Experimenting with spaced learning

This is a ‘working out loud’ blog post about some work we’re doing with spaced learning.

Most learning people have seen this graph.

I’m sure we’ve all personally experienced times when if it isn’t used, learning is quickly forgotten. Spaced learning is an approach where the learner’s experience happens over time. Unfortunately, many learning and development people seem fixated on creating ‘events’, through designing single face-to-face or one-off online courses, not on developing fully-integrated programs.

An integrated approach is at the core of what blended learning and the 70:20:10 model are all about. But when I speak with training providers they often complain that their clients are just not prepared to pay for any more than a one-off event.

With digital learning approaches part of the problem is with technology. Many LMSs are just SCORM players that don’t support blended-learning approaches very well. The other tension is that eLearning is often sold as saving time, but spaced learning is the opposite – it often takes more time.

• Some of the common approaches to spaced learning involve:
• breaking courses into smaller sections that happen over time
• email messages that are sent to users after they have finished the course
• mobile apps that remind learners to practise skills.

In some ways I see spaced learning as a technique to help transfer formal learning (the 10 in the 70:20:10 model) into the 70. But spaced learning is really only just part of the challenge of learning transfer; the approaches I’m talking about are focused on the individual, and learning transfer often needs to be more holistic.

What are we doing?

We are beginning to experiment with sending a series of emails to each learner after they have finished a course. We are just in the process of adding this feature to Glasshouse (one of the great things about Glasshouse is that it gives us the flexibility to go beyond passive SCORM objects).

But I’m bit worried that the emails will be just another message in someone’s inbox that will be quickly deleted.

The next steps are to go beyond just providing information. That might involve adding links to activities in the email, or adaptive features where the learner is provided with activities and vvcontent in the areas in which they are struggling. We have been working with a couple of clients to develop a few different approaches to spaced learning. One of them looks like this ...

Another pattern or approach could be simply to break the course up into smaller chunks ...

We are interesting in experimenting with how this could work with mobile learning. The QMindshare app seems to have a lot of the features we are beginning to explore.