The best way for someone to understand SpacedEd is to try a course but often people would like to know a little more about what they are getting into before investing the time to enroll in a course.

As a partial answer to that, we are happy to share with everyone a new short video we have made to provide an overview of SpacedEd. It is a little over 2 minutes long and we hope you will enjoy it.

Please take a look and share it with friends and colleagues you think might be interested on Twitter, Facebook and your blog. Of course we would also welcome any feedback you have for us on the video itself.

Burlington, MA. April 22nd, 2010 – Spaced Education, Inc., the innovator of fast, Q&A-based learning technology, announced today that SpacedEd’s mobile delivery and enterprise features are now free to higher education faculty and institutions across the United States.

Professors, instructors, and graduate students who are teaching courses at accredited, US degree-granting degree institutions will be provided their own branded website at which they can create and deliver SpacedEd courses to their students and colleagues.

“SpacedEd has been a tremendously valuable educational tool” said Dr. Graham McMahon, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.  “Students find the question and answer format to be fun.  They tell me that it helps them remember the material that they learned in my course and prepare effectively and efficiently for their national examinations.”

SpacedEd courses are structured as a series of questions, explanations, and student discussions that are presented in short bursts, typically 1-2 per day, over spaced intervals of time to improve long-term retention of learning.  An adaptive algorithm customizes the content and spacing on an individual basis until students achieve mastery of the material.  Over 10 randomized trials conducted at Harvard have proven the efficacy of the SpacedEd methodology.

Learning is automatically synced across all user devices and formats – a user can view their latest course content on their iPad, iPhone, a desktop or laptop browser, email client or an RSS feed.  The platform has been optimized to be blazingly fast over Wi-Fi and 3G networks.  There is no app to download or install.

SpacedEd invites higher education faculty to unleash their creativity with mash-up courses containing video, audio, images, and links to other resources.  In addition, SpacedEd is an effective method to deliver problem sets or study questions to students via mobile devices and can help cure summer learning loss.  Current SpacedEd courses range from music theory to trigonometry and from Arabic to cellular physiology.

Faculty can apply for their private SpacedEd site at http://www.spaceded.com/

In addition to the discussion that happens within SpacedEd courses, we have used this blog, Twitter and Facebook to connect with our members. Recently we added a new tool with the creation of the official SpacedEd discussion group on LinkedIn. We will cross-post from our blog and Twitter feeds to the LinkedIn group and hope to get some great discussions kicked off with members – both longtime users and brand new folks. If you are a regular LinkedIn user, please join our group and start a discussion. We looked forward to chatting with you.

Harvard Magazine in its most recent print issue featured an interview with B. Price Kerfoot, inventor of the “spaced education” concept that powers SpacedEd.

On more traditional forms of web-based learning the author comments:

“[Kerfoot] knew that Web-based teaching modules are a gold standard for online education, but in a study done at four medical schools, Kerfoot found that “most students hated them and long-term retention was quite poor. Why waste a week of their time and $1,000 of their tuition teaching them about a medical subspecialty when the knowledge will disappear from memory in five to 12 months?”

The full interview is now available online.