Back to School on Your iPhone
Continue your education with these apps.
For most of my life, I have learned new skills by reading. While books continue to provide value to readers, video has surpassed the written word when it comes to efficiently teaching new skills. If you're learning how to repair a leaky faucet, would you prefer to read a book on plumbing or watch a video that shows you how? Granted, not all online videos are well produced or even accurate, for that matter. Luckily, there's been a rise in online platforms that focus on professional video instruction.
With the COVID-19 era upon us, online learning has been elevated to a whole new level of daily acceptance among formal students and lifelong learners alike. Quarantine practices and social distancing have changed the dynamics of learning, prompting top-tier providers to evolve their services to overcome the challenges that previously made online learning less appealing than real-world classroom instruction. I spent hours testing and evaluating five of the most notable video learning companies —here's what I found.
Coursera
(Free with in-app purchases)
Founded in 2012 by two Stanford University computer science professors, Coursera is one of the few companies that allow participants to earn an accredited university degree from well-respected institutions like the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, and the University of Texas. As such, their courses consist predominantly of those you'd find in traditional college course catalogs. Arts and Humanities, Business, Engineering, Language, and Social Sciences are offered by actual university professors. They can contain, in some cases, 40 or more hours of instruction and include quizzes and supplemental learning materials. You can individually purchase or aggregate courses toward a complete degree.
For example, a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder costs $20,000.
Their iOS app is one of the best in this article, supporting floating video with variable playback, quizzes that properly format to mobile screens, real-time captions in various languages, and the ability to AirPlay to other video devices such as an Apple TV (and their Apple TV-optimized version works great as well). It's also one of the first to take advantage of iOS 14 features with a useful Home screen widget.
edX
(Free with in-app purchases)
Finding quality academic-level educational programming on YouTube is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Unless you know exactly what you're looking for by course name, institution, and professor, good luck discovering quality instruction. Fortunately, edX has curated these freely posted courses from top universities into a freemium model where you can view them for free and pay if you want or need an authentic certificate of completion for personal or professional reasons. Since the course videos are freely posted on YouTube, the quality varies from decent audiovisual production to slide shows accompanied by a mediocre microphone recording.
Since the content on edX is primarily YouTube videos, their iOS app is mainly an organized wrapper for the videos combined with a discussion forum and course catalog listing. There are built-in casting features, and I couldn't get the variable speed playback function working. At least the client offers the ability to download videos to the device, so you can view courses offline.
Khan Academy
(Free)
The PBS of the online education world, Khan Academy made a name for itself when founder
Sal Khan decided to post videos of his mathematics instruction on YouTube for his cousins. He quickly amassed a collection of helpful tutorials that caught educators' attention, as well as notable successful business leaders like Bill Gates. The surge in popularity and media attention made Khan Academy the premier nonprofit educational content site for high school and college curriculum subjects. For those like me who are well beyond their college years, the videos offer a nice refresher on math, science, and humanities. Mr. Khan continues to create videos using a Wacom tablet to create the same light pen drawing approach he's been using for more than ten years on his YouTube