The online classroom is self-directed, where students decide when and how often they access their course material. Even in the traditional classroom, students have shown a propensity to shift their time allocation to the last minute, so it is not clear what happens when they have full control over their learning schedules. Our interest is whether this self-directed learning environment produces similar harmful binge behavior as observed with online television, where memory and satisfaction with the experience decrease over time. With access to clickstream data from an online e-educator, we found 62% of the sample binged their learning by concentrating their studies within the semester rather than distributing their online activity throughout. Two types of binge learning emerged as significant: Front-bingers, who accessed the majority of their education early, performed more similarly over time to those who spaced their learning activities. Back-bingers, who accessed the majority of their material late in the semester, did not perform as well. To help us better understand these findings, we used a relatively new measure of behavior called “clumpiness” to summarize their overall online activity. We discuss our findings and their implications for online education and marketing course design.

在线教室是自我指导的，学生可以在其中决定何时以及多久访问一次他们的课程资料。即使在传统教室中，学生也显示出将时间分配转移到最后一分钟的倾向，因此，当他们完全控制学习时间表时，会发生什么尚不清楚。我们的兴趣是，这种自我导向的学习环境是否会产生与在线电视所观察到的有害的暴饮暴食行为，在这种情况下，记忆和对体验的满意度会随着时间的流逝而降低。通过访问在线电子教育者的点击流数据，我们发现有62％的样本通过在学期内集中学习而不是分散他们的在线活动来促进他们的学习。暴饮暴食的两种学习方式变得非常重要：前锋，较早接受大部分教育的人，其表现与那些安排学习活动的人在时间上的相似性更高。在学期后期访问大部分材料的后援者表现不佳。为了帮助我们更好地理解这些发现，我们使用了一种称为“团块”的相对较新的行为指标来总结其总体在线活动。我们讨论了我们的发现及其对在线教育和市场营销课程设计的影响。