Creating a Study Schedule with the New, Improved Osmosis Tool

All right, let's get started. Welcome to today's webinar: creating a study schedule with the new and improved Osmosis study schedule tool. Just a few notes to begin with. This webinar is being recorded, and we will post it on the Osmosis events page early next week. You'll get an email when it's available, so please feel free to take a look at it at another time in the future. Feel free to share any questions you have in the chat. Just keep in mind that it could take a few minutes to answer them. We'll do our best to address the majority of them before the end of the webinar. Thank you very much for your patience as we work through any questions you have there. We'll also be sharing additional information in the chat throughout the webinar, so make sure to open the links and save them. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So again, welcome everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Patrick Diller. I am a product manager here at Osmosis from Elsevier. With me is Aoife (Eee-fa) Buckley. She's a designer with Osmosis from Elsevier. We were the two main owners of building the new study schedule tool: Aoife through design and me as the product manager. So, we're really thrilled to walk you through something that's incredibly close to our hearts and we feel super useful for your learning journey: the all-new Osmosis study schedule. In the next 35 to 40 minutes, we're going to talk about why we rebuilt the schedule and built it the way we did, what problems we heard from students like you. We'll dive into some key features that make this version smarter, more flexible, and personalized. EA will walk you through some design and research journey so you kind of understand how we got to where we are. Then, the fun part: we'll do a live demo of the study schedule in action, give you a little sneak peek of what might be coming next, and wrap up with some Q and A. Again, don't wait till the end to ask any questions. Feel free to put them in the chat, and we will attempt to answer them either along the way. Aoife is going to be looking at the chat some, also Stephanie will be looking. If there's things that we can answer in chat, we will. Otherwise, we can catch them during some breaks and during Q and A at the end. So before we get started, are there any questions? No. All right, let's move in then. We've got a few poll questions for you, and I did these a little differently. If you've got your phone, grab your phone, scan the QR code here. Before we dive in, I just want to get a quick pulse check. Scan the QR code and tell us how you feel about studying these days...and be honest. We'll kind of use these responses as context as we talk through the study schedule during the live demo. I'm going to give you about 30 seconds to scan that and then I will continue here. All right. So, why did we build the new study schedule tool? Now, if some of you are in the MD field, you might have seen our old study schedule. This is a brand new version of it. We have brought it out to all of our different products, not just the MD space, and we really felt that we could make a difference. As we talked to students, we listened. We heard from students that studying is overwhelming. Planning what to study, when to study, how to juggle multiple topics, all the responsibilities you have can feel like a job all in itself. You also told us you needed structure but without rigidity - being able to make changes when you need it but also have some type of structure that tries to keep you on track. Motivation without pressure. You get lots of pressure in your classes already. How can we help motivate you without pressure? And tools that can actually reduce your stress, not add to it. So building the schedule is already one big stressor that gets eliminated. And that's one of my favorite quotes from user feedback that we had. So let's get into the heart of today's webinar: how the new Osmosis study schedule is actually going to make your life easier and help you thrive. We designed it with one simple mission: to help you study smarter, not harder, and most importantly, with less stress. We start with personalization and flexibility because, let's be honest, no two students have the same routine. Some of you may be juggling part-time jobs. Some of you have family responsibilities. Others are night owls. Some are morning warriors. So instead of asking you to change your life to fit our tool, we flipped it. We built the tool to fit your life. When you create your schedule, you tell Osmosis when you're actually available to study. You choose the days, the amount of time during those days you can study, your topics, and from there, we build a daily plan that fits your rhythm. And here's where it can get even better. If your plans change, because they will, you don't need to panic or start over. Our study schedule automatically rebalances your tasks, shifting your study blocks forward to find space later in the week and make sure you stay on track without having to micromanage each piece. And if you're balancing multiple exams or courses at once, no problem. You can create multiple schedules and manage them in one single place. Also, how many of you have ever asked, "Am I on track?" or "How much do I still need to do?" We've heard that over and over again, so we made the new study schedule answer these at a glance. Every day when you go in, you'll see not only what you have to study but how long it should take and how much progress you've made toward your daily goal and your final goal. Each task comes