6 reasons why PDFs are not perfect for learning

They are opti­mized for read­ing long pages of text with­out hav­ing to scroll up or down, so they’re great when you have a big mon­i­tor in front of you.

How­ev­er, when you try to learn with PDFs, you’ll find that they have sev­er­al dis­ad­van­tages.

Where PDFs fail

1. First of all they are not respon­sive. This means that they are not designed for small devices such as smart­phones and tablets.
2. You can­not add your own con­tent, mean­ing that you can’t cre­ate your own study mate­ri­als by com­bin­ing dif­fer­ent sources. Well, you can but you need a Pro ver­sion of any PDF soft­ware.
3. There is no inter­ac­tion. You can­not take quizzes and you can­not par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions about the con­tent.
4. There is no mul­ti­me­dia. You can’t watch videos or lis­ten to audio files with­out open­ing them in anoth­er app.
5. There is no copy­right pro­tec­tion. Any­one can copy and paste your con­tent with­out giv­ing you cred­it. This can be a major issue for con­tent providers who want to pro­tect their work.
6. There is no track­ing of learn­ing progress, mean­ing you can’t see how much you have learned or how many times you have read a doc­u­ment.

Conclusion

PDFs have a few advan­tages but also a lot of dis­ad­van­tages when it comes to learn­ing. This is main­ly because they were not designed for that pur­pose. If you’re look­ing to learn some­thing, it’s best to find oth­er for­mats that are more inter­ac­tive and allow you to track your progress.

There are oth­er apps which are much bet­ter suit­ed for learn­ing than PDFs.

Get More Brain is a learn­ing app which allows you to add your own con­tent, includ­ing videos and audio files. It’s per­fect for cre­at­ing your own study mate­ri­als. Addi­tion­al­ly, it allows you to par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions about the con­tent with oth­er stu­dents. Get More Brain is great for inter­ac­tive learn­ing and allows you to track your progress as you go.

Get More Brain relies on Bit­mark, an open source markup lan­guage which makes it easy to cre­ate learn­ing con­tent in a struc­tured, sus­tain­able and inter­ac­tive way. Bit­mark was cre­at­ed to bring learn­ing con­tent to the smart­phone.

And yes, you could also cre­ate PDFs from Bit­mark if you still want­ed to.

This sto­ry was first pub­lished on LinkedIn (Jan­u­ary 27, 2022)