One of the most important uses for my Obsidian vault is to allow me to effectively learn content for my university course. I have lectures on a very regular basis and at the end of each semester I am expected to be able to answer a wide range of questions concerning all the content that I’ve been exposed to over the last few months. This is a walkthrough of how I use Obsidian and Anki to help me learn all this content. This is very helpful not just for university students, but for anyone who is expected to memorise and be able to recall information.
Spaced repetition and active recall
Active recall and spaced repetition refer to the idea that the best strategy for learning information is to actively answer questions on the topic, at intervals that are spaced out over a period of time. This has been scientifically proven as a very effective method of learning content. In the book Make it Stick, the authors give evidence to suggest that when retrieval practice is spaced out over longer periods of time, memory is stronger in the end (or at the exam) than when all the retrieval practice is massed together at one point in time. Anki is a very effective software for this, using an algorithm that chooses when to next present you with a certain flashcard dependent upon your feedback as to how well you remembered the content of the card.
Why use Obsidian?
Having used spaced repetition and active recall to revise content for A-levels, I had previous experience of how powerful this learning method could be, but I wondered if there was a way to improve it. I became aware of Obsidian plugins that could port specially-formatted lines of text in Obsidian notes to Anki as flashcards that you could revise in that software. Because of this, I’m now able to create lecture notes inside my vault that are a mixture of notes, symbols, files and flashcards, creating a more complete and effective learning resource for my content.
It’s like bringing the power of Obsidian to the content that you would just be feeding into Anki otherwise. Because of this combination, I can now have the learning power of flashcards in Anki and the knowledge management power of Obsidian, allowing the referencing of PDFs, linking to related files and embedding of metadata within lecture files, including tags, which I could query with the Dataview plugin if I wanted to.
How to set this up
Everything that makes up this system is free, so anyone that has a functioning laptop should be able to follow along and get to learning the content that they need to learn. The notes app is Obsidian, which allows you to record information during whatever sessions you might be doing that expose you to the content you have to learn. The spaced repetition app is Anki, which is the gold standard in software in this space. Popular amongst medical students, this app allows you to customise the intervals at which you review different difficulties of cards, as well as how many new cards you review per day.
Both pieces of software are powerful in their own right, but better once their functionalities are extended with plugins, allowing them to be set up for your specific use case. This system makes use of one plugin for Anki and one plugin for Obsidian. For Anki, AnkiConnect allows other apps to communicate with Anki over an API. This is how the Obsidian plugin Flashcards sends information to the program from inside your lecture notes. It captures lines in your notes that you format to be flashcards. This formatting is customisable, but the one I use as follows:
Here is the question prompt, or the front of the card #card
Here is the response to the prompt, or the back of the flashcard
This method I chose because it took the least additional typing, but you can use formatting such as ‘Q:’ and ‘A:’ for question and answer respectively, as well as using :: to separate inline cards. You can specify the Anki deck that is the target of the export by adding it to the cards-deck property in the note YAML. Once all the cards in that note are made, you run a command from the command palette and they are sent to Anki so you can revise them there. The Flashcards plugin itself has details on the technical side of the setup, including AnkiConnect, so I won’t explain it in depth here.
Extending the system
Now that you create flashcards in Obsidian there is potential to enrich your learning with all of the power that this tool can offer. What power this is too. You could create templates that contain all of the questions that you need to answer differently on a regular basis, you could reference your knowledge in different projects that are related to creating rather than learning. After all, you are capturing information in your second brain now rather than a flashcard app, so you can reference the knowledge anywhere where it’s needed.
One of the more experimental and exciting uses of Obsidian to create flashcards is the potential for AI generated content. In my own opinion, the points at which human intellect is most relevant is determining what information to be input into a system and deciding what to do with the output. This means that all the time you spend creating flashcards beyond deciding what information to input is not particularly useful. Using the AI Assistant built into the QuickAdd plugin in Obsidian, I’ve developed a chain of prompts that summarises my lecture notes into flashcards in the form I gave above, using just the information that I’ve captured, so that I can spend more time on active recall and working on other projects.
Conclusion
Bear in mind that the best way to learn anything is by doing the thing, or in the case of an exam, practicing as closely as possible what you’re going to be expected to do. With this in mind, we can see that repeating questions on flashcards is best suited to those people that specifically need good knowledge of facts, like me in a zoology degree, rather than those who need to be able to apply techniques and concepts, like my friend in a maths degree. Take what you need from these above suggestions and workflows to enhance your own work, because all I want is for you to be more effectively productive so you can spend more time doing things that truly fulfil you.