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SpacedEd is now on LinkedIn

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.

Democratizing Learning

Ed. Magazine, the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is currently featuring an article on SpacedEd entitled “Repetition, Repetition, Repetition“.  It covers background on how SpacedEd came to be and includes this quote on the content-neutral approach we take in allowing anyone to create a course on anything:

“For that reason, SpacedEd CEO Duncan Lennox calls it democratized learning. “Everybody who signs up as a learner is also an author,” he says, “and anyone can come and build a course.”

The full article is available online.

Learning by Degrees

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.

Beyond Medicine: SpacedEd for improving your soccer knowledge

Although SpacedEd was originally developed at Harvard Medical School for medical student and physician education, our goal has always been to bring the technology to the widest possible audience. To that end, one of the first things we did when we created SpacedEd.com was to open up authoring to anyone on any subject.

It has been great to see the wide range of topics that have already been covered in courses from consumer gadgets like the iPhone and Motorola Droid, to a variety of math topics, and beyond.

Recently, a number of new and interesting topics have appeared on the site and over the coming months we will highlight just a few of them. We are starting with soccer.

Alex Kos is one of many coaches putting a lot of effort in to promoting and improving soccer participation in the United States and he has written a SpacedEd course called “Soccer 101“. You can read more about his thoughts behind using SpacedEd in his blog post “Enrich and Retain your Soccer Knowledge with Spaced Education“.

Its great to see the ever-expanding set of subject areas appearing on SpacedEd from authors like Alex. Our thanks to them all!

Jay Cross on SpacedEd and Learning to Learn

I had the pleasure of speaking with well-known e-Learning expert Jay Cross last week and sharing our vision for SpacedEd with him. He has since written not only a blog post on our discussion but also gone ahead and created a short course in SpacedEd on “Learning to Learn“.
It is very exciting for us when folks respond so positively to the SpacedEd concept and are willing to begin experimenting. We try to make it as easy as possible to get started and are constantly watching and listening so we can continue to improve the site day by day. Thanks Jay!

ReadWriteWeb: Harvard Medical School’s Learning Technology Must Be Smart…Right?

Our recent news on SpacedEd Enterprise has gotten a great write up from the folks over at ReadWriteWeb, which we very much appreciate.
They say, in part:
“Research from Harvard Medical School has resulted in a pretty sharp SaaS learning system. SpacedEd, as it is called, uses a simple question and answer format that adapts to the person’s level of knowledge.”
We are very excited to have launched Enterprise and we are just getting started – we have a lot more in store in the coming months, so stay tuned…

SpacedEd Brings Radically Simplified Learning to the Enterprise

Burlington, MA. – Spaced Education, Inc. today announced the Enterprise Version of its unique software as a service (SaaS) solution. SpacedEd Enterprise provides organizations the ability to use SpacedEd’s ground-breaking method of online learning that uses a simple question and answer format to complement their training strategy. Learners may receive courses the way they want, whether on their desktop PC, laptop or smartphone, via email, RSS feed or the web. As they learn, SpacedEd adapts the content based on how the individual performs.

Cushing Anderson, IDC Vice President for consulting, HR and learning says “[SpacedEd] exploits a proven instructional technique called spaced repetitions in what could become a highly effective mobile learning strategy.”

SpacedEd Enterprise gives both corporate learning and for-profit learning organizations tools to manage user access and permissions, as well as to view metrics. It incorporates an optional answer blog function, which fosters dialogue with course-takers to elaborate and clarify answers and allows users to contribute content themselves. The SaaS offering lets companies test, try and pay on a per use basis. The company will offer premium services to integrate with an organization’s Learning Management System and HR platform.

“Companies today are increasingly relying on lightweight technologies to boost productivity and solve business problems. We provide a tool that dramatically reduces the time and effort of instructional design while delivering a learning experience that is tailored to the individual user. ” said Duncan Lennox, CEO of Spaced Education, Inc.

“SpacedEd Education is both elegant in its simplicity and innovative in its approach. It uses techniques that are essential to retaining information and dealing with information overload, and allows us to reinforce the principles and exercises from Brain Training workshops and courses” said Jan-Willem van den Brandhof, founder of BrainStudio, a Netherlands-based training company.

