You want a homeschool app — but you've tried everything. Here's the honest rundown of what we loved, and where each tool let us down.
Khan Academy
Free · mastery-basedWhat we loved
- Almost every subject, covered well
- Excellent, genuinely verified material
- Built around mastery
Where it fell short
- My child got bored with the teachers
- You can't print transcripts
- They forget what they mastered a week ago
Acellus & Power Homeschool
Accredited · paidWhat we loved
- Acellus Academy is accredited
- Simple to use
Where it fell short
- Teachers don't always verify their information
- The price keeps climbing
- Kids still don't retain the material
IXL
Practice bankWhat we loved
- A deep bank of questions
- Kid-friendly
Where it fell short
- Repetitive — and mistakes carry a big penalty
- Practice only — no real instruction
- Not a full curriculum; thin on social studies
So what would actually work?
Every tool got part of it right. None of them got all of it. Here's the list I kept coming back to — and the gap that kept the others off it.
Transcripts & homeschool hour logs
Records you can actually print when it's time to prove the work was done.
Khan can't print theseMastery with spaced review
Master it once, then revisit it on a schedule so it never quietly slips away.
Why kids forget on every other toolEntertaining videos with engaging practice
Lessons that hold a kid's attention, paired with practice that doesn't feel like a worksheet.
Where boredom set inCustomizable for each learner
Pick the videos, the quizzes, even the review pace — tuned to one child's memory, not the average.
One-size-fits-all everywhere elseA reasonable price
Something a homeschool family can actually afford, year after year.
The thing that keeps going upWelcome to Ulearn
Ulearn was built for homeschoolers. It started with a simple, slightly uncomfortable question:
How many people actually remember what they learned in school?
Ulearn uses spaced review so you don't forget what you learned — even after months and years. And because every kid's memory is different, you can customize the review for each learner, so it adapts to them.
When I started building, I thought, “okay, time to recreate every video for every subject.” Then I realized: almost every video, for almost every subject, already exists. Lectures from Stanford, Harvard, and the best research institutes. Genuinely entertaining explainers. Demonstrations I could never film myself — like chemistry experiments that land in the Guinness World Records. If your child could have the best teacher in the world for a topic, wouldn't you want that? It's already out there.
But Ulearn adds the part that was always missing: control. A parent can choose each video and quiz their child watches — or build their own course, which is as simple as picking a topic. The curriculum bends to your family, not the other way around.
And finally, I wanted it to be reasonably priced. Even as a resource that's just getting started, I want to give as much as I can to fellow homeschoolers who are doing their best inside the current education system.
Let's build this together
Have a question, an idea, or a piece of feedback? I'd genuinely love to hear it. Ulearn gets better every time a homeschooler reaches out, and I'm happy to collaborate with and support anyone out there trying to do this well.