Who says education needs to be within closed doors and expensive. For everyone who hasn’t got the time to strut around a college campus paying exorbitant fees to get an education, there’s Coursera, the app that promises to bring you free online courses on your mobile phone.
Coursera App Brings Free Online Courses to Mobile
Coursera offers courses from over 100 top-tier global universities and institutions for anyone who wishes to get a meaningful education, right from their mobile device. The app lets you browse through various courses, watch lectures from top instructors, complete assignments and get an education right from the comfort of your environment.
You will of course, need to have an account with Coursera to get started, and you can do that right from your mobile phone. Just enter your name, email address and password and you’re on your way to a first class educational experience.
Coursera has the cleanest interface I have seen in an educational app. The main menu comprises of your courses, search functionality, browse, downloads, feedback, FAQ and logging off options. A simple swipe will hide the menu and display the Home screen, which comprises a list of all the courses you have undertaken or completed.
I hit the Browse menu to take a look at the courses there were on offer and found a healthy mix of arts, sciences, engineering, food & nutrition, law, math, music, film and a whole lot more. Selecting a top category, takes to you a page listing topics for study.
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When you select a topic for study, you will receive information about the course such as its duration, date of commencement, University of study, language of study, workload, overview, objective of study and the names of the instructors. To join a course, simply hit the Join button and agree to honor the HONOR Code or list of rules specified in the course. You can tap on a university name to see what courses are being offered by it.
If you find a course that interests you but its not due to start in some time you can sign up for notifications and that will be displayed in your Courses dashboard.
Currently Coursera offers over 600 courses in 20 subjects. You can watch lectures, check out the course material, and work on certain assignments using the app. However, certain assignments such as those involving peers or forums can only be done via the website on your PC to get full credits.
If you like to take a lecture with you for offline viewing, simply hit the arrow button next to the video title to download them individually. Or just tap the top right menu to download all videos on a page. The built-in download manager lets you manage your downloads without any fuss. The app lets you takes courses not only in English, but also in a number of other languages including Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian.
If you find yourself just not ready for a particular course you recently enrolled yourself in, no worries, the un-enroll option lets you opt out of it.
The Coursera app is the ideal companion to the official Coursera.org site. If you have a device running Android 4.0 and have a penchant for learning, do check out the app. It’s a fantastic resource and its available for free.
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