Pluralsight: A mobile app for learning new skills, souping up existing ones

The app is compatible with Apple, Google, and Microsoft products

At a time when there is a lot of concern over global and Indian corporate giants laying off staff citing inefficiency, especially in the technology sector, it becomes imperative for employees to upskill themselves in sync with the changing needs and stay relevant for their employers. This assumes even greater significance today as people in many cases are pitted against machines, which are threating to take away human jobs.

While technology has emerged – or is threatening to emerge – as a cause for people losing jobs, technology can also be used for effective upgrade of skills and learning for staying in business. Today, the concept of learning has changed immensely and you can upskill yourself over the internet, so there is no need to enroll for a course and visit classrooms. While companies like Coursera and Udemy have for long been offering exhaustive online education from the comfort of learners’ homes, there also are some new entrants promising to bring equally relevant learning experience over your phone.

Among the new ones, Pluralsight, an online and app-based platform, has been gaining popularity in the online learning space. The company offers online courses ranging from basic programming tools to much-advanced machine learning and analytics.

Business Standard used the Pluralsight app on the Google Android platform to see how well it is able to impact education over phone. Here is what we found:

Pluralsight offers app support to almost all platforms, covering your learning across devices and geographies. The app is compatible with Apple Mac, iPhone and iPads, Google Android phones and tablets, Microsoft Windows and Smart Televisions. This review is, however, limited to what we found on Android.

The app can be downloaded from Google Play Store and Amazon Fire Store for compatibility across Google Android-based platforms. Once the app is downloaded, it asks for a sign-in. There is no way you can register from the app. For that, you need to have first visited the portal on a computer and registered.

To check what the app offers, you can skip the sign-in and move inside the app to see the available courses. You can scroll through the list and check the table of content as well. You cannot play the videos or do much without signing in. So, it will be better to first register on a computer and then use the app after signing in.

The registration is subscription-based and is available for individuals and teams. For individuals, the subscription starts from $29 a month and $299 a year. To get a better grip of the app and to test all its features, you can also register for a free 10-day trial, which allows you to use almost all the features of the app.

Highlights of the app:

The Pluralsight app offers a simple dark-themed design with relevant content categories visible at the top. Each category shows new courses at the top and lists popular courses below. For simpler navigation, the app also offers a search bar.

The course list offers a table of content, description, transcript and a list of related courses to choose from. There is an option to download the course for offline access as well.

Verdict

The Pluralsight app offers almost all that other online learning spaces bring and adds some more to that. The subscription-based model of Pluralsight versus the course-based subscription model of other platforms is a differentiating factor that opens a new avenue for new-age learners. There is no dearth of content and courses and most technical courses are available with the option to download for offline access. The platform, however, might have been better for Indian users if the courses were optimised for the workforce in India. Also, there should have been an option to see the subscription amount in the Indian rupees.