I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years.
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever.
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made.
Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.
The bitter lesson here is that if you want to control a business you can not avoid or outsource marketing. It is a huge part of any trade and you have to bear the marketing cost.
I totally understand the desire to avoid it and concentrate on the craft and to create. I tried and failed at it numerous times. I decided that I will not start a business if I do not have any partners who understand and are willing to engage in sales and marketing.
I've been bamboozled by Udemy a couple of times, thinking a course was recently made, only to discover the videos were 10 years old and most of the content was woefully out of date, with a few "recent updates" videos tacked on at the end.
Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road.
Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.
Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.
Wow hey Nick, I took your docker course on udemy a few years ago. Even these days, I am revisiting it. Gotta say it's one of the best courses I have taken.
For me, it was not the recommending system from udemy brought me to it, it was just a google search. I was interested in docker container at that time.
Maybe SEO works better for the niche.
As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
Almost my entire education has been OJT (On the Job Training). I'm a high school dropout, with a G.E.D. I've spent my entire life, looking up the noses of folks that just assume they are better than me. Gets a bit grating, but the plus side is, is that I have to prove myself, over, and over.
Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).
What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.
My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.
I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.
The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).
I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.
Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.
Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
Udemy never sold knowledge. They are selling that feeling of a new beginning, of a better future, of FINALLY doing (buying!!!) that course you always wanted to finish. 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.
> 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.
And another comment:
> I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
I'm not understanding the problem. I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through. That a big percentage don't get far is not at all a criticism. It's plain human nature.
Counting what percentage finish a course is a fairly useless metric (and you can always make the course trivially easy to game that metric). One needs to measure (absolute) output. How many succeeded - not what percentage succeeded.
I gained a lot from both Udemy and Coursera. Stuff that has helped me a fair amount in my career. It may well be true that I didn't finish most of the courses I signed up for. Why should I care? Why should Udemy/Coursera? It was a win/win.
E-learning can be like Steam to some people. You buy the course and then it sits there. You get a dopamine hit when you buy, and you can finish the course later. Sometime.
Some people need structure. But mostly structure is a way of dragging along those who aren't soaking up learning already, who aren't naturally seeking the next problem and breaking it apart. Not everyone does this, and so structure helps as a forcing function.
There are some subjects where you need academic and theoretical grounding. Or expensive equipment. For everything else, it's best to get hands on and just throw yourself at the subject. There's nothing really stopping a motivated person.
This is also true with other sources of knowledge though. Check any youtube course playlist and compare video views for first vs last lecture, often >80% dropoff. What percentage of library borrowers get past the first chapter of a book?
Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me.
I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.
That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.
If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
> nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.
I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.
For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.
Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.
That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.
But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.
Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar.
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
The meaningful competitor wrt. raw educational content is freely available OpenCourseware made available under CC licenses, which prevent any after-the-fact rugpull. Of course online learning also has a big service-provision and perhaps certification component, which is where specialty platforms like Coursera and Udemy may have a real advantage.
The platforms lost because they enshittified and everyone left because of it, not because YouTube existed (it already did when they started). Compare the ancient "legacy" stuff that Coursera had to the stuff it has today. Little wonder nobody actually wants what they're selling.
As another comment here said:
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.
> It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.
I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.
Geoff Hinton's 2012 Coursera course "Neural Networks for Machine Learning" was incredible. Anyone who took that course got in on the ground floor of deep learning just when it was about to take off. It certainly changed the course of my career.
To give an idea of how cutting-edge it was at the time, the well-known RMSProp optimizer was unpublished work that Hinton presented in the course, and people had to cite the presentation slides when they used it in papers published later.
Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.
The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.
Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.
There was a set of three "legacy" courses on something called Saylor Academy back in the day by an instructor named Kenneth Manning. Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Materials. They were all basically just filmed classroom lectures, but the filming was done well. Great instructor.
Barry Nalebuff’s Intro to Negotiation is pretty fantastic. Had you negotiating against strangers in well-designed scenarios, then getting feedback from others on the recordings.
