edX Reviews 1,343

I signed up for Basic Spanish certificate course. When I started the course I read somewhere that the course was 7 weeks long but the course information said the course would be ending in 3 weeks. I emailed for clarity and Becca responded and told me that the course would end in 3 weeks and offered to switch me to another class. I emailed back to get clarity about why the class was ending in 3 weeks when the websites says the course ins 7 weeks. Her response to me was basically, " I offered to switch you to a new class. Do you want to switch or not?" not in that language but that was what she meant. She never explained the timing of the class.
I responded again and asked, "how do I cancel the class and get a refund?" Ten minutes later she emailed me back a cancellation receipt with no other response.
Customer Service agents apparently not be so customer friendly at edX- beware.

I've done 3 online courses through edX and the platform makes it easier to navigate through modules.

I am reviewing the edX class, 7.00X Introduction to biology Secret of Life with Eric Lander, the EdX class from MIT. The class is not for beginners as advertised. It assumes you have a Lot of preexisting knowledge. They do not factor in all the right questions you get after watching lectures by Lander, towards your certificate. There were two additional final exams besides part I and II for a total of four exams (this came as a surprise), and they are labeled as "ungraded" yet if you skip them you can't "unlock" the next exam. The interface is broken. It told me I wasn't able to receive a certificate but if you refresh the page, it suddenly "counts" your progress and lets you proceed. MANY questions on the final exams were related to things never mentioned in class and I have documentation with screenshots. I also have documentation of other online classmates leaving comments that the questions being asked assume you aren't a beginner even if the class is advertised as for beginners with no existing knowledge. The class should prepare the learner for the questions, meaning, the amount of preparation should equal or exceed the level of difficulty of questions, but in this class there is a great disparity between the preparation given and the style of questions.

The only reason why I am giving two stars instead of one is because Eric Lander is an engaging professor in the lectures.

They deal you low blows with redundantly worded questions, questions about stuff which was never discussed in class, and the final exam part 2 focused way too much on fruit fly genetics which, (I have documentation), were explained quite superficially and explained in passing several months before the final. They screw you over. The style of questions and how to solve them was never shown in class regarding fruit fly genetics. They again assume you're "already" some expert scientist with fruit fly knowledge. Like, they give you some formula for calculating the progeny of fruit flies but don't explain in depth. They don't really give you the tools to succeed. They throw you in the ocean and say "swim!" without first taking you through the kiddie pool with flotation devices. Like, the style of questions in the finals were not shown in class!!
Overall, the difficulty of the questions and the preparation given in class are MILES APART, a TOTAL DISPARITY.

Finally, They know the class is brutal even for an 3.78 Cumulative GPA student as myself, yet they take an "average" of both finals rather than add the total of one to the total of the other. I had near 100% answered correctly questions in all the segments after lectures, so you'd think after I spent $450.00 in total for the class, that I would have a certificate but they dealt me dirty and I learned a lot but have no certificate to show! A complete waste of time they took my money and I have no certificate even though I see no reason as to why. I am an excellent, hard working student and independent researcher with her own STEM CELL PATENT in biology!!! There was Way too much emphasis on the fruit fly genetics, with poor preparation given to students. Not everyone will go work with fruit flies, hahahaha. screw this class. Also, there were several segments that could EASILY be an entire CLASS in and of itself. Save yourself don't take it. 9 months later and -$450.00 less in my pocket, I have no paper in my hand to show for my hard work. I am extremely disappointed and feel cheated out of my money. I could go on on and on with how ripped off I feel! I have no comfort for my broken heart. I deserve that certificate!

The course content is pretty good and the delivery methods are good as well. I only give 2 stars because first of all you cant receive your certificate unless your peers review your assignments, which can take weeks and weeks and weeks. They say you can contact staff from the course but they never reply. Further, the UI design is horrible and partially not functioning (when trying to upload ID). Also, the courses are fairly expensive and you can find the same content on other learning platforms for half of the price. So the idea of this platform is great but still requires a lot of work to make it smooth for users.

Love that you are making courses more accessible. I just wish the cost for cert comes with discount option for students

The concept is amazing, but the courses are boring and unimaginative. Like 90%of the courses on there are parts business programmes. It would be nice to see a lot more traditional subjects on there. It's as if they think that learning is all about optimising profits for whatever company you work for and no other knowledge matters. In a sense it is kind of tragic to see what edX has become.

If you are doing the Harvard Computer Science courses like CS50 because you want to learn how to code - they are useless.

