The Qstream Blog

Completing a “Spaced Education” Course

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  March 19, 2013

No comment

Spun out of Harvard Medical School, Qstream uses an interactive “spaced education” methodology which is scientifically proven to increase knowledge retention from 3 months to 2 years. Essentially Qstream presents information and then reinforces it over spaced intervals of time.

There is a proven neurophysiological basis for the spacing effect. Learning over time enhances memory and the survival of new neurons. It increases the efficiency of the uptake of information, and encodes the information so that it is preferentially retained.

To deploy the spaced education methodology, Qstream provides course authors with various controls over the spacing parameters for a course. This includes how many and how often questions are made available to learners in a course. Authors can also specify the number of times a question must be answered correctly before “retiring” it, thereby removing the question from a learner’s personal question queue.

To provide even more flexibility, we recently enabled authors to specify the completion percentage. This is the percentage of questions that a learner must retire to complete a course. You can require learners to retire 100% of the questions or a smaller percentage.

Some CME-granting organizations, for example, require clinicians to complete only 80% of a course to receive CME credits. Setting the completion percentage to 80% triggers a learner’s course to end at that point and display any course completion details with survey links.

Course authors can set the completion percentage on the “Completion” tab within the Course Editor.

Course completion percentage

Clearing Testing Data Prior to Launch

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  March 5, 2013

No comment

Testing your content before you launch a new course is always a good idea.  We recommend that you enroll a small group of testers to review:

• clarity of questions and explanations
• spelling and formatting
• proper tagging of correct answers

Setting the course spacing parameters to deliver all questions at once enables your testers to move quickly through all of the questions.  They can even use the question-based comment blogs to submit feedback for each question.

We recently introduced a new feature that enables you to clear any data generated during testing prior to launching the course.  This includes learner, question performance, and leaderboard data.  Clearing out the old data lets you launch with a clean slate, and ensures that course reporting and analytics are based on valid learner data.

Course owners can delete all data by setting the course to “draft” on the “Publishing” tab of the Course Editor.  Clicking on the “Delete all learner data” link removes all data associated with the course.  There is no turning back so be certain that deleting all data is appropriate.  We recommend that you save data from courses rolled out to actual learners.

Clear test data before launching a new course

Printing for Offline Review

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  February 12, 2013

No comment

The Course Editor is an online authoring tool that makes building Qstream courses quick and easy. You can even share the online authoring with subject matter experts by inviting them as co-authors. The course owner maintains control over important course-level settings.

Testing course content can be easily accomplished through our online “Preview” function. As a final step you can even enroll and review the course online from a student’s perspective.

To complement our online authoring, preview, and testing capabilities, course owners can now print their course content. This provides another method for distributing content for review and approval. Content can be printed or saved as a .PDF file for easy distribution via email.

Print or save to .PDF

To print, simply change the word “edit” to “print” in your URL when the course is open within the Course Editor.

Simply change “edit” to “print” in the Course Editor

New Look for Answer Page

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  January 22, 2013

No comment

Qstream provides an engaging and easy-to-use experience for learners. Learners view a question, submit their answer choice, and then see an informative “answer page”. The answer page is the heart of the learning experience. It provides feedback on the learner’s choice, a robust question explanation, leaderboards, and integrated comments.

To enhance the learner experience we recently updated the look and feel of the answer page. This includes adding new leaderboards, improved feedback on the question status and points earned, and a streamlined display. Learners love it!

Enhanced answer page

Teams, Get Ready!

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  January 7, 2013

No comment

Gaming is an integral part of the Qstream learning process. Leader board competitions increase engagement levels and this has a direct impact on mastery of the content. If learners keep up with their questions they will master the content.

Leader boards now include team competitions. Learners can be grouped into teams based on a client-defined tag such as sales region, business unit, job title, specialty, and more. Teams compete on the leader boards based on the average score for the team.

Online leader boards display up-to-the-minute team rankings that keep everybody engaged.

Team leaderboard competitions!

