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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Cambridge, MA, July 7, 2009 – Spaced Education, Inc has signed an exclusive license agreement with Harvard University for a new learning technology that was developed and used at Harvard Medical School.

The method, called Spaced Education, was developed by Dr. B. Price Kerfoot, Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. It utilizes a simple question and answer format, delivered in short daily bursts to the learner and backed by a proprietary algorithm that adapts the content based on how an individual performs.

“Our early studies showed that traditional online learning generates only limited long-term retention of knowledge and is poorly accepted by learners,” said Dr. Kerfoot.  “To address these problems, we incorporated two research findings from the field of psychology (the spacing effect and the testing effect) into a new method of online learning based on a question and answer format.”

Spaced Education, Inc. has developed and launched the online service and website SpacedEd (www.spaceded.com), which puts this learning technology at the core of a social learning community.  Learners can sign up for a wide range of courses, many for free, and receive their courses in a simple question and answer format, delivered on a regular schedule via email, the web, or a mobile device.

The company will market its software as a service (SaaS) solution to individuals, educational institutions, course providers and enterprises that want to offer courses based on the Spaced Education methodology.

Proven in more than 10 peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials led by Dr. Kerfoot, Spaced Education has been shown to change behavior and to be effective, efficient, and well-accepted by learners:

Effective

• 50% increase in clinical knowledge in a study of 480 physicians.
• Learning benefits of Spaced Education persist for 2 years in study of 206 physicians.

Efficient

• 36% increase in learning efficiency due to adaptive algorithm (compared to non-adaptive method) in a study of 62 medical students.

Well-accepted

• 77 to 95% of the approximately 3000 study participants to date request to enroll in more spaced education courses.
• Completion rates greater than 70%.
• Preferred 3:1 over web-based teaching modules (a gold-standard of e-learning) in RCT of 724 physicians.

Certain courses have also changed behavior of participants. For example, in a study of 95 VA primary care providers inappropriate cancer screenings decreased by 26%, a significant potential reduction in cost and patient anxiety.

“In contrast to the standard ‘binge-and-purge’ approach to online education, Spaced Education presents content to the learner in small packets which are repeated over spaced intervals of time to improve long-term retention,” said Kerfoot.  “We now combine this with an adaptive algorithm which customizes the content and spacing on an individual basis until a learner has achieved mastery of the material.  Initial trial results have been extremely encouraging.”

“The effectiveness of SpacedEd’s learning technology has been proven with unprecedented rigor at Harvard University – never before has a new learning approach been validated to such an extent,” said SpacedEd CEO Duncan Lennox. “Combined with the level of convenience and sheer addictive fun that SpacedEd brings to learning, we believe Dr. Kerfoot’s work will fundamentally change the way the world learns.”

“Dr. Kerfoot’s innovative learning method has been proven to increase retention and change behavior.  It is ideal for today’s social and increasingly mobile online world, and represents but one example of a variety of timely research initiatives being advanced across our campus, benefiting society and researchers alike,” said Isaac T. Kohlberg,  Senior Associate Provost and Chief Technology Development Officer at Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development, the office that is responsible for all activities pertaining to the evaluation, patenting and licensing of new inventions and discoveries made throughout Harvard University.

About SpacedEd

SpacedEd is a unique and growing learning community, 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 Waltham, MA. For more information, contact Duncan Lennox at +1 781-583-1503 or visit www.spaceded.com.

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