I feel your pain. I also record every class with the intention of listening back to them to take notes on what's relevant. And I will also take notes during class, but this gets messy because I don't listen as I am typing because it is distracting. Ultimately, I would love to be able to record and type in keywords that are time stamped to the recording. The way I imagined this working is to develop an extension to an existing word processor such as Microsoft word or Google docs. When the extension would be turned on and recording, the return key can have dual functions, One will be The normal function of a new line, and the other function will be to make a timestamp to the recording. And to the left of each line there can be a play button to start the play back from that position in your notes.. this way all you need to do is type in a keyword and hit enter. Later you can search for those keywords to listen back from there obviously, this is easier said than done and I have zero programming experience, so it would be up to someone else or up to me learning how to program.. and if anyone out there would be into a project like this, I would love to collaborate and contribute what I can. This kind of a solution would be my idealistic approach. "
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I recorded all my lectures in university, with the best of intentions. Later in the week, I'd listen to them a second time, while transcribing them! It would be a good way to study, and to organize my recordings! How many times do you think that ever happened? Hint: if your guess is larger than "zero", you're wrong.

The problem with taking notes during the class itself is that keyboards are loud, and if you use speech, you need to have headphones on one ear, and that distracts you from actively listening to the lecture, or participating in the class. Some universities offer paid note takers to help with this, but mine only offered them to students with physical challenges, not blind students.

Transcription services are available today, but though I haven't used them much, I don't think they cut it. What we need is something where we can search the auto generated text transcript, and then play the lecture audio starting from the word or phrase we found. That way, a blind student while in the class, would only need to note down a list of unique sounding keywords. After class, the student could search for those keywords that seemed important, and make more complete notes from the recording. That would be much less work than having to listen to the entire lecture a second time, so it would be more reasonable to expect that students would actually do it. Also, if portions of the transcript were accurate enough, we could just copy those directly into our class notes.

I can speak a bit to this. I worked in student news for a bit. Was a student journalist. The best way I found to keep track of interviews was to record. This works and doesn’t for a bit. Some people can write/type fast. I would listen to six words, get obsessive on it’s contents, write them down, then by the time I hit stop 10 more words had come out of the mouth of the speaker on the recorder. What if you type fast you can type 90 words a minute or something like that, right? Speaking is like 240 or something like that. I just couldn’t keep up. I would go back and would listen a bit, then find where I left off maybe check and then when I lift my fingers to hit stop 10 or 20 words would have gone by since I stopped checking and then repeat the rewinding processing. Finally I get a few more words written. Repeat, Repeat, and repeat. Until you get three maybe four good quotes from the file. Time elapses. Maybe 30 minutes. Maybe 30 minutes maybe 45. Now think about three sources.

If there was a way to work this more efficiently, slow down the speech more accurate rewinding, based on time, short lengths of time or something. A few words at a time.

In my case no one technique has ever worked well. Like another poster I have up and down experience with recording lectures. It's all about whether you get back and listen to them. again. I am starting a new degree in the fall and I have been playing with a PlexTalk pocket to do the recording. So far I am seeing a few advantages over my iPhone. First, the battery life of the PlexTalk is better. I can record in Daisy format and add in headings while recording. I can speed up or slow down speech. I can also put PDF or Word docs on the device to read. I think this will be one device I will use in the fall. Organizing notes has been something I have been thinking about. In the case of the PlexTalk everything can be saved to an SD Card. In theory I could have multiple SD cards and separate them by lectures, courses, etc. However, in reality I think I would lose the various cards.

If I had my ideal recorder it would be something like the PlexTalk with a few additional features. It would sync with a cloud service when possible. It would have a web interface with the cloud storage that would allow me to play the uploaded files from any device. Perhaps even allow me to do some editing from the cloud service. rather than another piece of software I would love something cloud based that I could use from any accessible computer.