Addictive Learning That Sticks
In a hurry? Enroll in the course here. 
Learn by answering a few emailed questions every other day? SpacedEd co-founder and CEO Duncan Lennox says that is precisely what his product is doing for physicians. (SpacedEd was invented at Harvard Medical School.)
SpacedEd is a platform designed to allow learners and teachers to harness the educational benefits of spaced education. It is based upon two core psychology research findings: the spacing effect and the testing effect. In more than 10 randomized trials completed to date, spaced education has been found to:
- Improve knowledge acquisition,
- Increase long-term knowledge retention (out to 2 years),
- Change behavior,
- Boost learners’ abilities to accurately self-assess their knowledge.
In addition, spaced education is extremely well-accepted by learners.
The SpacedEd approach is predicated on a set of core principles:
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- Short Repeated Bursts: Because it uses a regular schedule and an adaptive algorithm, learning can be delivered in small amounts that can take as little as 3 minutes a day.
- Push Learning: The learning comes to you on a regular schedule. You don’t have to remember to do it or set aside large chunks of time.
- Adaptive: The daily content adapts based on past performance automatically to drive long-term retention while requiring less time.
- Immediate Feedback: Once a question is answered, detailed educational feedback is provided. Users are also given performance data (their course progress and performance relative to peers) which feeds their addiction to the courses.
I was skeptical. People are supposed to learn by answering questions they at first don’t know the answers to? Yesterday I put together a sample course to put SpacedEd to the test. It took less than an hour all told.
Topics covered:
- Formal & informal learning
- Learning celebrities
- History quiz
- Jeopardy questions
When you complete the course, please leave a review at SpacedEd or a comment below.
Charles Jennings has written that we need to learn less in order to know more. In an age of ubiquitous computing, I don’t need to know all the details if I know where to find them.
SpacedEd could be a great way to learn the core learning content, the small orange dot above.
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Thanks for this Jay – I can see some great opportunities for using this to reduce the burden and boredom of compliance training
Hi Jay,
I really like the format- fast, easy to use and bite-sized. Reminds me of rypple.com but for learning instead. The dashboard is great too, people love to track their progress. What would make it a little better would be linking to little self paced learning modules if you get something wrong- so that you get a good understanding of what the correct answer is. (maybe you can do this? didn’t explore enough) But the core ideas of testing and spacing are fabulous and I think this is a great new addition to any new facilitator/learning specialist’s toolbox.
Thanks!
Phil, yes, precisely. I mentioned Rypple to Duncan Lennox when he first showed me StagedEd.