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A few words on Interactive Spaced Education from Firle Beacon on the South Downs.

Dr Price Kerfoot trained at Harvard Medical School and Oxford and then elected to spend two years not in research, but in developing educational tools.

Dr Kerfoot took a simple learning problem, the failure of his urology students to retain enough of what they learnt and went looking for a fix.

Medics are used to cramming for exams, testing themselves with question cards, so Dr Kerfoot wondered if this method of 'spaced learning' could be shown to have educational value; it has a history. Research with Harvard students showed that it could work so a programme was created that would develiver sets of questions to students by email with links to a website that would set multiple choice questions.

Students would learn and be tested at the same time.

The results, written up in various journals, have proved to be encouraging; the platform is now available to others to exploit.