Disappointed with Study.com (Discrete Mathematics)

[legenwait4itdary]

I have just completed Discrete Mathematics with Study.com and to say I am disappointed would be an understatement. The lessons were terrible. Explanations were poor. In many cases, I had to look elsewhere for explanations.

Some of the questions (quizzes) were worded in a very strange way. Some of the final exam questions were worded oddly too. The notation was confusing too. They cannot even get the matrices to show properly

But my biggest disappointment were the lessons. Really, really poorly done. I was lucky as I have done a lot of maths in the past so I was familiar with the content to some extend.

Not being able to use notes on the final makes little sense, imo. I mean it should not be about how much you can memorize but how you can apply this knowledge.

I got 81% on the final so I should be fine (I got two connection errors so, let's see if I need to do it again - the window did not close, though, and I was told to refresh which I did and was promptly reconnected). 

Anyways, I am not looking forward to the rest courses and I have to do a few

(The courses I took with SL (a few years ago and one recently) were much better.)

[scorpion]

Yup, pretty accurate review. As someone who used SDC for a Computer Science degree, it's easily the worst quality out of any of the credit providers I've used. Their only advantage is the big catalogue of courses.

The courses themselves are excruciatingly bad. The focus on having "cross-course" qualifying quizzes means that the content is nonsensical and completely out of place, since it prioritizes making them general enough to count for several different courses rather than flowing from a single course's content. The actual lessons are just thrown together by a variety of different authors, so there's no continuity and wildly varying quality page-by-page. And the VOs / animations are completely disconnected from the author of the content, so it's usually robotic and a very formulaic read-out that misses the entire gist of the written lesson. The quiz questions are also frequently and frustratingly wrong, but since the lesson content is one-shot from different authors, it's never corrected.

It's basically just a money printer of trash content that survives on the size of their ACE accreditations.

[spohara]

I may have had a thread deleted on this topic because I maybe went a bit overboard on my criticism. There are lessons in this course that can easily mislead someone not already well versed in the topic because they teach things that are flat out wrong. Get ready to do the same for architecture. I remember there being one course that I thought was decent out of the eight I took for CS, but I forget which it was. Good luck.

[Westslope Cutthroat]

Aside from legitimate complaints of discontinuity stemming from multiple authors, I found the Leading Organizational Change and Managerial Accounting courses to be okay. They cover way too much and serve as a bit of an outline for further reading.

On the other hand, the math and science courses are a real travesty.

The quiz and test questions are frequently utter nonsense.

The Advanced Technical Writing course is pretty good if you want a broad overview of formatting technical papers (not so hot on the content portion, though).

[bjcheung77]

Advanced Technical Writing seems like a good option for those who want to get into the groove with writing in a technical sense. I added that to my Study.com classes but haven't gone through the class yet. I'll work on it during the Spring Break and finish it then...

[studyingfortests]

I took courses that were all in the social sciences, and a couple of general ed (presentation skills in the workplace, for example) and for the most part, the quality I had was very different. Animations, while a little janky, generally very closely matched the material being talked about. In their research methods, the animations and video were often super helpful in understanding the concepts. It was definitely evident that multiple people had prepared and presented different talks in the courses, and sometimes the subject changes in a given course were a bit abrupt, but for the most part, it really wasn't bad, and it was rare that I had to go to another source to get clarification (though this did happen a couple of times.)

One course, their prep for ECE Research Methods, got me an A on the ECE exam (which, honestly, shocked me), and completed about 90% of SDC's own lower level Reserach Methods class, so I was able to "double dip" and count the credit for both courses at TESU. (Of course, ECEs no longer exist, so unfortunately that option no longer exists.)

With as many different classes as they offer, it makes sense that there would be some that be not-so-great. And perhaps I lucked into the decent ones. But at least from my experience, I'd say overall, it was pretty good, especially compared with the materials from competitors like OnlineDegree or even Coopersmith.

[bluebooger]

...
But at least from my experience, I'd say overall, it was pretty good, especially compared with the materials from competitors like ... Coopersmith.

link please to your post about your experience with coopersmith