EdX has received the top spot in PC Magazine‘s Education & Reference Comparison Chart, earning 4.5 out of 5 stars and an editor rating of “excellence”.
PC Magazine has commended edX for “its welcoming platform for faculty and students”, “innovative assessments”, “free honor certificates”, “growing catalog of excellent courses” and its open source platform (Open edX), that “enables developers to build and share assessment modules”. “Faculty ought to appreciate the platform’s open-source code, generous support, and institutional backing.”
IBL has extracted other ideas from PC Magazine’s review:
- “EdX offers both self-paced and timed classes. Its courses possess features of online education, including discussion forums (often moderated by faculty and teaching assistants); machine-graded multiple-choice assessments; self and peer assessments; and, of course, video lectures (typically divided into segments of twenty minutes or less).”
- “Home institutions do not grant credit to their edX courses. For example, I can audit The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours class for free, but if I want course credit, I will have to enroll in a semester-long Harvard Extension course, which costs between $1250 (for noncredit or undergraduate credit) or $2200 (for graduate credit).”
- “Participants will spend most of their time in Courseware, which begins with a left-aligned overview. Lessons are divided into sections, sections into learning sequences, and learning sequences into units. Participants navigate through units using arrows at the top of the screen. I found this process somewhat inorganic at first, and I would have preferred something like Coursera’s auto-progression; however, once I adjusted to it, I actually preferred the edX structure because it allowed you to anticipate forthcoming content via the object icons.”
- “edX offers the most versatile toolkit. In addition to multiple-choice, tick boxes, and fill-in-the-blanks, edX supports specialized tools such as circuit simulators and chemical bond simulators. DemoX showcases some of the most ingenious assessments, including those designed for the K-12 market (e.g. a drag and drop tool for counting) and introductory sciences (an interactive periodic table).”
