edX: False Advertising!

I recently enrolled in the Quantum Machine Learning course offered free by the University of Toronto through edX. It turns out that, although you can enroll in the course through the edX Android app, you can’t actually complete the course on Android!

Why is this a problem? I have neither a desktop nor a laptop available. All of my code to-date, from a gender-classifying neural network to a Google web scraper, has been written from an Android smartphone.

The first sign that something was wrong was the in-app links to external content. The course uses online Jupyter Notebooks, which I am familiar with. However, the content within the notebooks outclasses the content within the app, which is primarily poor-quality lecture videos that could be on YouTube instead.

By poor-quality, I mean barely readable on a small screen. One staff member commented that he can’t make out the hand-written formulae even on a tablet screen. He also commented that LaTeX isn’t going to work on Android; I haven’t even gotten that far yet.

The primary lecturer is also challenging to listen to because of his accent. I stopped watching the lectures and started reading the transcripts instead. I’m even starting to think that the lectures may be completely unnecessary, because the online notebooks largely repeat the lectures, but are far more informative due to having runnable Python code.

The second, and insurmountable, sign is the absence of assignments and quizzes. You can see the words “assignments” and “quizzes” inside the app, but the only content actually available is discussions. I’ve even tapped through the online resources, but all I see are discussions of assignments and quizzes, but no actual assignments or quizzes.

Therefore, it does not seem possible to complete this course on Android.

Fortunately, the course is free. If allowed, I’m going to continue to audit it. I don’t need a certificate; I just want to understand the subject matter and run something, anything on a quantum computer. I want to say, in casual conversation, “I entangled electrons today; what’d you do?”

When I complete that personal goal, I’ll be happy. But, I’ll still hold edX in low regard for offering such a misleading app. It should be called edX Companion, or something indicative of the fact that you can’t actually complete courses (at least this one) using the app.