As you work through an edX course, you may want to highlight a particular passage or make a note about what you have read. In some edX courses, you can highlight passages and make notes right in the courseware.
Note
You can create notes for most text in the courseware. However, notes are currently not available for exercises, videos, or PDF textbooks.
For more information about working with notes, see the following sections.
Section Contents
Note
You can use either the mouse or keyboard shortcuts to create, access, and delete notes. For more information about using keyboard shortcuts, see Keyboard Shortcuts for Notes.
When a course includes the notes feature, every page has a Notes page at the top and a pencil icon in the lower right corner.
Your notes can contain text as well as tags that help you organize and find your notes. You can see individual notes inside the course content, or you can see all of your notes at once on the Notes page. For more information, see The Notes Page.
To highlight a passage or add a note that includes text and tags, follow these steps.
Select the text that you want to highlight or make the note about. You can select as much text as you want.
When a pencil “edit” icon appears above the selected text, select the icon to open the note editor.
When the note editor opens, enter your note and any tags that you want to add. You can also save the highlight for the passage without entering a note or tag.
To highlight a passage without adding a note or tag, select Save or press Enter. When you move your cursor over the highlighted text, the note field contains the words “no comment”.
To enter a note, select Comments, and then type the text of your note. Your note can contain as many words as you want.
To add one or more tags, select Add some tags here, and then type any tags that you want to add.
Tags cannot contain spaces. If you want to add a tag that has more than one word, type multiple words as one word with no spaces, or use hyphens (-) or underscores (_) to separate words in the tag.
You can view your course notes in two places.
On the Notes page, you can see all the notes you have made in your course in one place. You can also search the text of your notes.
The Notes page shows you both the text that you selected and the note that you made. You can also see the following information next to each note.
The Notes page has three different views: Recent Activity, Location in Course, and Tags.
When you select Recent Activity, notes are sorted by the date you created or edited them, with the most recently modified first.
When you select Location in Course, notes are sorted sequentially by the location of the note in the courseware.
When you select Tags, notes are sorted by the tags you have added.
To edit a note, follow these steps.
In the courseware, move your cursor over the highlighted text until your note appears.
When the note appears, select the pencil icon in the upper right corner to open the note editor.
In the note editor, edit your note, and then select Save.
To delete a note or highlight, follow these steps.
By default, you can see all of your notes. You can hide your notes, and show them again, by selecting the pencil icon in the lower right corner. When the pencil icon has a dark gray background, notes are visible. When the pencil icon has a light gray background, notes are hidden.
Note
If you hide notes, you cannot make new notes. To make new notes, select the pencil icon to show notes.
To search your notes, follow these steps.
You can use keyboard shortcuts to create, edit, and delete your notes.
Note
These keyboard shortcuts are for both PCs and Macintosh computers. However, you can only use these keyboard shortcuts on browsers that support caret browsing.
- Internet Explorer and Firefox support caret browsing by default. To enable caret browsing in Firefox, press F7.
- Safari supports caret browsing when VoiceOver is turned on. For more information about VoiceOver, see the Apple website.
- Chrome does not support caret browsing.
Before you use the following keyboard shortcuts, you must make sure that notes
are visible. To show or hide notes, press Ctrl + Shift + left bracket
([
).
To create a note using keyboard shortcuts, follow these steps.
]
) to open the note editor. The
note editor opens with the cursor in the text field.To close the note editor without creating a note, press Tab to move to the Cancel button, and then press Enter. You can also press Esc to close the note editor.
To edit or delete a note, follow these steps.
To close the note editor without making any changes, press Esc.