Commentary On "Beyond Time-on-Task: The Relationship Between Spaced Study and Certification in MOOCs"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18608/jla.2015.22.6Keywords:
MOOC, spacing effect, distributed practice, sessions, time on-site, theory, commentary, online educationAbstract
In Miyamoto et al. (2015, this issue) the authors looked to substantiate the presence of the spacing effect, referenced from the Psychology literature, in several MOOCs. Their secondary analyses constituted a robust, empirical finding on the correspondence between session distribution and certification but with only a coarse, analogous relationship to the theory of distributed practice. This article underscores the difficulty of validating theory and inferring causation from data produced in the wild but also the resultant rigor necessitated by this difficulty.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2015 Journal of Learning Analytics

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution - NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).