Although I preferred the look and feel of Coursera I felt that the Edx platform functioned better for my learning style.
Both courses had videos and grammar lists but the adjustable speed function and the hyperlinked transcripts I felt were a vital resource. Within the grammar section of the Edx course they also had short MP4 clips with the pronunciation.
The course within Edx definitely uses all the resources available to it – Videos, podcasts, mp3, pdfs, etc. and while this might come across a little busy looking I much preferred having the choice and the freedom to choose what worked for me.
I wanted to keep the language theme going when choosing a course from Coursera so that I could compare like for like. Unfortunately I couldn’t find another beginners Italian course but I found an intermediate French course that I thought I might be able to attempt. As it turns out my French is not as good as I imagined it to be so the content of this course was a bit too advanced for me so even though I was unable to understand the instructions I was able to navigate the course to get a feel for the technology.
Functionality
I felt that the overall look and feel of Coursera is clean and fresh. The sections are laid out into weeks rather than units and gives an estimated time that it will take to complete.
Usability
Within each week section there are videos and readings. The transcript for the video is listed underneath the video but I don’t think this is helpful as in order to read it you are not able to watch the video as you have to scroll down the page. The transcript is not hyperlinked and you can’t adjust the speed.
There are also lists of grammar as well as comprehension exercises that are easily accessed from the menu at the side. All of these individual sections are clearly labelled as to what is contained behind each link.
What is a MOOC? A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course – is a flexible way to learn for free. There are many MOOCs out there on the web from Edx to Udemy. For the purpose of the following posts I decided to use Edx for the first course I did as it was where I found the course that I really wanted to do. I used Coursera for a second course although I didn’t get too far into this course I was able to get an idea of the functionality and useability of the resource.
I decided to do an online language course as languages were always a big interest of mine but I’ve put learning a new one on the long finger for so long. After visiting Lake Garda last year for my holiday I fell in love with the Italian language and found that I picked up the basics quite easily during the week I was there. I used Edx and Coursera to find what was out there.
In this post I will discuss my experience using Edx – what I thought worked or didn’t and the usability and functionality of the tool.
First things first, navigating the search function was quite easy to do – it was broken down in to many different topics in the menu on the left while there were decent size tiles in the centre of the page with images to match the content of the course. One issue I had with the functionality if this section was that if you click into a course to view the details and press the back arrow on the browser it doesn’t bring you back to where you were on the menu – it brings you back to the beginning which is quite frustrating if you had been browsing far down the list.
The next step was signing up for the course which was easy as I had already signed up for an account.
Functionality
The home page of the course has a list of what they refer to as units and each unit has a drop down list with a link to the different sections within that unit.
Above the list of units there is a link to a Welcome video. I clicked on the Welcome video and was greeted by a woman with an Italian accent who talked me through how to navigate the software. I was excited to start this learning journey :).
Each section within the unit was further broken down into different types of learning from videos and podcasts to good old vocabulary lists.
One of my favourite things about this course was the ability to go through the different sections to suit my own learning style. I could go through the vocabulary list first or watch the videos.
Usability
I decided to start with the videos for the first section. At the beginning of the section you can print off the transcripts so you can follow it along with the video. The speed on the video was adjustable by the user so you could speed up or slow down to listen closer to pronunciation. The transcript for the scene scrolls alongside the video and all the individual lines are hyperlinked – once clicked on these links will bring you back to the corresponding section of the video. I found these 2 functions of the video immensely helpful for learning.
Navigating through all the sections in each unit was mostly seemless. I think these icons could have benefitted from having a little bit of text on them or possibly been a little more obvious as to what was under each link but other than that navigating through and using the various different technologies within each section was very straight forward.
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