I'd never heard of SRS until reading this post. Went down the rabbit hole of learning about it and it does sound pretty cool. It certainly has lots of potential for teaching new hires company-specific material as well, such as SOPs and GOM/OpSpec info.
The only reason I probably won't pursue it right now is because I don't have the time to develop decks to study.
Is it common to buy decks on a given topic? That's the one way I might make time to develop decks on the Citations I fly, if there were actually a demand to monetize it in some way for pilots worldwide flying these Citations.
Most of the decks are hand-made and shared. I do not think there's a market currently for that, but for
good flashcards I would absolutely pay and in a perfect world there would be. There may not be yet, but I think you're ahead of the curve. The applications are as varied as you can think of and you can build scenario based questions, but you'd have to do a lot of them... at least that is what I did. I
But really, the real power for me was in learning systems, then I created some cards describing various systems failures to ask questions. Make sure each card only has 1 thing on it at a time if you can... but they're very powerful. The original use case is language and they say, "you have to write your own cards to learn" - I do not believe that is always true, it just takes a little more time. I downloaded the 1000 most common Spanish words a month or so before I went to Spain last summer and basically was able to carry on a casual conversation from when I got there with limited prior experience speaking Spanish. You need at least a month or two to learn something out of your wheelhouse (like if I was going to learn chemistry or something), but I knew some basic stuff about Spanish and how languages work in general.
In systems for something like you're describing, I would do something like this for the 1900 (and bare with me I haven't flown it in over a decade):
Front of card:
If you have a short on the ______ bus you will lose the flaps, instrument lighting, prop synchrophaser, the control over the R bleed various fuel sensors and crossfeed among other things (AFM 7- whatever)
Back of card:
Left Generator Bus
You drop these into your deck and just follow the schedule. You can schedule extra, but I haven't found it really helps, you're not going to learn well by cramming, you just need to be reminded every now and then. You can tweak the refresh rate if you think you need more, but I haven't found that that makes it more effective.
If you want to be a major nerd, you can do things like:
Front of card:
Draw the electrical system
Back of card:
<a simplified diagram>
This works for some people, but you have to do it when you see the card. The key to me (and your approach may be different) is to phrase the cards as a question, or a fill-in-the-blank, and just religious do them. I do them every morning when I wake up. The anki App on iphone is expensive (it's like $20 or something) but it's worth it because you
never have to pay for it again. There are people selling subscriptions, don't do that. The app is pretty old-school, but it's good and you can sync your cards in a free online repository.
I'd like to know more about this.
Got a recommended starting point?
So, of course you can read above, I first discovered this in early 2020 when I read this article:
That article is... very comprehensive and an excellent place to start, but I find that I do not necessarily need to make my own cards, it just takes me longer to learn stuff where I don't make my own cards. Still, I wrote all my cards for the TwinOtter then just
knew the airplane about 3 weeks later. It was very cool.
Now I use this to study. I put all my notes and things I learn into a shared deck called "big deck energy" that does the heavy lifting and if I have to learn something quick, I put it in a separate deck for a few weeks before merging it into the main deck.
Sounds a bit like what Sheppardair use - although agreed scenario based thinking outside the box is tricky if you don't realise the box exists...
Would Austin Collins approach assist at all? not system specific but a good handrail for part 135...
Austin's Very Easy Guides
The AVEG documents are straight up amazing. I always recommend them. For how to use anki for scenario based training, I'd say do this:
Front of card:
<failure condition>
Back of card:
<things to consider>
For example, you would probably learn a lot if you made these cards just by war-gaming a bunch of hypotheticals and throwing them into the deck. I could totally see something like using a few cards to tie together the topics in your head.
Front of card:
Pilot Windshield Heat is MEL'd.
Back of card:
Flight in known icing is prohibited.
Front of card:
The pilot windshield heat is on the ______ bus
Back of card:
Left generator bus (remember, left-side is pilot side)
You haven't really described a scenario but by putting both cards into the system you have made the (obvious) connection in a scenario based training situation. If you lose the left gen bus you're going to lose the pilot windshield heat, and you've tied that to "FIKI prohibited." Then when you do SBT and lose the left gen bus, and the • sim instructor starts throwing ice on the airplane the connection of "oh, I need to do something" will be a natural leap.
Like I said, if anyone is interested in this, I'll happily help you out just pm me, if you are in anchorage and interested, I'll even show you how I have my setup handled over some beers when I'm done with grad school here in the next few weeks. For me at least, spaced repetition has been a game changer. The key is you
must do it every day. I just burn through my cards in the morning and add them as I see fit.
Also, I often throw in some cards that aren't even questions. I throw in things like, "reflect on this quote from this book" or whatever. In that way this tool has enriched my life:
Here's a look at the web interface for my cards (I've done them on my phone I just haven't pushed the cards I've studied yet):
Going into big deck energy, here's one that I periodically see:
Front of card:
Reflect on this quote by Tolstoy from war and peace.
Back of card:
"They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.
I usually mark it "read" but if I want to refresh how often I see it, I'll mark it incorrect, but I do take a minute to think about it. It's nice.
Most of the questions I have for math stuff look like this:
Front of card:
What’s an ultra fast way to calculate the eigenvalues of 2x2 matrices?
Back of card:
v = m +- sqrt(m^2 - p) where m is the mean of the trace of the matrix and p is determinant of the matrix m.
You can embed LaTex in these cards, sometimes I do sometimes I don't.
