This is a beginner's guide to the (mostly) free technology known as ANKI. ANKI is a flashcard tool meant for reviewing and recalling information at optimal spacing intervals until the information is learned at a sufficient levels. It allows learners to cover content with frequent and time-efficient rehearsal.
The main appeal of ANKI is that it allows more efficient spaced repetition, a technique that is general to education and learning. Spaced repetition is approach to review of learned content that transitions a single fact/idea from short, intensely focused periods of learning to increasingly stretched out delays before you review that fact/idea again. Thus your learning interval for a given facts is stretched over increasingly long periods of time. For medical and dental school learners, this may allow you to fine tune your independent study time so that things that you need to see more frequently are optimized for rehearsal and long term review. Whereas, things that you are stronger in your recall will be significantly delayed or stretched very far out for rehearsal.
ANKI is just one of many ways to retain information. WHile it has its upsides, one of its biggest limitation is that there can be fewer inherent opportunities to elaborate and generate knowledge with ANKI cards. It is important to recognize that many tests in medical school and dental school do not ask you to describe, identify or define a single idea. Instead it asks you to integrate across many ideas, elaborate and extend to new scenarios or solve a complex problem. Many cards that are in premade ANKI decks are not set up to force you to use your knowledge in this way. So beware that success in using ANKI does not equate a priori to sucessful learning in medical school or dental school.
This video is a basics tutorial explaining what ANKI is, how to set it up, describing some of its main features that are usually set up already for you as defaults, and some additional features that you may choose to update on your own. It also discusses some card formats, like image occlusion. We thank Cade Friedman for taking the time to generate this tutorial. All information provided here is just opinion and there is no conflicts of interest to disclose from the Learning Center or Cade Friedman.