with estimated time so you can plan realistically. Whether you have a full afternoon or 30 minutes before dinner, you can chip away at your learning in a meaningful way. And the part that I love: if you miss a day, it doesn't just leave you behind. As mentioned before, it reschedules missed items and evenly redistributes them across your available days. No guilt trips, no giant red warning signs. It just helps you catch up. You're still in control, but now you've got less pressure. Motivation and ownership...this is another area where many study tools fall short. You might have tried spreadsheets, whiteboards, or sticky notes before, but the problem is they don't really make you feel good about studying. They're just lists, and lists can feel like judgment. We wanted this tool to feel different. So we focused on ownership and motivation. You're not just following someone else's to-do list. You can drag and drop your tasks around. You can add your own custom study items. You can include prep for your flashcard reviews, question breaks, and wellness breaks. You get to shape your day the way that works best for you. And when you complete what you set out to do, we celebrate it literally. You'll see positive messages, completion animations, and a little joy at the end of your day. It may be small, but it matters because studying for exams, whether it's USMLE, NCLEX, or your final class test, can be isolated and draining. We want to give you a lift every single day and keep you motivated. So, when we say this tool helps you thrive, we mean it's supporting your brain and your well-being. It's just like a coach or a trusted friend. It keeps you organized, focused, and encouraged even when things get hectic. Something that often gets pushed to the side in med school is your mental health and well-being. We know the grind can be relentless. You're constantly trying to learn new information: anatomy, physiology, pathology, and there's this ever-present pressure to stay ahead. So in building the tool, we asked ourselves, how can we build a study tool that supports not just the mind, but your mindset and well-being? And that's where the pre-study checklist comes in. It's simple but powerful. Before you even start your session, you can ask specific questions of yourself, such as: Did you grab a snack or a bottle of water? Did you silence your notifications? Take a few mindful breaths? Why? Because your brain might be ready to study, but if your body is running on fumes or your phone is lighting up with alerts, you're not really set up to succeed. This pre-study checklist is customizable, and you can add or delete items to make it work for you. We're helping you encourage micro habits...those tiny rituals to cue your brain that it's time to focus. So, let's pause again for a quick poll here. Scan the second QR code and let us know what resources you are using to study right now. This helps us understand how the study schedule fits into your broader learning experience. If you can't use the poll, you're welcome to answer in chat also or would prefer in chat. I'll give you a couple of seconds to do that, then we'll continue. All right. Before I turn it over to Aoife to talk about our research and design process, are there any questions we can answer at this point? Hearing none, I will move on and turn it over to Aoife for a moment. Hey everyone, I've put the questions in the chat, just FYI. Great. Thanks, Stephanie. Hello everyone. I'm Aoife. I'm a UX designer with Osmosis, and I'm based in Wicklow in Ireland. For those that aren't as familiar with user experience design, at Osmosis, I focus on listening to our users, understanding their pain points, struggles, ideas, and I come up with design solutions that make the product hopefully more useful and enjoyable for learning. Today, I want to take you through an overview of our research and design process behind our new study schedule tool. Next slide, please, Patrick. Over a year ago, we realized that our existing study tool wasn't really aligning with our students' real needs. We know that medical students have extremely limited time, and instead of supporting them, our tool was creating a lot of friction with some bugs, and the experience felt a bit overwhelming. As a student said, "I don't know where to begin. Make it more flexible and able to adapt to the reality of my day-to-day." Next slide, please, Patrick. So, we decided to kick off a project to do just that. We wanted to redesign a schedule that made students feel accomplished and clear on what they had to study for, whether that be for the day, the week, or even month, but also allowed them to adapt it when life got in the way. Next slide, please, Patrick. To do that, we needed to speak with actual students and hear what they had to say. We started by surveying over 100 medical students to understand their study habits, challenges, what helps them to stay motivated, how we can help alleviate stress and burnout. We also looked at what they liked in other tools. We ran a workshop with 12 students, asking them to mock out their ideal study experience. As you can see in this number one here, we asked them to put up post-it notes outlining the main pain points they experienced in their current study schedule. This really helped us get in the mindset and uncover what they really needed when it's time to sit down and study. Next slide, please, Patrick. From this initial phase of research, several key insights stood out: First, students rank time management, exam prep, and spaced repetition as their most important features. One student put it well: "There's so