Guide · Cards and spaced repetition

Revision

A quiz records what you know at a given moment. A revision card does the opposite: it comes back at the right time so that knowledge stays. OpenLearn connects the two — any wrong answer can become a card.

What a card deck is

A deck holds cards, each with a front (the question) and a back (the answer), optionally an image on the back. A deck can belong to a wiki, which makes it visible from that space’s pages.

Creating a deck

New deck (/cards) offers three sources:

From a wiki page — the page text is split into cards (headings and definitions, lists, tables). Read them over: automatic splitting produces noise, it does not understand meaning.
From a quiz — each question becomes a card. This is the most reliable route: the question already has a written answer.
By hand — you write front and back, in the card format you want.

Revising

Revise (/cards/<id>/study) opens the session. For each card:

the front is shown; you answer mentally (or out loud);
you turn the card over;
you say whether it was easy, right or to review.

Those three answers decide the interval before the next showing: a card you know returns in several days, a card you missed returns within the session or the next day. The algorithm is deliberately simple — a stripped-down SM-2 — because an opaque scheduler teaches nothing to the person using it.

What honesty changes. Answering "easy" on a card you half-forgot lengthens the interval and will cost you time three weeks from now. The machine cannot check: the quality of revision depends entirely on how truthful the answer is.

Publishing a deck

A deck is private by default. Publish makes it visible in the Published tab; Make private removes it. Unlike wikis and quizzes, publishing a deck does not go through moderation: a card is a working tool, not an editorial publication.

Printing

Print the card produces a paper version of the deck, front and back, to be cut out. It is still the fastest way to revise on a train.

Seeing your progress

From /cards, the My decks tab shows the number of cards and the state of each (new, in progress, known). A deck whose cards are all “known” remains revisable: forgetting is normal, and the interval will lengthen again.