Pacing is incredibly important to motivation. The thing is, there's no single answer. Even in traditional, full-time, in person classrooms where everyone puts i

Pacing is incredibly important to motivation. The thing is, there's no single answer. Even in traditional, full-time, in person classrooms where everyone puts in the same class hours, natural ability, different skills at the beginning and better attention mean that students will always learn at different speeds. The ideal model is one of personalized education. What's kind of shocking is that online education so far has basically ignored this altogether. There's been zero investment in ways to continually pace and encourage students to learn at a speed that is both challenging and within reason. This isn't too surprising: it's a hard problem, and it's much easier to have users paying a subscription fee forever (for those services that are paid) and blame themselves when they fall behind. At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/ http://www.thinkful.com/) we see evidence that our learning model, which pairs experts and students together much more like you'd expect from tutoring, sees 10x the retention and completion as other online course options.