much to cover. We need a way to digest it all efficiently. We need time management features the most." Second, students wanted help revising their weaker areas and a tool that would highlight this to them. Third, they didn't want to spend time figuring out what needs to be studied and when. A common sentiment was: "Do the planning for me." Fourth, they needed a tool that was flexible, editable, and that morphed into their individual day-to-day life. As one student mentioned, "Making a schedule that is unrealistic causes anxiety and makes me no longer want to use it." Armed with these insights, we began moving into the wireframe design phase to test and get feedback on. As we designed, we asked ourselves questions as a team: How do we make the onboarding flow for our Osmosis users feel fast but also get that personalization? How do we help users avoid feeling overwhelmed or distracted? And how do we create that sense of progression and achievement within their daily study? So now that we had our wireframes and some assumptions, we wanted to test the low-fidelity prototype with our users. We ran eight usability sessions asking questions like: If you have too much content to study than you realistically have time for, what options would you want in your study schedule to manage that? Let's say you finish your tasks for a day sooner than expected. What would you like to happen with your schedule? Could you see yourself using a tool like this? And how would you expect this study schedule tool to manage your time when you have more than one exam coming up? There were some really interesting use cases and feedback that really challenged the design and how we had thought about the tool originally. We analyzed these sessions and iterated again on our designs. Some of the many interesting findings to highlight here: One, students really wanted greater flexibility and control over tasks. Dragging and rearranging their tasks, adding, deleting, adding custom items. That was an essential part of the study schedule. Two, a desire for both manual and automatic redistribution of tasks. That means if you miss a whole day of study, the tool will automatically redistribute your tasks so that you can stay on track. Third, students had a really strong preference for integrated schedules. They wanted a cohesive view of their studies in one place to feel in control of their study for that day. The feedback was so helpful, and even though the tool is now live, we definitely don't want to stop there. So if you have any feedback on the tool and any ideas, please drop them into the chat as Patrick is about to go through the live demo now. We would absolutely love to hear them. I'll pass back to Patrick for the walkthrough of the schedule. Thank you. Absolutely. As you've noticed, we've talked to a lot of learners. We are always looking for learners to talk to who would be interested in sharing their experiences, working through new product development, getting to see some fun things ahead of time. So if you're interested in that, please drop that in the chat and we will keep you in mind as we build out and look at new things in the future. Let's go into a live demo of the study schedule. I'm going to ask if everybody...and I know there's a lot of you...but you are more than welcome to speak up during this part. I would like to get feedback along the way and I'm going to ask some questions about doing different things as we go along so we get there. Would you like to start off seeing a template for USMLE or building a study schedule out as an individual class exam? Somebody go off mute and yell out which one you want to see first. Don't be shy. People are saying in the chat: class, individual class exam, pass class exam. All right. Let's do individual class exam. Okay. Individual class exams: this is going to make a personalized study schedule with specific topics that you need for an upcoming exam. Because I'm in the MD thing area here, we have preclinical or clinical. Which one would you like to see first? Preclinical or clinical? First person: Preclinical? Preclinical, you got it! You can come off mute and shout it out. We're okay with that. Next step here, this is going to help you determine what topics you want to include. If you've been in Osmosis before, these should look very similar to you. We have your main topics: foundational and organ systems here, then your subtopics: anatomy, behavioral health, blood and lymphatic systems. Then we have your topics underneath those subtopics. We can choose any combination of items that we want for our schedule. So let's say, what do you guys think? What topic should we study? Cardiovascular. Cardiovascular, yes. All right, let's do cardiovascular. We're going to do anatomy, histology, and pathology there. All right. Now we've picked out the topics that are there. Our next question is: what resources do you find most helpful? This is a way you can create your study schedule to be specific to what you like and what you want to work on. I might want to do videos?I love watching videos. Maybe I want to do questions or videos and questions together. I can do flashcards, Osmosis notes, and a new option we have: if you have Complete Anatomy, you can view your Complete Anatomy models also when you're studying different anatomy. I'm going to go ahead and choose videos and questions to start with. Next is my end date. We're going to pick the date for my exam and say it is two weeks from now, so the 21st. Now, we have these topics scheduled. We know when the end date is, but I still really don't know how much I'm going to need to study