This is a short video resource on when note-taking actually helps, and when it doesn’t, aimed at undergraduates but adaptable to any study-skills teaching.
About the resource
This is a narrated video (with slides) that walks through the moments in academic life where note-taking adds value: lectures and seminars, reading and research, and assignment work. It also covers the reverse case, what not to bother noting, since students often over-copy slides or transcribe word for word instead of being selective.
The resource was produced for Durham University’s Academic Skills Centre, in collaboration with Durham students, as part of general study-skills provision rather than any specific module.
The video uses third-party illustrations (unDraw) and icons (Phosphor Icons) under their own licences, and background music from Pixabay under the Pixabay Content Licence, not the CC BY 4.0 licence applied to the rest of the resource. If you strip the audio out or reuse it separately, you’d need to source it from Pixabay directly.
How you could use it
The video is short enough to embed in an induction week or study-skills module, or to link from a VLE page on academic writing. It would also work broken into individual slides for in-session discussion (e.g. showing the “when not to take notes” slide as a prompt before a seminar) or repurposed as a script for a different institution’s own recording.
Licence and attribution
© Abby Catterson, Durham University, CC BY 4.0, 2026.
Note: the third-party assets above (unDraw, Phosphor Icons, Pixabay audio) sit outside this licence and carry their own terms.
Download or access the resource
Watch/download the video (to download the video, click the three dots at the top right of the page and select Download Podcast)