What Are the Best Online Studying Features Available on Windows

The rise of remote learning was largely due to the pandemic and lockdown restrictions. Though many countries are now moving away from these restrictions, the popularity of online education continues to remain at all-time highs.

This isn’t due to those who are studying for their bachelor’s, but instead due to professionals who are interested in diversifying or furthering their credentials. With the ability to work and study many professionals today are turning back toward education in order to reach their career goals.

Master’s and doctorate programs alike are now very popular for this very reason. Not only do online degrees offer a variety of innovative learning tools from podcasts and vodcasts to live-streaming and online, interactive elements, but there are also increased social elements and many third-party tools that can make it easier and more effective to study online than ever before.

Windows can be a great tool to get you started with your online degree, especially if you are a professional looking to advance your career or business skills with an online master’s, or even an online DBA.

There are so many possibilities for your career when you have the opportunity to further your credentials or expand them. You do not need to take time out of your career as online, part-time degrees are specifically designed to work around your schedule. Earn a doctorate in business and become an expert researcher who can help drive your industry forward. Expand your skillset with a second master’s degree. With online education, the power is in your hands, but one of the biggest hiccups that many don’t consider is their setup.

There are many excellent programs and tools that you can use to improve your online education experience. This guide will help you understand what top study tools there are available and which ones are best for you and your specific degree.

Best Online Studying Features Available on Windows

Best online study tools and programs for Windows

Creating an in-depth learning management system (LMS) today means using a combination of the academic tools offered through your institution as well as personal programs that improves your learning and education experience. A few of the top programs and tools to consider adding to your LMS include:

1. Cloud-based note-taking app

You will want a robust note-taking app that can sync across devices instantly through the cloud. One of the best examples available today is OneNote. OneNote is one of Microsoft’s essential tools that can make it a cinch to make multi-media notes online and keep them synced up wherever you go. OneNote is available on both Windows and Mac OS as well, with app versions available for mobile phones. With cloud-synching, you can easily add to your notes wherever you are.

OneNote has even upgraded recently to better suit the needs of online classrooms. The free add-in OneNote Class Notebook makes it easy to create collaborative notes between users. Doctorate students for example could easily receive notes and edits from their supervisor or supervisors with minimal interruption.

2. Study Planner App

It can be difficult to manage a full career and online degree, especially if you need to keep track of assignments and deadlines (both officially set and personally set). A great study planner app can help you visualize your schedule, assignments, and deadlines, and keep track of your progress visually.

As a working professional, you can also use it to simultaneously track professional assignments and tasks so that you can easily coordinate your schedule and manage your time in one place. While there are plenty of options available, a popular choice for Windows PCs is iStudiez. It comes with a free trial but is subscription-based.

3. Make PDFs readable

While most if not all PDFs created today are enriched and can easily be highlighted, annotated, and even read aloud, this is not true for older PDFs and especially not true for older scanned documents. The good news is that there are solutions when a PDF isn’t immediately readable.

Applications that read PDFs now go above and beyond that one basic function. A PC program called LiquidText not only makes PDFs readable, but it also offers you an active reading and learning experience. It will work to create automated excerpts of the paragraph or highlighted text and allows you to easily keep and move excerpts as you read through several documents. This way you can easily compare information, save it, and build robust notes.

4. Reference Manager

Every academic should have a reference manager at their disposal. This is particularly true for doctorate students who are working on a research project. A simple program like Zotero will make it easier to save, organize, and even cite references in the format your school has chosen. Never miss or forget a reference again. Never hunt down the source of a statistic or claim that isn’t from your own research. Like OneNote, it is entirely free to use.

5. Focus Applications

While breaks are essential to stay on track and maintain high levels of productivity small distractions don’t help and they can sabotage your efforts to stay on track with your study and even professional goals. This is particularly true if you find it difficult to continue to study after a long day of work.

There are several options available and all of them essentially allows you to choose which websites you want to temporarily blacklist. Create a list of the sites you spend most time scrolling through or find yourself visiting when you should be focusing on your work and add them to the blacklist. When it is time to study select the time you want to be productive and activate the program. You won’t be able to access these sites until your study session is over.

It can be very difficult to organize yourself when committing to a degree on top of your already busy career. These apps and tools will help you manage your time and improve your ability to learn at an accelerated pace.