Execute Program’s progress mechanics emphasize completing new lessons over increasing recall duration

Lessons on Execute Program have four states:

1. Locked (when one or more prerequisites is not Learned; see Execute Program’s lessons don’t unlock until you’ve successfully reviewed their prerequisites)
2. Unlocked (when all prerequisites are Learned but you haven’t worked through that lesson yet)
3. Active (when you’ve worked through a lesson but haven’t reviewed it)
4. Learned (when you’ve reviewed a lesson at least once)

The presentation tops out at “Learned,” which is achieved when the reader has reviewed a lesson only once. It makes no distinction between demonstrated retention of one month and one day.

This is the course dashboard on Execute Program:

That top circle represents the proportion of lessons in the course which are Learned. So you “finish” the course when all lessons are Learned, even if their SRS interval is just a day or two.

This makes for an interesting contrast with Quantum Country, in which progress is all about reaching increasing levels of recall durability.

One interesting consequence of this framing is that when users have reviewed all lessons in a course once, they broadly feel like they’re “done.” They’re still getting review notifications, but the UI doesn’t associate any meaningful goal to those reviews, so many users are likely to churn at that point.

Q. What constitutes “finishing” a lesson on Execute Program?
A. Working through it and reviewing it at least once.

Q. How does the emphasis of Execute Program’s progress mechanic differ from that of Quantum Country?
A. It emphasizes initial progress through the course’s lessons over long-tail progress increasing SRS intervals.