As a parent, who is also a consumer of online learning, Study.com brings the best of all worlds for homeschooling needs. While it comes at a higher price point ($60/month), Study.com has an advanced curriculum and overtakes other alternatives, such as Acellus.
Rating: 4/5
Although Study.com is the most expensive, it is also the best homeschool curriculum I’ve found. Prior to Study.com, my son was taking several different curriculums (online and offline). What I immediately noticed was that Study.com was teaching a more advanced curriculum per grade level. 5th grade math, for example, had elements of 6th and 7th grade math from other curriculums.
A shining example of this program was a recent event at home. I was watching a TV show on the Kush peoples, and my son started telling me that the Kush were South of Egypt. That the Kush were part of the 25th dynasty. He spoke about the Egyptian invasion, and the invasion of the Kush into Egyptian… point by point he nailed the talking points of the show. I was pretty impressed, considering he finished that course nearly 8 months prior.
Dual Accounts
When you create a Study.com account, you get a Parent account and a child/student account. From the parent account you search and add courses for your child/student. The parent account has insight into various grade and scores, however there is one oddity. For some reason Study.com doesn’t show Exam scores to the parent. Those are only shown to the student!
Course Content
The content is made up of short videos in sequence. Each course has a lot of these 15-20m videos.
Under each lesson is the lesson transcript, which can include diagrams, images, and tables.
As an example, 6th grade science has 14 Chapters (each chapter has multiple video lessons), and there are 92 quizzes in total. As a parent you can audit any course, at any time, and peek into the course content. This doesn’t disrupt the child account and it’s current level within the course. You can quickly see if the content is too hard, too easy or just right.
Content can be watched and re-watched on demand. If my son finishes a course early, I often have him review the chapters that were challenging in the quiz scores: having him re-watch videos. There’s no lockouts of content, as you have with Acellus.
Quizzes can be retaken indefinitely. Unlike Acellus there is no way to cap the amount of retries (Acellus caps retires to 2 or 3). If you’re a parent worried about a child retaking a quiz too many times, there are options to see how many times a child took the quiz to get the last score they got.
TL;DR
Although Study.com is more expensive, and lacks certain features found in other programs, I feel the content is very strategic and driven. It outpaces everything else I’ve tried for homeschooling.
The one downside of Study.com is the grading. Quizzes are scored and shown to the user, but the exams are only shown to students and not factored into the final score. I find that very odd. In order to see the exam scores, I have to login as my child’s account. For this reason I deducted a star.
Another oddity, is the overwhelming amount of content. Filtering to 7th grade math, pulls up 3 pages of results! 3 pages! Study.com supports course material as supporting material for specific programs. Unfortunately they don’t put the full curriculums at the front, so you have to dig through the mass amounts of content to find the specific content you want.
Alternatives
There are cheaper alternatives, such as Miacademy and Acellus, but they each have lacking features. Miacademy lacks content, when compared to the many video lectures and transcripts available in Study.com. Acellus lacks the ability to review video lessons once watched, and parents can’t view any student content at all on Acellus – Study.com is very transparent, allowing parents to audit all course material of the student, and allowing a student to review course content at any time (on demand).