every week to be able to meet this. This next screen gives you an estimate to study that content and fit it within that time frame. It's going to take you about nine hours to study a week. So, I can choose from my days how much I'm going to study. I can do it in half-hour increments. I'm going to say Mondays: two and a half hours; Tuesdays: three; Wednesdays: two; Thursdays: two. Well, let's see. I've already passed my study hours for the week, which is great. So Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I'm not going to study any. I'm going to take those days off. Then we go into the pre-study checklist. This is where I decide what items I would like here to make sure I'm in the right mode to study. If I prefer not to have a pre-study checklist, I can turn it off, but we really recommend that you start with one just to help get you in that right mode. I prefer non-healthy snacks, so I'm going to take off healthy snacks. I'm not going to worry about that, but I love to pet my dog to relax before I get down to study. I was doing that before this presentation, so that's going to become one of my checklist items for the pre-study checklist. The last thing I need to do is name my schedule. We're just going to name this one Anatomy. I'm going to choose what color I want the schedule to show up with. It's going to take just a few seconds to build my schedule. Now you can see in our day view, we have a couple of different areas and options for you. The first thing it says is: "My study for today has an estimated time of two hours and five minutes." Some of you may ask, "Hey, why is progress 18% done already?" We automatically give you credit for videos that you watch once they go to 80%. These are videos I've already watched within Osmosis. So we're saying, "Okay, you've already watched these. Just go to the questions and check your questions. Make sure you understand and remember it." If I want to go back and review those because I got a question wrong, I can manually uncheck it to make sure that I go back and do that. This was a really good way for us when we talked to learners and students that said, "I've done this before, or I don't want to have to do it again even though it's for my test coming up because I just want to review certain things." So this is a great opportunity to do that. You'll also see we have overall progress here. This tells me how much content I've done overall. The one down here at the bottom is just today's progress, and this is my overall progress. Right now, it tells me I'm ahead of schedule and I should reach my goal a little bit ahead of that time. We list your deadlines. You can also see your deadline here on today's date and my end date. Then my pre-study checklist that I can go through here at the end to make sure I'm ready to study from this screen. One other important thing is the ability to add your own custom material. We understand that not everything is going to be in Osmosis. You may have a paper, a study group session scheduled, or an outside reading you need to do. You can put your study schedule items right in here. For example, I'm going to read chapter three. I can put a URL in if there's a URL to it. I can add other details, like "I need to finish and write summary notes." I click add, and that adds it right into my custom material section for that day. I can also add other schedules. For instance, I may want to have a schedule for multiple classes or a schedule for my USMLE step prep along with my individual class. We'll do the USMLE step prep one to show you what that looks like with multiple schedules. I'm going to use flashcards, questions, and models for my USMLE step prep. It's a little bit farther out. This one says I need eight hours to study a week for this content. If I look here at the bottom, it gives me my total hours across the schedule. I can easily see what I've already scheduled on each day. I know that I have another couple of hours I can study on Monday. Tuesday, three hours is the most I can study. I can do another couple of hours on Wednesday. An hour on Thursday, I still need a couple of hours. So, I'll have to put some times in Friday and Sunday and still be able to take Saturday off. You see it automatically updates me here. I have a constant run. I know how many hours a week I need to spend to study all my different areas during that time. When I choose a different schedule, it now pops in. You'll see my anatomy here, and here's my USMLE step one prep items in my day view to-do. Now let's talk about what happens when something goes wrong. I know that next week, August 11th, is my birthday, and I do not want to study that day. I can take these items and drag and drop them to a different day to study. I drag and drop these into different areas. I can do that for every item that's there. It also shows me which schedule those are for. You'll see right off the bat it gives me a recalculation of how much I have to study each day because of those items. So it does give you that flexibility. Now we can also look at it from a month view. Let's say I know that a certain week, say the 26th here, I want to take these and move things from the week view to a separate day also. We don't recommend that you go into items from here, but we give you the option to move them so that you can see the month view from the week view. If I click on one of these, I can go directly to that item. Let's go back to day view for a moment. When working through my day view, I want to click and work directly in this item. We bring it up in a new tab. One of the things we talked about with learners was that if