SpacedEd.com-Online Learning for medical students- review by MS3 Bill Mulkerin

The website SpacedEd (http://www.spaceded.com/) was recommended to the
MS3s by Dr. McDougall during our CF3 course. The general idea is that
you sign up for courses, and they send you a couple questions every
couple of days. The ones you get wrong get sent to you again after a
shorter time interval than the ones you get correct (so you'd be
resent one you got wrong in 5 days vs. 20 days for one you got right,
for example). Eventually, once you've answered a question correctly a
couple times, it is "retired". This continues until you have retired
all the questions for the course. After trying the site for several
weeks, here's my take:

Pros
- It is very easy to enroll in courses and change settings for the
frequency you want. If you want to get questions every day, you can do
that. Or you can space them out over a longer time-frame.
- Most of the questions and answer explanations are pretty short, so
it's easy to finish your questions for the day in just a couple
minutes between rounds, or classes, or whatever else. I've tried other
sites' learning activities (Medscape, for example), and I don't really
want to spend the time to read 6 paragraphs explaining a case. Even
the longer questions on SpacedEd are still pretty short, so it doesn't
feel like too much of a burden.
- The site works well with iPhone, iTouch, iPad, so it is easy to do
questions wherever you happen to be.

Cons
- If you sign up for multiple courses and you don't change the default
settings, you'll end up getting questions sent pretty much every day.
At first, it's not so bad. But after a while (and especially if you're
busy with other things), it can be sort of a pain.
- Most of the courses don't have that many questions (somewhere in the
25 - 40 range for a lot of the free courses).
- There aren't that many courses on the site yet. Many of the ones
that are on there are free, but some want you to pay a couple dollars
for them.

Specific courses I've tried are:
- Core EKG, Name That Heart Rhythm: Basically gives you an EKG strip
and asks you to either name the rhythm or some other straight-forward
question. I like this one a lot because it is quick and a good
refresher on EKGs.
- Core Cardiology for Medical Students: Has more involved questions
than the EKG course. Gives a quick clinical vignette and then asks for
diagnosis or treatment. Also a very good course.
- Core Urology for Medical Students: Has well-written questions and
succinct explanations.
- ACEP PEER VII Sampler - Excerpted questions from Physician’s
Evaluation and Educational Review in Emergency Medicine: These
questions tend to be harder, and have longer answer explanations. They
still don't take very long to get through, though.

All in all, I've found the SpacedEd site to be helpful, and very easy
to keep up with. I definitely recommend giving it a try to see if you
like it.

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