This Comprehensive edX Review will help you decide if its worth e-learning at edX.
Introduction to edX
edX is one of the top e-learning platforms which offers 2,500+ interactive online courses from the world’s most renowned colleges, universities, and organizations. With the most famous subject areas being data analysis, statistics, humanities, engineering and computer science. Most courses offered at edX give the opportunity to achieve a verified certificate.
Now, you know what edX is and what it provides to the e-learners all across the world. After having a general idea of what edX is, let’s talk about background and other significant features of edX.
Background of edX
A few scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard founded edX in 2012. Only a year later, the platform had gained more than a million subscribers. With the aim of becoming a leading Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) provider in the field, currently edX is offering professional education courses in partnership with some of the most significant corporations (including Microsoft) and allowing people to enroll “anywhere, anytime”.
After discussing about the background, our next step in this review will be to discuss if its worth enrolling in an edX e-learning course or not.
| Pros: • Industry’s Well-established e-learning platform, • A large number of courses to choose from, • Partnered with world’s prestigious colleges, universities and organizations, like Microsoft, Harvard and Berkeley. • Many courses are free for students, • 14-day Refund Policy, • Accredited certificates are awarded after completing a course, • Easy to navigate, • University-level courses. |
| Cons: • No proper course structure, • Lack of topics like film making or baking, • Some courses are too expensive, • The platform may frequently crash. |
edX.org Courses
edX offers a large variety of learning options in more than 30 subject areas including engineering, law, science, business, artificial intelligence (AI), history, public health, computer science, and social sciences. An edX learner can select and get enrolled in any course/ program including:
- “One-off courses” for students to enroll at their own leisure;
- “Global Freshmen Academy” for university students of first-year;
- “XSeries Program” for students to get deeper knowledge of a specific subject.
- “Professional Certificates” for students aiming to meet the requirements of present job market, online post-graduate degree;
- “MicroMasters Program” to help students improve their existing skills even further;
So now you know that edX is extremely rich in terms of the number of courses that it offers to the students. Since it’s just a review of the edX, you can check the complete list of courses at the university’s website. After discussing the Intro, background and courses offered at the edX, I’ m sure you can’t wait to find out about the pricing of courses offered at the edX e-learning platform.
Pricing
edX provides a large variety of courses with varying prices according to the type of course. You can choose to learn a course for free; for that you won’t receive a verified certificate and won’t get access to the graded tasks. If you wish to enroll in a verified course, the pricing ranges between $50 and $300 (which is certainly expensive). Some advocates justify the high prices of edX courses by stating that the high price is due to university-level courses. But, considering the issues in the quality of content and platform’s functionality; it’s easy to judge why so many learners are still wondering if its worth enrolling at edX course or not.
I am sure that you would find the above discussion helpful in providing you with the most significant and up-to-date information about the pricing of edX courses.
Ease of Use
After visiting the home page the first impression you get about edX is, it’s a university’s website. I feel it was company’s intention too; as they offer university- level professional courses.
It’s actually very simple and provides to the point information; avoiding any unwanted pop-ups or trivial information. You can easily find sections for each course, the list of partners, the search bar; everything is easily accessible and right in front of you! It’s good if you are looking to find something quickly, or if you don’t want to waste your time on irrelevant options. In this way, I agree with many users of edX that the website is easy to use.
You can directly access the “course” section or explore various courses and degrees that the platform offers. Just select the course of your choice- anything from philosophy and arts to finance and economics. Hence, edX’s user interface is well-organized and intuitive. It’s very easy to use and easily takes you to whatever you’re looking for.
After opening a course page, you get a short description, general information, an introductory video and other important information about the course (such as price, length and language of the course etc.)
It’s super easy to get yourself registered at the edX. The layout and design of its platform are intuitive and clean. Following are the steps you need to take to register at the edX:
1. Open a browser and type edx.org
2. Click on the menu in the top left corner.
3. Click on ‘Register.’
4. Add your details such as full name, public user name, email, password and region of residence.
5. Click on ‘Create Account.’
I’m sure that you would find the above description useful for registering at the edX.
But, what I find unattractive was how the course description is presented on the website. The format is not very appealing and interesting; all that you see is a lot of details.
The large number of students enrolling everyday at the platform determines its success. No doubt, there are a lot of factors that make a website popular amongst users, but things like navigation, the friendliness of the user interface, and all other options in between play a major role in building the first impression about an e-learning platform.
I hope that you found the above details about the ease of use of edX, to be interesting and informative. Let’s talk about the quality of content at edX.
Quality of Content
edX proclaims that because it offers professional and university-level programs, it ensures the top quality of programs and courses offered to its learners (for this reason the “verified” flair is present on most of the programs thumbnails).
I ensure you that you may also get hooked the very first time you visit the edX website; however, in this age of internet the word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire. And, for EdX you find conflicting reviews of its users about the quality of content. Some users claim that at edX they found and learned more than what they have paid for and what they expected to find and learn.
On the other hand, when some learners are asked about the legitimacy of edX, they say a big ‘No‘ in answer! Many of the edX reviews exclaim that the courses are of very low quality – whether due to the technical issues or the instructors that teach at the platform.
Some users mentioned that the courses are poorly constructed, it is difficult to see feedbacks and there are many spelling and grammatical errors etc. Also, the platform frequently crash – users of Mac iOS have faced this problem the most.
Considering edX as a website hosting as large array of courses as it does, it wouldn’t be fair to generalize and proclaim that “all edX courses are bad” or “all edX courses are not good”.
Also, edX proclaims that it offers the courses and programs of the top most quality because it offers university-level courses, and there is a “verified” flair on thumbnails of many courses which shows the authenticity and reliability of a specific program. With these aspects in mind, edX needs to work on their platform’s content quality and fix the technical issues at the website.
It is a famous saying that ‘Content is King.’ I am sure that after reading the above discussion you would find an idea about the content quality at edX platform for e-learning. Let me share what I discovered about learning at edX.
Experience of learning
After the above discussion, it is must to talk about the learning experience at edX. In fact, everyone has a different thing to say about reviewing the e-learning experience at edX.
While it is true that everyone has a different experience to share and, many factors are considered when you talk about learning at an educational platform. One thing I have noticed that people either give extremely positive or extremely negative comments about edX, there is no middle ground. Some people are exceptionally happy with their learning and some are exceptionally disappointed. It’s really strange and I didn’t find any other e-learning platform with so much difference in people’s opinions about it.
After reading the above description, I’m sure you can easily see that even if an e-learning platform has high-end server performance, world-renowned professionals, state-of-the-art visualizations and graphics but if its content lacks in quality, people may simply reject it.
Conclusion
After reading the above discussion, you can say that although edX is accepted and widely seen as one of the most significant e-learning platforms, it still needs to improve a lot of things at the website.
All in all, edX provides university-level courses, a large number of features, and is extremely easy to navigate. It is one amongst the most recommended e-learning platforms which offers a great place to develop new skills or enhance the existing ones.