Five courses, five portals, and finals in a week

Every course is a different website

One class posts everything to the LMS. One has a separate site the professor built in 2016. One lives in a shared drive folder linked from an email in week one. Add the syllabus PDF, the reading list, the office-hours booking page, the discussion board, and the library's course reserves — five courses, thirty links, none of them in the same place.

You end up navigating by memory and by search bar, retyping the same portal URL every day of the semester. It works until the week you cannot afford the twenty seconds.

A board per course, built in the first week

Set it up once during syllabus week and it pays for the whole term. One board, one category per course, and inside each: portal, syllabus, readings, office hours, assignment submission, the group chat if it has a web address. Descriptions carry the details you keep forgetting — office hours Tue 2-4 in room 214, essay due at 11:59pm not midnight.

Setting this up in week one costs twenty minutes and saves you the semester's worth of retyping the same portal URL.With the extension, that board becomes your new-tab page, so every course link is one keystroke away and searchable — type "stat" and the statistics portal is there. Add a checklist per course for the assignment deadlines, with a recurring cadence for the weekly readings.

Research: forty sources you cannot lose

A term paper means forty tabs — journal articles, a database search you refined for an hour, three sources you have not read yet, the citation generator. That state is worth real hours, and it lives entirely in a browser that is one update away from restarting.

Save all open tabs as a session and close them. A saved window reopens as one browser window later, so tomorrow's session starts where today's ended. Turn on the opt-in auto-saved browser snapshots and you get crash restore and new-machine restore, including window positions — which is the feature you will care about at 1am the week before finals, or the day your laptop dies and you are working from a lab machine.

• One board, one category per course; subcategories for a course with a lot of material
• Sessions to park a research session instead of leaving forty tabs open
• Opt-in snapshots for crash restore and moving to another machine
• Checklists with a weekly cadence for readings and problem sets

Cheap now, portable later

The free plan is one board, forever, with no card — for most students that is the whole system, since one board with a category per course covers a term. If you want a separate board per class, plus one for research and one for job applications, the Individual plan is $3/mo. There are no ads on any plan.

When you graduate, export everything to a standard bookmarks HTML file. Export is on every plan, so the links you collected over four years leave with you, and a student email address expiring does not take your research with it. The honest limits: extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera, no Safari extension, and no mobile app — if you work mainly on an iPad or a phone, this is not built for you yet.