Team leader boards make it easy to run a friendly competition across the country or around the globe. You can use them to recognize teams with:

• 100% of learners “on track” for the week
• the highest leader board scores
• all members finishing first presentation of the questions
• and much more!

The Power of Tagging

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  December 6, 2012

No comment

Qstream recently introduced a powerful and flexible tagging system for private Qstream sites. Learners can be “tagged” with information such as sales region, business unit, country, job title, manager, specialty, and more. Tags are entirely client-defined and unlimited.

Tags enable course owners to look for trends in engagement, baseline knowledge, content mastery, and question performance by groups. Exported data can be sorted by one or more tags. In addition, the online reports can be filtered based on tags.

Tagging information can be added as part of the batch registration and enrollment process. Tags can also be added or updated at any time – even after a course is over – as learner information changes or new tags are desired. Coming soon is a new feature for collecting demographic data for open, self-enrollment courses.

Tags can be used to filter reports

Using Qstream as a Performance Coaching Tool

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  November 28, 2012

No comment

Qstream’s online performance report enables managers to provide focused feedback to their team. A management hierarchy defines which learners individual managers can access. Managers can then review performance data for their team members to identify knowledge gaps where additional coaching may be helpful.

The performance report includes both summary and detail performance data for the manager’s team overall and individual learners. Baseline performance (blue bar) indicates how learners responded on first presentation of the material. Mastery (yellow bar) indicates the percentage of questions learners have retired so far.

The performance report can help managers understand what their employees know and provide help when needed. For example, learners with low baseline performance may have come to the course with limited background knowledge. Learners whose mastery percentage lags others may indicate a lack of engagement or difficulty with the material. Questions with multiple incorrect responses might indicate topics where individual coaching is appropriate.

Learner Summary

Learner Detail by Question

Streamlining the Login Process

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  November 14, 2012

No comment

With Qstream, the learning experience is simple and fast.  In just 3 to 5 minutes every few days, learners respond to questions and learn from robust explanations that reinforce essential knowledge.  No travel.  No time away from work.

To make things even easier for learners, we streamlined our login process with an auto-login feature.  Learners are now automatically logged in when responding to questions from a notification email.  No need to enter a username and password … clicking on the “answer” button takes learners directly to their questions.  This is especially helpful when responding to questions from iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.  Learner feedback has been very positive.

Passwords are still required for functions such as changing course and account settings.  However, we have simplified this process as well.  Learners now set their own password the first time they use Qstream, which makes it easier to remember.

New learners now choose their own Qstream password

Moderating Comments

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  November 12, 2012

No comment

Qstream’s question-based blogs are a powerful way to collaborate and share information among learners and content experts.  They can be used to immediately address questions that arise, and to elaborate on learning points in the course.  Question blogs also keep course authors tuned in to what learners think about the questions and explanations.  It doesn’t take long to find out if your question is confusing or misleading!

Qstream provides built-in blogs for every question.  After responding to a question, learners see an explanation screen with feedback on their answer choice.  It also displays any comments posted by course leaders and students about the question.  Learners can view the comments and post a reply.

We recently expanded the commenting functionality to control when comments are published.  Course authors can now choose whether comments are published immediately, require a moderator to review and publish, or are turned off.  This course-level setting is located on the Publishing tab in the Course Editor.

New Option for Moderated Comments

Enhanced Feedback for MCQ’s

Posted by: Barry Paul    Tags:  Product    Posted date:  November 8, 2012

No comment

For multiple choice questions (MCQ’s), the feedback just got better.  An MCQ presents learners with a question and a multiple-choice answer.  Learners choose one or more answer choices, submit their response, and see feedback.

In response to learner suggestions, Qstream now provides more specific feedback.  It lets you know whether an incorrect response is completely or partially incorrect.  It also shows the percentage of learners who answered the question correctly overall, and the breakdown by answer choice.

Qstream is a social learning experience.  Displaying group response data helps learners see themselves as part of the larger learning community.  Providing more specific feedback also helps learners to understand what they answered correctly or incorrectly.

Specific Feedback for Multiple Choice Questions