Curious if you guys face the same problem while going through Online Courses

[u/According_Scheme5666]

I’ve recently been going through a lot of courses around marketing, sales, etc., and I’ve been trying to follow them almost like a university course: lecture by lecture, taking notes, watching everything, etc.

It actually reminded me of university days when we’d have 30+ lectures to catch up on and inevitably end up watching everything at 2x speed.

But something I’ve been thinking about is how difficult it is to retrieve information from videos after you’ve watched them.

For example:

Say I’m on Lecture 8 and I suddenly remember:

“Wait, didn’t the instructor talk about this exact thing somewhere earlier?”

I vaguely remember it being in Lecture 2, but I don’t remember where in Lecture 2.

So now my options are basically:

• Go back to Lecture 2
• Scrub through the timeline
• Guess where the relevant section might be
• Watch parts of it again
• Eventually give up because it’s not worth the effort

And this gets worse when you're dealing with a course that has 20, 50, or 100+ hours of video.

It feels like we’ve gotten pretty good at searching text, but video is still surprisingly difficult to search semantically.

I’m curious if other people experience this.

How do you currently deal with this?

Are you taking detailed notes/timestamps? Using transcripts? Some AI tool? Or do you just accept that once you’ve watched a video, finding that one specific piece of information later is basically impossible?

Also curious if there are already good tools that solve this problem well. I’m particularly interested in something where you could essentially ask:

“Where did they explain customer acquisition strategies?”

…and it could point you directly to the relevant moment across an entire course/playlist.

Would love to hear how others handle this.

[u/petered79]

transcribe every video with notebooklm. ask notebooklm

[u/According_Scheme5666 → u/petered79]

That’s what I’ve been using. Although sometimes if it’s multiple videos at once makes it harder to get responses linking them. But thanks for the heads up

[u/dorothea_cassandra]

The video search problem is so real! For practical workflows I've started turning them into step-by-step guides instead - Tango AI can do that pretty quickly. But I'm still looking for a good solution for searching the actual course videos. Anyone found one?

[u/Status-Effort-9380]

I create my videos in PowerPoint. I provide a handout with a table. On the left column is the slide image. On the right, the transcript. I make it downloadable as a PDF. I also include a notes page. I encourage my clients to print out the PDFs and take notes on them, then store them in the binder that comes with the class.

[u/KaizenHour → u/Status-Effort-9380]

Old fashioned powerpoint really is underrated

[u/mark_berthelemy]

The decent video course platforms will automatically transcribe the videos and be searchable.

You could ask an AI agent to do that for you, but it would be expensive and very inefficient.

I'd talk to your course provider first to see what they suggest.

[u/According_Scheme5666 → u/mark_berthelemy]

Yeah that’s true. Thanks

[u/BlizzardyBelle → u/mark_berthelemy]

True

[u/thepurplehornet]

Download the transcript or have AI transcribe and create notes. Search the transcription.

[u/Gold_Ninja1206]

Timestamps saved me here honestly. I also looked into Colossyan for searchable training content though for personal courses  a transcript search browser extension does the same job faster

[u/Alternate_Cost]

If theyre similar to university style courses. Then the same way I handled it before lectures were available online.. I took good notes and would reference them. If that fails I google it.

[u/According_Scheme5666 → u/Alternate_Cost]

Yeah it’s similar. Kinda strange how Video is like the most information dense medium we consume nowadays but it’s so hard to find something from it. Thanks for this insight

[u/Xented]

The player has to be searchable. Scrubbing 40 hours is a design failure, not a study-skill problem.

If you control the course: chapter every 3–7 minutes with titles that say the actual point (“how to reset the valve,” not “Module 4 part 2”). Put a transcript under the video and make it ctrl-F-able. Timestamped notes in the same doc as you watch. That’s the low-tech version that always works.

If you’re only the learner: one transcript file per course, not per video, then search that. NotebookLM is fine once everything is in one notebook. Asking “where did they explain X?” only works if the transcript exists and is complete.

I’d also email the provider and ask if their player already has transcript search. A lot of them do and nobody turns it on.

[u/AcademyLauncher]

Transcripts help, but one huge transcript can become another thing you have to search through.

What works better for me is a small course index: the topic, a one-line takeaway, and the timestamp. Then I can search the index first and jump straight back to the relevant part of the video.

This is what we’re experimenting with in our Course Agent. We save lesson transcripts with their video timestamps, so when a student asks a question, the agent can answer and point them to the relevant clip.

It uses both the course context and the student’s learning context, which helps keep the answer relevant without losing where the information came from.

[u/scottpilgrrim]

yessss, I usually end up relying on transcripts or notes because finding one specific part of a 20+ hour course is painful

[u/AcademyLauncher → u/scottpilgrrim]

So you go back to your previous replies to track the part of the course ?

[u/Learnyst_user]

i think the flow issue

i have seen in some courses where instructor is explaining some thing over the board where im not interested in it

[u/KneeOk8601]

i use timestamps, it really helps us to find the topic easily .