about the world and different ways of approaching it.” Students who learn in an embodied way and take courses that cultivate these foundational and transferable skills early on will be more adaptable and open to change.

While in recent years there has been a big push for post-secondary students to focus on STEM courses to ensure employability, in the winter 2026 term at UW, according to the UW co-op employment summary, the arts faculty had a higher co-op employment rate with 94.4 per cent than the science faculty with 92.4 per cent or the engineering faculty with 94.3 per cent.

As one fourth-year psych student shared, UW professors are stating that “AI will change the work force” by automating jobs, but that there will always be opportunities to “work on these systems.” However, rather than urging students to avoid any course outside STEM, they should be encouraged to take courses that build physical skills to withstand technological evolution. Learning embodied skills fosters adaptability and flexibility, making young adults more marketable and hireable.​

New does not mean better

While AI is increasingly used in post-secondary institutions, students are led to believe that their familiarity with AI is key to future job opportunities through provincial statements, such as Ford’s, and in the classroom. As stated by a fifth-year RMPC student enrolled in the co-op program, there is significant “encouragement to us AI at work to expedite work processes.” But the idea that the newest technology is the most advanced and effective means of completing work reduces one’s assets to their ability to use technology, disregarding their existing skills and their ability to learn.

While the assistance of technology can be an asset in the classroom, being intimidated by and submitting to AI as educators, driven by its popularity and worldwide implementation, disregards the success and effectiveness of other technologies and of education as a whole. Technology such as AI shouldn’t be worshipped as all-knowing, and neither should its use be frowned upon. Using it “requires you to have a certain fundamental level of knowledge and skill,” according to Morrison, to know what information is accurate and how it can be verified. Rather, responsibility for their education should be returned to students, guiding them to invest their time in learning and developing physical skills rather than in isolated tasks. As author Adam Gopnik states, every mastered skill is rooted in practice, so with dedication, drive and “effort,” any accomplishment is possible.

Why the push for handwritten notes?

While many students struggle with handwriting notes during lectures due to a lack of speed, difficulty deciphering fluff from important information, and not knowing how to effectively notetake, repetition is key to developing these skills. “Students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it — prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before” in order to effectively process the information they are being taught, according to a Scientific American article.​

In a time of so much dishonesty and deception, people often mistake a lack of knowledge for an inability to do something, and this is the exact struggle many post-secondary students face. If given the opportunity to practice manual note-taking, many students may surprise you, because “students choose the thing that is habitual, even if it’s not effective,” Morrison says. She also shares that she “likes to tell a lot of jokes and run around the room [during class], but [she] cannot compete with co-op matches that people are checking on their laptops… [because] people with computers are often multitasking.” Distractions are sometimes inevitable, but if students are given all the right tools to be distracted, can they really be blamed?

“The classroom is little stimulus compared to everything else in the world, and I want my students to succeed at paying attention and I don’t help them when I’m like, go on, use your computer,” Morrison continues. Using technology in class also creates a barrier between students and their classmates. Technology “prevents us from connecting with the people around us, and when we connect with the people around us, it can feel really authentic and powerful as a learning environment,” Morrison states. Although returning to handwriting notes can feel incredibly difficult at first because it’s more physically painful, time-consuming, and more difficult to do quickly, it’ll eventually get easier and easier until you cannot remember a time when you didn’t take handwritten notes.

But what about accessibility?

A common concern that arises when discussing written note-taking is the conversation of accessibility and exclusion. But rather than following traditional methods of teaching for students with different learning styles and abilities, why not “try to design a classroom environment where people who have learning differences can fit themselves in without having to ask for something different than what other people have,” Morrison proposes.

Associate professor Danielle Deveau from the English language and literature department highlights the superiority of handwritten notes, noting they promote learning in a more “profound way.” However, she also notes the lack of accessibility for students when enforcing a particular note-taking method. Similarly, Carla Fehr, an associate professor in philosophy, prefers that students write notes by hand, as it encourages active engagement and deeper learning, but still emphasizes that she will not enforce policies that could disadvantage students who depend on digital tools.​

As a neurodivergent person herself, Morrison shares the importance of creating an effective learning environment that works for and includes everyone. She shares that in her classes, everyone is divided into groups at the beginning of the term, and each group is assigned a note-taking week with the option to use technology. So, regardless of what notes people wrote in their notebooks, they can feel at ease knowing there will always be a comprehensive document with notes on every class, accessible to everyone.​

Morrison also shares that she prefers writing and drawing on a whiteboard during class rather than preparing generic slides, as it forces her to slow down and gives students as much time as they need to make notes. So rather than notetaking being a question of inclusion and accessibility, maybe it’s an opportunity to reflect on teaching approaches.

In speaking with numerous UW arts professors, many recognized the benefit of students taking handwritten notes but expressed hesitation about enforcing a specific note-taking approach due to accessibility concerns. They are instead assigning more in-class writing exercises and even providing students with notebooks for class notes to promote reflection and consideration of course materials. However, rather than focusing on how students take notes in class, perhaps faculty should consider critical and accessible pedagogy.