5 Ways eLearning Professionals Can Benefit from Bookmark Manager Tools

Elearning. A magical word in the current online-oriented world. Nonetheless, every reader is familiar with the systematic art of underlining, highlighting, and marking interesting parts of books for further reference. Otherwise known as bookmarking, this meticulous practice plays a vital role in both knowledge management and continual learning. But what happens when the book has no beginning or end?

Being an open book itself, the Internet allows us to jump from one interesting part to another using a massive network of hyperlinks. As convenient as that may be, this system of tags and meta tags has one major flaw. It doesn’t allow you to manage bookmarks in real-time. As every corporate trainer or online tutor would know, having the right learning resources at your fingertips is crucial regardless of whether you’re in the process of creating,
managing, or assessing an eLearning course. Luckily, a digital bookmark manager is here to give you a hand. Here’s why this simple aid is a must-have tool for online instructors:

1. Less Research = More Time for Students

There’s only one type of content that makes a difference: high-quality type. In eLearning especially, professionals need to provide nothing less than exceptional, highly engaging, mistake-free, and fact-dense content. At the same time, corporate trainers and online tutors must create online courses that are suitable for different types of learners. Everyone with some experience in teaching knows that this is hard work. And, the quality of learning content depends on the quality of research.

eLearning professionals spend a lot of time preparing their course materials, which necessarily includes in-depth research on the subject. When conducted online, thorough research poses several challenges, the most frustrating of them being bookmark management. Printing entire web pages is not very cost-effective while saving them to the computer simply isn’t systematic enough.

Writing links down on paper and copying them to excel tables doesn’t suffice either, not when you need a methodical approach that saves time and energy. Luckily, the alternative we have in mind is perfect for this.

Bookmark managers such as Start.me allow you to not only save research links but also to label and categorize them for easier navigation. By saving you time on research and course preparation, these helpful tools enable you to become a come-at-able online instructor.

2. Evergreen and Up-to-Date Content On-the-Go

Most bookworms will remember the first time they realized that their Amazon Kindle app allows them to send PDF files directly from phone to Kindle. What a happy revelation, being able to carry your personal library, along with your tidy bookmarks, wherever you go. Bookmark managers offer that same superpower. A great bookmark manager will help you save and categorize everything you find on the web – blogs, articles, images, videos, and presentations – so that you can build portable knowledge bases and use them whenever you need.

And this goes beyond your profession. And since we’re talking about Kindle, let’s consider what this means for your PDF library. You’ll be able to access all the encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks that an online tutor might need even if you don’t own a Kindle, simply by managing bookmarks on your phone. That way, you’ll always be able to provide accurate information to your students.

3. Opportunities for Continual Learning

Now consider what this means in terms of continual learning. How many times have you been stuck in a traffic jam thinking about the book you’ve left at home?

It happens to the best of us – having a moment to spare, you end up playing Candy Crush on your phone because you can’t find that interesting article you saw on Facebook yesterday. Being a good online instructor doesn’t only mean being able to create online training on a generous deadline. It also means being able to answer your students’ questions in real-time.

And you won’t always be able to do that if you don’t keep investing in your own knowledge pool. Bookmark managers provide continual learning opportunities for both you and your students, simply by making great learning content and resources for further reading available anytime, anywhere, as well as across devices. This is what gives your online courses a competitive edge. What bookmark managers don’t give you is an excuse to procrastinate.

4. Prolific Collaboration and Peer-to-Peer Sharing

Whether you’re tutoring online students alone or are a part of an online faculty, you certainly realize that prolific peer-to-peer communication drives the digital academia forward. Teaching is a service, and a lot of it is competition, of course, but collaboration is still key to growth. Within every cohesive team of online instructors working together on the same eLearning project, there’s always a need to share expertise, skills, and student data.

This calls for an increase in knowledge management capabilities and knowledge exchange tools. No such toolkit is complete without a bookmark manager. Unlike complex project and task management systems used in other industries, bookmark managers allow you, as an online educator, to share meaningful resources with your colleagues and like-minded people. Better bookmark managers also enable commenting and discussions. In this way as well, bookmark managers save time and cultivate erudition.

5. Building the Environment for Knowledge Sharing

Bookmark managers fall under the category of knowledge management tools that are essential not only to eLearning professionals but also to professionals from all other sectors and industries. The main benefit of these tools is that they help build an environment for knowledge sharing. In today’s day and age, having a structured approach to organization-wide knowledge management is crucial for survival. Whether we’re talking about digital companies or online academies, it doesn’t really make any difference.

In this particular context, bookmark management has two major benefits:

1. It boosts continual learning and development by enabling individuals to hone their expertise in a highly personalized and methodic way.
2. It improves eLearning organizations by introducing a simpler approach to cataloging and boosting the overall quality of their online courses.

Over to You

If you’re interested in an easier, more organized, and more efficient approach to online tutoring, consider giving bookmark manager, like start.me a test run. To online educators who build courses, bookmark managers provide a simple yet smart technology that has the potential to improve the entire industry.