As a PDF tool, Acrobat is genuinely excellent — decades of annotation refinement, every conceivable markup option. The comparison isn't about annotation features; it's about where annotation happens. A student highlighting a PDF in a standalone app is studying in a different building from the lecture, the quiz and the class. A student annotating inside the course is studying where everything else already lives.
What context adds #
- Split view: the annotated PDF beside the video explaining it, one screen, no alt-tabbing
- Instructor visibility: model annotations and student questions travel with the document
- Timestamped notes: a note on the PDF can link to the lecture moment that explains it
- AI on the same document: summaries generate on the annotated PDF — your marks inform the machine
- No app sprawl: students don't manage three tools and a downloads folder per course
The honest trade #
Power users with deep Acrobat workflows — legal redlining, print production, form engineering — should keep them; those are professional document jobs. Reading and studying are course jobs, and the integrated annotation covers them fully: highlight, note, question, box and summarize, synchronized across devices and visible to the instructor where the course wants them visible. The feature list is shorter; the learning output is higher. In education tools, that's the trade worth making.