edX: Courses by Harvard MIT for iPhone

Free education app for free college courses

edX: Online Courses by Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, IBM is an educational mobile app for the massive open online course provider, edX. Developed by edX itself, this handy app allows you to take your courses and classes with you, wherever you may be. It lets you work on your quizzes and assignments without having to switch back to a computer, so if you’re traveling or constantly on the go, then getting this mobile version is recommended if you’re a registered edX student.

Learn online

A massive open online course— or MOOC—provider, edX is a nonprofit organization founded by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in 2012. It hosts over 2,000 online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. This means that anybody in the world can access these free courses just by registering to edX and becoming an online student. 

edX runs on the free Open edX open-source software platform and allows research conducted on how people use it. You can expect college courses from universities and institutions such as Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Microsoft, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Wharton, and even Oxford. Thus, if you’re looking into having online college education instead, you can try on edX for size.

Off your computer

The edX mobile app allows you to keep learning even when not in front of your PC. Similar to how the website version works, edX lets you enroll in your chosen course from the thousands of varied selections they offer. These courses all come from different schools so you can decide which one you’d like to learn from, and you can cross-enroll between school courses this way. There is a myriad of choices available to you—from computer science courses to history. 

You don’t need to physically attend classes somewhere anymore if you take these online courses. Some courses, unfortunately, will need live demonstrations of your skills but you can practice those on your own, as well. edX gives out quizzes and exams as you progress through your course’s curriculum. There are videos you can watch, professors you can talk to, and forums you can join to meet other students and talk about your classes. 

edX even offers students the chance to earn professional certificates, if they enrolled to get those. However, the app still has some drawbacks that can be annoying in online classes. For one, the quizzes can’t be completed offline. The answers sometimes being erased when you lose your connection. Another is the fact that you can’t access your course texts when you’re offline either.

Needs more polish

edX is no doubt a great learning gateway that’s accessible to anyone. There are free courses that don’t hide any extra cost, and you can get some others for a price if you really want—especially for the certificates. edX is a joint effort by various prestigious schools, so it can be trusted and is a successful venture into the world of online education. However, some of its features could still use some polishing, especially for the mobile app.