Study.com Teacher Edition is designed to help teachers increase interactivity and engagement in the classroom by supporting and expanding upon your existing curriculum. Regardless of the grade level or subject you teach, Study.com offers a collection of video lessons, assignments, and quizzes that can be used to supplement your existing course material.
With over 22,000 videos in their library, all arranged within standards-aligned lesson plans, Study.com has an enormous amount of support resources.
With over 22,000 videos in their library, all arranged within standards-aligned lesson plans, Study.com has an enormous amount of support resources.
Before jumping into the review, here’s a brief introductory video on how an ELA and social studies teacher uses study.com in her own classroom:
As shown in the video, Study.com can easily and quickly be used to find supplemental lessons, videos, and quizzes that can be shared out with your students. Teachers can monitor the progress of students as they work through assigned materials as well.
In terms of pricing, the Teacher Edition of Study.com costs $60 a month. While this is certainly a significant fee, it’s important to note that students can use the resource for free, provided you add them into your virtual classroom.
When teachers first sign in, you’re taken to your dashboard. This is where you can get started by creating a virtual classroom and importing your students. If you use Google Classroom, you can automatically sync your students with Study.com. Otherwise, you can send out emails our give each student a class registration code to get them registered in your virtual classroom.
From here, you can find a course or a lesson (component of a course) that you want to share out with your students. Study.com has an absolutely enormous range of content that you can assign to students. Every subject area, every grade level, anything you need.
Most of the content is centered around short video lessons that are high quality and consist of animation, stock photos, slides, and occasionally videos of the course instructors providing narration. All of the videos are delivered in bite-size format (usually 3-6 minutes) which is perfect for this type of learning situation.
Additionally, teachers can also share out associated quizzes with the video, which are typically 5 multiple choice questions. When teachers assign content to students, they can do so to individual students, small groups, or the entire class, which is excellent for differentiation. They can also provide a due date and add additional instructions for their students.
Overall, for teachers looking to supplement their current instruction with high quality instructional videos and multiple choice assessments, study.com offers an excellent classroom resource.
On a final note for the classroom side, I think it’s important to point out that many of the courses have a lack of representation in the videos. As mentioned above, most of the video lessons feature of a mix of slides, animated characters, videos of the instructor, and stock photos. While some courses and lessons definitely do an exceptional job, many do not feature a single person of color in the animations or the stock photos. Additionally, after looking through at least 70-80 videos, I was not able to find a single example of a character that was representative for folks with disabilities. It’s unfortunate to see this, especially given what we know about the importance of representation and how students’ early experiences shape their understanding of what is possible for them. That being said, Study.com has been working on addressing this issue in their newer videos, and is aware there are still improvements to be made.
Outside of the resources that are available for classroom teachers, Study.com also has an immense library of support for teacher certification exams.
For any teacher who is looking to expand their certification, or for preservice teachers who will be taking the Praxis or other licensing exams, Study.com offers an impressive amount of support. Regardless of the content area or type of certification/licensing exam you will be taking, Study.com likely has you covered.
Overall, Study.com has an enormous collection of beneficial videos, lessons, and quizzes for students. The interface is incredibly friendly, and their standards-aligned lesson plans are perfect for supporting what you’re already doing in the classroom. Plus, the ability to easily differentiate lessons to individual students and small groups of students is a huge plus. I also can’t stress enough that the quality of the videos are incredibly high, plus they are fun, engaging, and do an excellent job breaking down difficult content.
On the con side, the price is certainly prohibitive for many schools and classrooms. At $60 a month, an individual teacher would need to spend $540 - $600 a school year on their subscription. At least in my experience, that’s a cost that many classrooms, schools, and districts would have difficulty with. With this in mind, Study.com has offered a coupon code for EdTech Roundup readers that will provide 20% off for the first 3 months to help offset this cost. The code is: EdTechRoundUp18 and is good through December 1st, 2018.
Along the same lines, for schools who are moving away from textbooks, and moving towards digital resources, some of those textbook funds could be applied to the cost of a platform like Study.com, given the enormous range of resources offered on the site. Additionally, to help offset the cost, Study.com offers school group plans, where schools can purchase multiple licenses for their teachers at a discount, which can definitely help make this more feasible for some schools/classrooms. Finally, as noted above, the lack of representation of folks of color and folks with disabilities in many of the video lessons was frustrating to see, but this is an issue the company is working on improving.
In short, if you have the funding available, Study.com is a beneficial resource for supporting your existing curriculum with engaging video-based content and assessments for your students.
The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
I was not compensated for writing this review.
I was not compensated for writing this review.
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