The article is worth reading and the idea has merit, but I’m going to go off an a tangent, OK, I’m going to have a rant.
It’s the headline “Online Learning, at a Pace”. Really? This is “online learning”?
It’s a branching quiz delivered by email, that’s all. It’s clever and worth a look, but to use the term online learning is just wrong. I can do the same thing using the postal service, alright, it wouldn’t be as efficient, but the basic learning design would be the same.
You might have guessed I have a problem with the term “online learning”
It is like having an umbrella topic in called “Numbers in business” that covers accounting, financial management, risk management, trading, in fact any subject that has uses numbers in relation to business, at any level from preschool to U3A . It doesn’t mean anything. It can be interpreted, researched and evaluated in anyway that suits your own particular circumstances and bias.
Imagine the confusion if people who didn’t have a deep understanding of “Numbers in business” started bandying the term around, or perhaps started making policy decisions based their surface understanding of the term.
It drives me nuts! Anyway back to the article.
“Launched in May, SpacedEd allows users to develop courses on topics ranging from “Core Cardiology for Medical Students” to “Bartending 101.” Enrolled students receive a set of questions as frequently as once a day, via e-mail or RSS feed (text messaging and instant messaging are in the works). All the teaching is done through a trial-and-error testing method: Answer a question wrong and it repeats; get it right and it repeats less often; get it right multiple times and it disappears. An algorithm adjusts for the student’s level and content knowledge, based on his or her score as it develops.”