Some weeks ago, I sought advanced online education platforms to tweak my knowledge of a few subjects. There are several great ones, such as Lynda.com or Video2Brain, but I was looking for a more academic approach with a tad of interactivity. Luckily, that day, I came across edX and enjoyed their offerings.
edX is a program run by several prestigious universities that offers online courses across many subjects and makes them available on-demand and worldwide. I have signed up for my first course already, the GSE2x “Leaders of Learning” by HarvardX, and I really enjoy it thus far. Every week a new part is brought online, but if you don’t have much time in a particular week, you can always continue where you left off later on.
I talked about this to my friend Diana Adams, who tweeted it a little later. Many people did not know about edX after that tweet but liked it. I wanted to share my opinion of this article with you further.
Did you know you can take free online courses hosted by Harvard, MIT and Berkeley? See https://t.co/hHXpe7nbfv (thank you @ChristopherIsak)
— Diana Adams (@adamsconsulting) August 7, 2014
What’s happening on the platform?
So, what do you get on this platform speaking of user experience? For me, it was the first online education portal made available to the public entirely free of cost by universities. That’s a great step forward in mass education. The courses are all online and provide you with mixed media with guidelines to go through them. They offer high-quality videos of your professor, quizzes, written resources, visual explanations, and, when applicable, even virtual 3D models, all on demand and at your own pace.
When you start a course, there is a bit of form to complete, but it’s evident that those only serve to improve the whole edX system, so I happily completed them.
Subjects
There is a great range of subjects available, not only IT-related matters, to counter popular belief in online education. Check out all those great topics currently available:
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Architecture
- Art & Culture
- Biology & Life Sciences
- Business & Management
- Chemistry
- Communication
- Computer Science
- Economics & Finance
- Education
- Electronics
- Energy & Earth Sciences
- Engineering
- Environmental Studies
- Food & Nutrition
- Health & Safety
- History
- Humanities
- Law
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy & Ethics
- Physics
- Science
- Social Sciences
- Statistics & Data Analysis
Certifications
Some courses offer different types of certifications when you have completed them. You can be proud of this and potentially add it to your CV or LinkedIn profile or hand it to your employer’s HR department. Until today, edX has provided more than 100,000 certificates to proud edX students.
Discussion Board
The classes also have a discussion board attached for the students and the curators to interact with each other. That works best when you are in a course currently ‘live’ and launching new parts every week. You can exchange thoughts with real people and ask or answer questions that might be going around. Online education is unique; you can meet people and make friends with the same interests.
Courses
There are more than 200 courses currently available, and they keep adding new ones across all the subjects listed above. Below, I have picked a few choices that I considered checking into because I thought they were exciting.
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CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science
- UT.3.02x: Age of Globalization
- GG101x: The Science of Happiness
- 15.S23x: U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self
- FC-01x: Future Cities
- CS1156x: Learning From Data
- CAMSx: Computing: Art, Magic, Science
- 200+ others and always new courses in the overview
Charter Members
The founders of edX are MIT and Harvard University. Beyond that, there are many other great contributing organizations, partners, and supporters. You can check the full list at this link.
Summary
We think that edX offers great services for educating yourself. The platform is very modern and fun to learn with. You are not tied to a schedule and can work at your own time and pace. For many courses, there is no cost involved, and when you finish a course, you can get a certification in many courses.
Beyond the actual things you have learned, the certification proves useful, for instance, when added to your CV. It shows a potential future employer that you are interested and self-motivated in improving yourself without someone telling you to do it. That’s a very nice plus point when considering new staff. There is also a blog and a news page if you want to check the latest. edX: I strongly recommend checking it out and trying a course.
YouTube: edX – How it Works
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Image credit: edX