You can get more in 15 minute YouTube videos than these courses

EDX itself emails me all the time and has no way to review courses. I wonder how many bad reviews the courses would have if these were visible like every other modern website. If you go on YouTube, you'll see everyone's comments, how many likes it has, how many views it has

EdX looked like a great option to further my education, but now I'll never know...
Upon looking into it and trying to find classes, I got BOMBARDED with upwards of 5-10 emails a day! The amount of spam was staggering! I would love to look into it more and would be happy to pay for their services, but their AGGRESSIVE add marketing campaigns are too overwhelming. I can't decipher the junk from the important details. EdX! Please fix this!

The only problem I faced with document verification. The camera was in mirror mode while capturing the photo. That's the thing that annoyed me so much.
In addition, courses are good, explained well.

I didnt want the course, because it wasnt my level, so i got my money back after 3 weeks.

In general, I am very content with the quality and structure of the courses. Two weeks ago, I have been offered a refund so I can switch to another course (within the same professional certificate path), however have not heard anything back since then. I have responded twice to accept the offer and for further instructions, but have been ignored. This is a very poor customer service, and I would never have expected that from an institution like edX.

only one complaint, multiple choice questions with drop down boxes that did not work thus unable to complete exam but this was rectified at the end.
All in all a great course with a lot to learn and very helpful information

I did the PowerBi Course (Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI from DavisonX), paid the fee for it as well. Overall i was happy with the content and what i got from it. I went from knowing nothing on the subject to the point where i was able to build a whole setup at work with the skills i learnt.

For me i approached the course as a "how to" rather than degree credits etc. So i was less worried about scores etc more that i understood it and how could i apply it.

There were some points where the video has mistakes and others have clearly flagged this as an issue but nothing has been done about it which is disappointing. likewise the videos were better to watch on youtube rather than on the edx native video player.

For my purposes though the course was good. i am confident around using powerBI now.

I also attempted an R stats course but after auditing it, i realised that this was not what i was looking for.

I've completed several classes with edX. The content of the courses was excellent, but there are some serious flaws with the website and the support team that leads to a poor user experience for learners. This experience means it will be unlikely I will purchase any future courses from them.

First, the website is simply not designed well:
- It's difficult to browse for new course titles.
- You cannot save courses for later.
- The "Dashboard" lists all of the courses you've taken, regardless of whether the course was completed. If you un-enroll from a course, it won't appear on the Dashboard, but you cannot take it the course again until the next "session" or if you pay (maybe).
- Courses cannot be archived.
- If you complete a course, you cannot share achievement page that shows up after finishing the course.
- There is also no link to the main course page, where you originally enrolled.

Another website flaw is that after a course has expired, you can no longer view the home screen for that course. The home screen is the page you go after enrolling. That page has all the dates you need to know for the course, so if you no longer have access, you cannot get the dates. The problem here is that although a course has expired, there is still time to upgrade to a verified certificate. But since each course has its own deadline, you need to access the home screen for each course to learn this information.

The support staff leaves a lot to be desired. In my case, I took a few classes but did not upgrade while I considered if it was worth the money, which is/was limited. Eventually, the course expired, but the website still gave me the option to upgrade. I wanted to know how much time I had left to consider my options, before my access to upgrade would expire, but the site does not provide dates for when this post-course/pre-upgrade period ends. So I contacted their support team to learn how I could find out when my course would expire. After submitting my question, I had a 14+ email exchange with someone on their support who repeatedly told me I could "upgrade to the verified track by paying the fee" or enroll in the the next session. At one point, they said I could view the course's homepage to find this information. But when I asked for an explanation on how to view the course homepage after my access to a course has expired, they support staff began sending progressively worse messages. Instead of addressing their own suggestion, they simply copied and pasted responses from their FAQ, no regard to how well the response actually answered my question. They even left a final message that was literally an overview of how edX works, "edX is a non-profit massive open online course provider...." Condescending, in other words. There is still no date available on the dashboard, which would answer my question. It's basic sales psychology. The least they could say is, "Sorry that feature isn't available right now", or something remotely helpful along those lines.

My conclusion is that when their support staff cannot answer the question, they've been given orders to not provide answers outside of a narrow set of responses, regardless of how well the response provides value or a solution.

The other thing that doesn't make sense is their enrollment/expiration policy. For instance, un-enrolling from a course means you cannot re-enroll until the course is offered again. However, when you view a course's overview page (found after searching), it will show you that the course begins on whatever date is today. But, if you go to your Dashboard, you will see no record of having ever taken the course. There are other issues I could go into, but those are some of the main errors I've seen.

It's a shame some really world-class universities are associated with a mediocre support team and poorly designed website. The content is really fantastic, but dealing with the website and the support team is very challenging.

