Harvard Research into Online learning: It’s different - Peter Reuell, Harvard Science

The solution, Harvard researchers say, is to test students early and often. By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreased by half, note-taking tripled, and overall retention of the material improved, according to Daniel Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, and Karl Szpunar, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology. Their findings are described in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “What we hope this research does is show that we can use very strong, experimentally sound techniques to describe what works in online education and what doesn’t,” said Szpunar. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/04/online-learning-its-different/