£30 for 6 months is pretty damn cheap and you get to keep it forever!
ebay example of the latest edition for sale: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/197011707080
On archive.org too if you are happy with PDFs: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22The+MU123+Cour...
First MU123 book A: https://archive.org/details/BookAMU1232ndedOU2014/MU123-Book...
This is a proper accredited course developed over 50 years or so with its own textbooks and material from a respectable university, not a gamified subscription portal experiment put together by god knows who that can disappear in a puff of smoke at no notice.
I can second this recommendation. The maths books are _excellent_.
It's hard to explain how, but let me try: most of the maths textbooks I possess (plenty of them) are written with the assumption that you attend lectures at a classroom and use them for extra material/exercises/reference.
The OU books are written with the assumption that you learn from them as the primary material, so they go a lot further with regard to explaining things as well as producing them from first principles.
- 5th grade math
- prealgebra
The book does look high quality. But I'm surprised it covers these fundamentals, given it's for a university course.
If you are above this level, you would start with the "intensive start", which skips MU123 (allowing you to pick another module in its place) and then starts with MST124 (precalculus, trigonometry and single-var calculus, roughly), moving you on to MST125 (intro to proofs, number theory, more calculus, linear algebra, etc), in a faster pace.
But I guess there are people who will have forgotten that stuff, if they're not using much math day to day.
If you can and willing dedicate on average 2 hours a day (a big commitment but I think I was able to hold it for several month with them) the cost of mastering, say, Linear Algebra will be ~4 less then if you subscribe and will be spending ~30 minutes a day.
I could use a couple of refresher courses. When I noticed the price, I next looked for an option to sample what I should expect for the money. Didn't find one. No trust but verify option?
I quickly concluded that this 'personal experience' story is a carefully-constructed native advertisement.
https://www.mathacademy.com/terms-of-service#cancellation
It's what I did 10 days ago before deciding to try it out
I personally just put a reminder in my calendar for all such things and be done with it.
the format basicly consists of a list of modules (lessons or reviews) to work though. each lesson module starts with a short test on how to solve the problem it teaches, 1-2 worked problems and 2-3 problesm then more short text on how to solve some variation of the problem coupled with 2 solved problems and 2-3 for you to solve. review modules just give you a few problems to solve. if you can solve 3 without making any mistakes, it will finish the module and you can go tot he next one. every few days you are presented with a quiz that tests what you know and genearates review modules for you to go though before retesting you.
overall, it seems spartan but its effective. you spend most of your time actuvly engaing with the problems with just enough information to solve them. the structure of the courses are setup such that you learn and master prerequisites before you are presented a lesson so there isn't much of the frustration you might find where a problem implicitly assumes you know something you don't. That a big reason they start you with a placement test.
overall I'd say the $50 price tag is worth it. its very efficient vs reading and working though problem sets where you don't necessarily know what you need to know to solve them. you're not spending time figuring out what your knowledge gaps are as it fulls them in as you go for you.
$49/month is almost nothing to me now, but it would be prohibitively expensive for a 15 y.o. me in freshly independent Czechia.
I suspect it would also be prohibitively expensive for most 15 y.o.s in the developing world today, and these are the guys and gals who stand to gain the most.
I wish there was PPP for the subscription, i tried for a few months but stopped the subscription recently.
I guess it depends on where you are at in the world, but in our neck of the woods $50/month is an absolute bargain compared to using a tutor. Not to mention you get to work at your own pace and to practice spaced repetition consistently.
> I can't help but feel that the people who would benefit from it the most are also the people least likely to be able to afford it.
Even if it were $10/mo, the people who would benefit from it the most (around the world) still can't afford it.