The courses:
I have done a course with Harvard and one with Smithsonian.
Both times the content was thin and unstructured.
I have seen more professional content by some YouTubers than I have on these courses.
The study time estimates are a complete joke: one course had 7 hrs to 35 hrs study (in itself not very helpful). Would you believe it had 60 hours of film to watch, 20 recommended books and 15 assignments to submit? Did I mention you had to have a blog or create a website for it and do social media posting at every step? More like 100 hours of work minimum.

The platform:
- The tech is at best tedious and at worse not working at all.
- Moving from one page to another takes time and it is the only way to get an overview of the course (to gage your study time).
- Some parts of the course are missing from the syllabus and will only appear as you progress (too bad if you are approaching the deadline)
- For some courses, the units will not mark as complete (even if you have done all the work and submitted 5 times). If you get in touch with the helpdesk, they respond "it will not affect you, the teacher doesn't look at that"... then you check their FAQ and see that that it is totally the opposite: because your units aren't showing as complete you are not going to get graded at all.
Then you check Trustpilot and see that other's work never got graded and people never got their certificate, despite contacting the helpdesk AND the relevant university.
After a second ticket raised with the helpdesk and 10 emails, i'm still trying to get the entirety of my work graded.

Essentially these courses are a Windows of marketing for the universities and institutions on the platform. They'll even use you to do loads of social media posting for them as mandatory to submit your coursework.
If all you want is a certificate from a prestigious institution (and you are lucky with the technology and are unconcerned about learning or being treated as a human by the helpdesk), then this platform may be for you.
If you are serious about learning and would like some respect, it is not.

I added an extra star for the effort the teachers went through to record the lecture videos, because the visuals help with learning the concepts. But that's about where it ends.
This was my second attempt at completing a particular course (free version) relevant to my current university studies. During the first attempt, I admittedly didn't manage my time well, and I only completed 3 of the 6 weeks before I lost my access to the course. I was bummed but I moved on. Months later, I see the same course has become available again. I had to start from scratch and do all the tests again from week 1 (I want to achieve a passing grade). I knew the due date was 3 May, so I worked hard to get to the end of the course this time. As I logged on for what I planned to be my last session just before 8am on 3 May, I found I no longer had access. Apparently EdX (in contrast to the rest of the world) defines a 3 May closing date as a "midnight on 2 May" due date. This is no doubt part of their plan to force people to buy the (very overpriced) 'verified certificate', because it's the only way we won't lose all our progress, and most people do use that last day to complete these online courses.
I'm so frustrated. I've poured HOURS of valuable time into this course (3 'weeks' the first time and 5 'weeks' the second time) and I have squat to show for it. Not even the meaningless free certificate. I emailed the support and begged to give me just two more hours of access, since their due date was very misleading. They said no of course. Then I applied for the financial support to pay for the verified certificate, which they rejected.
I wouldn't recommend EdX to anyone. I have completed free and verified courses on Coursera and I haven't had any issues.

To note, I had to pick a star to submit.... but they deserve no stars.

It is advisable to avoid this edX.

As you can see from these comments on Trustpilot, there has been no effort from edX to even address any of these comments listed, which shows you no care for its audience.

I signed up for a course which I thought would be enjoyable as these courses are not accreditable at all so the level of knowledge should not be of a degree or up, however, the teacher mark paper-based on THEIR level rather than the students level.

In the end, these courses are mostly marked by other students which are not knowledgeable in the background of the course topic. They are the ones which grade you.

There is supposedly a teacher who looks over your course work but I think they are robots as the feedback was the same from the student.

There is no resubmission either, you cant talk to any teachers for support and the admin is a nightmare.

Their response is about as fast as a snail.

The admins also are not educated nor trained on the course so they say something which they THINK is right but is not.

The journey with edX is so stressful, rather than enjoyable and a lot of it is very misleading as well only when you come out to the end do you find out.

While the course might look appealing, my suggestion is to go straight to the Uni themselves and do the course there.

Really enjoyable experience with this. I found I enjoy the Harvard classes the most - Wasn't very committed until I figured that out. Really appreciate the free content and the use of videos. Felt like I was in the classroom.

SCAM ALERT!! This company is performing fraudulent advertising and has no abiltiy to be contacted or held accountable. I paid for a class advertised as "Berkley School Of Music" curriculum. I paid for the class and created an account, but was never provided access.

When I attempt to sign on it says:

"In order to sign in, you need to activate your account".

However, no email was ever sent and the link directs me to customer support but only goes to an FAQ.

There is no actual customer support phone #, email, or chat. I never thought this would happen since I am used to taking online classes from other sites like Udemy etc. This was a real shocker.

They took my money and disappeared. BEWARE!!

I did many courses and a program on EdX and I was overall happy with it. Lately I had a technical issue and had to contact the support team. They replied the next day with a solution. Definitely satisfying service and the courses' content were great.