We’ll be talking more about how they are using SpacedEd in a future post but their work caught the eye of association e-Learning expert Jeff Cobb at Tagoras and he wrote up an article about it.

In part he says:

The SpacedEd approach is simple, elegant, and even without the research to support it, I can see intuitively how it would be effective.

Thanks Jeff – we appreciate the positive feedback and are glad you are enjoying the music theory course (see Jeff’s post for details.)

Summer learning loss is a problem facing millions of students across the United States. Due to our long summer vacation, U.S. children spend significantly fewer days in school than children in most other developed countries. Research has shown that this reduction in summer learning opportunities lead to stagnation and loss of knowledge. Unequal access to summer learning opportunities has also been found to be a substantial contributor to the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income students.

Harvard Medical School students are currently using SpacedEd to reduce summer learning loss of physiology knowledge. The free course (IN752 Physiology Refresher -http://www.spaceded.com/HMS-I-Collaborative/courses/627-Physiology-Refresher) is constructed of selected question-answer content from the problem sets and quizzes given to the students in the prior year. The course provides structured reinforcement of key physiology principles so that Harvard students will be able to retain and apply this knowledge effectively to their study of medical pathophysiology in the coming year.

“SpacedEd offers an elegantly-simple method to prevent summer learning loss”, says Dr. Daniel D. Federman, Professor of Medicine and Medical Education, Harvard Medical School. “Given the impressive data supporting its efficacy, SpacedEd is a powerful tool for students, parents and teachers across the country.”

SpacedEd is free to use. Students can currently enroll in over 100 SpacedEd courses, ranging from basic music theory to Spanish vocabulary and from everyday math to English grammar. To prevent summer learning loss, teachers can easily upload content from problem sets and quizzes given over the last year and deliver it in short daily bursts to their students.

You can view the complete news article for more details. We look forward to teachers and educators using SpacedEd to help reduce the problems created by summer learning loss.

“There are best practices for individual technologies, but what is missing is true, consistent integration of the technologies into strategic CME initiatives”

And he quotes fellow CME expert, Brian McGowan, as saying:

“We don’t have to be revolutionary if we are evolutionary … but for those who think we have come far enough already, they are dead wrong.”

We couldn’t agree with the two of them more and the full article is worth a read and available online from Medical Meetings.

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.

In March we launched SpacedEd on iPhone and iPod touch and its been a huge success. We received many requests to bring the same great mobile interface to Android and BlackBerry devices and we are delighted to announce that we have done just that.

Like iPhone, it has been optimized to be blazingly fast and get you through your questions and on with the rest of your day with the minimum of effort.

It works great over Wifi or 3G. Even better, SpacedEd on Android and BlackBerry is free to SpacedEd members.

Just sign up for your courses on the main SpacedEd web site as usual, then you can either go to spaceded.com in the browser on your Android or BlackBerry device or click the “Answer” button in a SpacedEd email on your device.

Best of all, SpacedEd automatically keeps your learning in sync across all devices and delivery formats.

We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.

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/

SpacedEd users can access SpacedEd.com from their iPhone or iPod touch web browser or from a SpacedEd email received on their mobile device. Users are able to answer their daily questions and participate in question discussions with other learners.

“We are always looking for new and innovative ways to bring our SASP Continuing Medical Education to our members,” said Dr. Anton J. Bueschen, President, American Urological Association. “SpacedEd on iPhone combines an innovative and proven learning methodology with the convenience of mobile learning, perfectly suited to the busy schedule of today’s physician.”

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

SpacedEd’s addictive and proven learning platform allows users to complete courses by receiving small amounts of learning through a daily question and answer process. Learning takes place in just minutes a day.

Businesses, organizations and schools are using SpacedEd everyday to provide educational courses to their audiences and benefiting from the proven long-term retention and significantly higher course completion rate of the platform.

Learn more about SpacedEd on iPhone on our web site.

“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.

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.