I put it in a tab here, it's very small and doesn't give you an open view. On our learn pages, we have a lot more than just videos. Videos are what you want to read, look at, or listen to and study. But we also have high-yield notes available in a lot of them. We've got "dig deeper," where you can look further into items; the full transcript so you can see what's there; a summary; questions; you can get to flashcards and questions through here. This is another option to work through, and by going into a separate area, I can see everything a lot better but also easily go back here and see that I've completed that item. Same thing for questions. Questions start off in a separate tool. I look at it, choose my incorrect answer because I had paid no attention to what it was. Questions we do not automatically mark complete. If you remember earlier, I said videos are marked when you watch at least 80%. Questions we leave for you to mark complete on your own. The reason is we want you to be comfortable with what you've answered and be sure you know those items. You might guess the sum, not be very confident in it. We don't want to make the assumption that you are comfortable in those areas, so you manually mark them as being completed. As I complete more and more items, the time estimates will go down and my percentages will go up. Active schedules: this shows all my different schedules. It shows how much I've completed in each schedule and gives me the opportunity to either move to completed. For example, say I dropped the course. I can move it to completed, so I don't need it anymore at this time. Or I can edit it. If I edit it, it allows me to change not only my topics but also my resources, scheduling, or I can delete the schedule fully. That's another way, as you're going through, to make custom modifications for what you need to perform and do. When you complete a full day, you get a nice message congratulating you. When you do not complete a day and come back the following day, you get not a mean message, but a message that says, "Hey, we moved some things farther in the week for you." They're rescheduled. You don't have to worry about them. You don't have to go back and remember what you completed, what you didn't complete, or what you need to complete in the future. We automatically do that for you. Here's my congratulations: "You finished everything for the day." It lets me know that I've completed 4% of my overall schedule and I can be done for the day. If I wish to continue working, I can move on to other options and other areas and days to do extra work, but I'm not required to. I will stop there because that was a lot. Are there questions that I can answer or anything else I can show? If you give the chat, or if we can read the questions to you, I have several to share. Sure. Is there a way to change what time the study day ends and incomplete topics get automatically rescheduled to future dates? Mine automatically does so at 8:00 p.m. and I usually study later than that. Ours is at midnight, I believe GMT time. I will have to double-check that, but it is midnight. So anything after that would auto-reschedule. All righty. They also would like to ask if students that participated in the development process were asked if they're neurotypical or neurodivergent. Not at the outset, no. But some participants volunteer that information sometimes, but we don't ask it at the outset. All righty. Does adding the resource preference add to the amount of time you'll have to commit to studying a topic, or does the number of topics add to hours needed? It's a combination of both. If I go to edit my schedule here and add some different items, it will change my topics. It even tells me, "Hey, I've made some updates. You need to go to scheduling and change my schedule." Now it's telling me I need nine and a half hours a week for this. It estimates 41 hours a week for this content because I added a lot of content to that anatomy in a few days. The same thing happens with resources. Let's look here. Estimated eight hours of study per week. I go to my resources. I'm going to add flashcards and Complete Anatomy. Now it is nine hours of study per week. So it does add depending on whichever resources you add. Complete Anatomy models add 15 minutes each to give you some time to explore. Videos are the length of the video. Questions are an average time to answer that set of questions. Notes are like reading, and those are five minutes to go through. We made a few assumptions on some things like models and notes as far as what the time would be to add. Okay, thank you. Got a couple more. I work in shifts. How can I adjust my schedule? Can you define what you mean by shifts on that? I'm guessing they work overnight, day shift, swing shift. So they're trying to figure out how to adjust their schedule based on working different shift times. Okay. At this point, we do not have anything that schedules a specific time during the day, just how many hours in your day. So if I work a swing shift, I know that I have two hours on Monday to study. That's great. Where it comes into hard play is if you have two hours one Monday and none the next Monday and three the next Monday. That's where we recommend you go into your week views and manually move things from one day to another to recalculate those times. Yes, or alternatively, you can go into edit schedule and reset your hours for the week depending on your shift for that week. Yep, you could also do that. If I have nothing here and then a couple there to reset it, I can do that also. Okay. Got a kind of deep one here: This looks