To encourage adoption, the company is offering an unlimited free trial for 30 days.

About SpacedEd

SpacedEd is a unique learning platform, designed from the ground up for a mobile, social world. Using a simple question and answer format combined with a proprietary adaptive algorithm, SpacedEd delivers “Addictive Learning That Sticks.” The SpacedEd service is based on a patent pending method developed and used at Harvard Medical School. Founded in 2008, SpacedEd is headquartered in Burlington, MA. For more information, please visit www.spaceded.com.

“SpacedEd”, “Addictive Learning That Sticks” and the SpacedEd logo are trademarks of Spaced Education, Inc.

For more information, contact:

Mary Bermel

mbermel@manasian.com

Leann Phoenix

lphoenix@manasian.com

Manasian, Inc.

781-547-7100

Better Access to Information & Support

We have been kind of quiet in the last few weeks but that is only because we have been working night and day on a lot of new features for SpacedEd.

We have continued to refine areas of the site, both large and small, and you may notice some of these changes which I will talk about in a future post.

For today I wanted to highlight some more informational changes we have made that we hope will make it easier for everyone to learn more about us and get more out of SpacedEd:

Revised How It Works Section

We have added a clearer overview of what SpacedEd is and how it works, along with more detailed information on the peer reviewed research that has proven the effectiveness of spaced education.

New Technical Support section

Many members asked us to change the orange Support tab that previously was the method used to submit a support request. Some found it distracting and for others it just took up too much screen space if they were on a smaller display.

So we have moved the link to submit a support request to its own section. This new Technical Support page also covers some of the more common questions we get, as well as having a link to the full FAQs.

All About Us

We have also added some more information on the people behind SpacedEd, as well as how to get in touch with us.

We have some major enhancements to SpacedEd coming soon and will be posting more information in the coming weeks. Until then, please keep your feedback coming – we appreciate it and try to respond to every suggestion or request.

SpacedEd reviewed on KillerStartups

There are a number of sites that create short introductory snippets to what’s new and exciting out there on the web. One of the more popular is KillerStartups and today they put up a short review on us.

Please take a look and of course we would love your vote when you get there too!

Important Changes to SpacedEd Scheduling & Navigation

Thousands of SpacedEd members have taken courses since we began our Public Beta in early July and we have been watching how people use the service and listening closely to everyone’s feedback.

As a result of this, we are about to make three important changes live on the site and we wanted to tell you a little bit about them.

1. One Email Per Day

Up to now, you will have received an email notification of unanswered questions for each course you are enrolled in. As most SpacedEd members are enrolled in more than one course, this can start to be somewhat overwhleming.

Beginning tomorrow, Wednesday September 30th, you will receive at most a single email notification per day, regardless of how many courses you are enrolled in. You will only receive it if you have unanswered questions in any of your courses.

This new combined email will reduce your inbox clutter and hopefully let you focus more on your SpacedEd courses. (We found that people start “tuning out” their daily emails when there are too many.) The combined email will feature a new unanswered question selected at random from one of your courses.

2. Improved Question Navigation

You will notice a new “Featured Question” box on your Dashboard. Similar to the new combined email, it will randomly select a new unanswered question from one of your courses. Below the question (and in the new email) there will be a simple but distinctive “Answer” button. This will take you to the question and allow you to submit your answer.

After answering a question, there will be a similarly distinctive “Next” button to take you to the next question in your current course  (or, if you are up to date on the current course, in another course with unanswered questions)

Once you complete all unanswered questions in all courses, the button will take you back to your Dashboard.

This will make it much easier to navigate from question to question effeciently – just follow the “bouncing arrow” button.

3. No New Questions While Current Ones Outstanding

Previously, new questions continued to accumulate in your queue regardless of whether you had answered the previous days new questions. With this change, you will never have more new questions than the total set for each scheduled mail (“Number of questions per delivery” when you are enrolling in a course.) This change should make it much harder to get too far behind in a course, which can be very demotivating if you build up a backlog of many new unanswered questions.

More To Come

We have lots of new features planned for SpacedEd in the coming months but we felt it was even more important to continue to fine tune the experience for learners and continue to make SpacedEd the most fun way to learn without even trying!

Please continue to send us your feedback and thanks for helping us make SpacedEd better than ever.