'Spacing Count:' A Metric for Identifying the Degree to Which Work Is Spaced out and Distributed over Time in Distance Learning and Online Professional Development Courses

Abstract

The spacing effect is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that suggests that the more spaced out a person’s work in a series of tasks or a course, the more they will benefit from the activity. The spacing count is a metric described in this paper to measure the spacing of a participant’s work in an online professional development course over an established amount of time. This metric was developed with data from an actual online teacher PD course that was administered in Moodle. Through a series of data transformations from system log files, the process in this paper ultimately provides a frequency count of the number of intervals of a course set by the researcher (defined as the resolution) in which a participant completed substantive amounts of work in each interval (defined as the sensitivity). This metric is derived after a course is completed and data have been collected, but additional variations could be possible in future work to have it serve as a real-time analytic. Although this metric was developed in the context of a teacher PD course, it can be additionally applied to both general online learning and project management.