great and useful. Does it synthesize different topics or concepts to test learners by combining different content from different concepts? As in, it's always easier when it's learned in isolation. I think they're trying to figure out if it will cross over from topic to topic or if you're going to stay in anatomy and then pathology separately. We recommend having different schedules. You'll notice I have the anatomy schedule and then the Step 1 prep schedule. Everything in my anatomy schedule will show together, and everything in my USMLE Step 1 will show together. If I look at future days, depending on the amount of time each needs, you might get overlap where you have pathology over multiple days, also on your Step 1 prep because there's just so much to it; you couldn't do it in one day. But we do try to put all of the items together that we can. You'll see pharma, physiology here. We have your questions, flashcards, and videos all under that specific topic. The reason we did that was it gives you the ability within your schedule to see exactly what you're studying. Also, I can look at subtopics and say, "I only have 15 minutes between a class." Here, this electrical conduction of the heart should take me about eight minutes. Let me jump in and do that real quick. It gives me that opportunity a little better by breaking them up the way we do. Does that help answer the question? I think so. Got another one: Are the schedules created randomly or is it learning strategy based? Great question. At this point, it is kind of based on time and the topics you choose, kind of where they are in the navigation tree. Because we allow you to do topics and subtopics down to lipid-lowering modifications, for instance, we felt that from the individual class exam area, it was more important for you to be able to choose what you wanted to see and do than build a lot of the actual flow of everything through the learning style because it's really built for short-term. This is what I need to study for my next quiz or test. The preps and the templates are built off of our USMLE reviews and those go in order set by content of how a normal USMLE step prep would run as you were going through the test. Got it. One more: Is it possible for someone to turn off the auto rescheduling feature? Midnight GMT is fairly early on the East Coast and my daily tests often get rescheduled in the middle of doing them. It is not possible at this point. That's a great question. Let me first validate the time that it gets rescheduled. Instead of turning it off, would you be willing to say if we did midnight your local time, would that be okay? We're not in regular chat, but hopefully they'll reply somewhere here in the chat. Okay. We are done with questions for the moment. Excellent. Let's jump back to the presentation for a moment. We're getting close to the end of the hour. Very much appreciate you hanging out with us. All right, you can see it again here. Overall, we're here to help you make sure that you can say, "You've got this," at the end. I was talking to a second-year student recently, and they said, "When I fall behind, I just shut down. I don't open my study plan altogether because I feel like I've already failed." That hit me really hard, which is exactly why we built the auto rescheduling, the happiness prompts, the wellness prompts, and the pre-study schedules into the tool. The last thing you need when you're falling behind is a screen yelling at you saying you're falling behind. You need something that says, "You can do this. Keep going. Adjust. Move on." That's what we're attempting to do with this tool. Let's quickly recap the big ideas: The study schedule is personalized to how you learn best. It's flexible. It adapts to you when life gets busy. It's built to support both your productivity and your well-being. You're part of a community of learners just like you doing this. No one's doing it alone. We're working together. We want you to study smarter, stress less, and stay balanced in your life. We're not going to stop there. We have a few items we'd like to see coming soon to the study schedule. Again, this is where I need your help. I have the last poll for the day from me. We're looking at a few different things: calendar sync, so being able to sync your study schedule to a Google or Outlook calendar; doing a study schedule with a group and sharing that study schedule across a group; viewing the study schedule on your dashboard when you first go into the product and see everything that's in there; having a dashboard view of your study schedule; and badging. Getting badges for completing things and achievements. Poll three is up. I would like you to jump in, take a minute, and prioritize the ones that are there. This is how we want to make sure we do what's right for our learners and coming up in the future. Help us figure out what the next step should be. If there's something that's not listed that you think would be great for us to do, put it in the chat. We'd love to hear about it. Thank you again for coming on and listening to this and helping us make things even better. Aoife and I both appreciate you being here. Just remember again to access the recording of this webinar or to register for future webinars, visit our events page at osmosis.org/events on August 21st. Feel free to register today and save your seat. If you're interested in reading more of our blogs, want to watch our webinars on demand, or register for future events, you can also visit our blog at osmosis.org/blog. Helping current and future clinicians focus, learn, retain, and thrive. Learn more.