Perry Mehrling’s course on Money and Banking is good too.
I recently bought a course on the Spring Boot from codewithmosh. Despite spring boot being a dry subject, it was probably the best intro backend course I’d ever taken!
Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
Ironically the very first coursera course was (IIRC) Andrew Ng's machine learning course, which was fantastic, and the deep learning specialization, which was also phenomenal. I can unironically say that Andrew Ng was the best instructor I ever had in grad school (and I didn't go to Stanford...).
Honestly, I feel like it's easy to filter out good/bad courses on Coursera by stuff like University name (although gotta admit last time did a course there were 3 years ago)
Udemy figured out that selling to enterprise is way more profitable than individuals. Coursera figured out that University/Company brand is more valuable than Joe's Ultimate Course.
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
I think that window is closing pretty fast. Models can currently construct pretty good learning material by themselves. I setup a project using claude code as the agent that researches and constructs learning material and lessons.
The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
Udemy always had that scammy vibe with courses "90% off" (from to $200 to $20 and things like that), plagiarism, as well as anti-patterns and very questionable quality control on the courses themselves.
They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.
I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.
I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.
As a counterpoint to the negativity in here. I purchased one of Angela Yu's basic webdev courses a couple years back and it springboarded my coding ability. I left it rather quickly to just build random stuff I wanted, but still, it was the spark.
Angela Yu course is good, told my brother about it and he had hard time figuring some stuff out cause some pieces were outdated (he has zero experience)
Same here; I've gotten a lot of utility from Udemy. Actually kind of got me a job (tbf, the manager I'd known for years and he'd've hired me regardless, but I was able to actually DO the job he wanted me to do basically day 0, even when he was willing to hire me and let me learn as I went).
There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.
"Coursera to Combine with Udemy to Empower the Global Workforce with Skills for the AI Era"
Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.
I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.
After Coursera/Udacity/EdX discontinued courses that I wanted to take, or removed access to ones I only partially completed, I switched to buying classes on Udemy. I completed only a handful of many purchases, and the quality level was okay-to-mediocre but better than nothing, so I got more value out of Udemy than Coursera.
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
For a basic crash course in Python, is there anything better than the top rated Udemy course, can YT offer something better ? I really don't mind paying the 12$ it costs on Udemy.
I get so much decision fatigue when choosing a course series on YouTube. On every technical topic, there are like 15 people making courses anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours.
I interviewed for an eng role at Coursera back in 2012, not too long after they were founded. Their claimed goal at the time was a re-imagining of education, insisting that current educational institutions were stuck in the past.
Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.
I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
The dream never dies, possibly because people remember when class time was supplanted by a movie. Anyone remember "I Am Joe's Heart"? Those movies showed that you could just sit and watch passively like TV, and you'd learn quite a bit, with professional diagrams and animations to help.
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth.
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.
You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)
Remember Conglomerates? It just keeps changing name.
Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses.
I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.
I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
Udemy course ratings have always felt absurd to me.
The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.
The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
I once did 2 moocs on coursera about machine learning, and I learned a lot, but some time afterwards, they f'ed up their login so much, that they required Google stuff to be loaded, which made me reconsider even logging in there. The platform seemed to get ever more bloated. Maybe I should check what their status is now, whether one can use their site without implicitly agreeing to being tracked by Google.
No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.
Addendum: Oh OK, they f'ed it up even more now, so that the login page doesn't even appear, when you click login and don't enable JS. How silly. I guess they have also fallen to the "everything must be an SPA" fad.
Dead end for what? Quality recordings of real lectures have been amazing for self improvement. I've never gone into it expecting a meaningful certificate, just meaning for me living my life.
Turns out that an online certificate isn't worth anything when layoffs happen and the market is oversaturated with people who have real degrees. MOOCs have their place, but it's a very narrow set of disciplines.
My alma mater (University of Nottingham UK) has just stopped all music and modern language teaching, which (for a very popular, respected, large campus institution) seems a bad sign for universities generally.
Honestly years out of college, I really want to refresh my engineering education, and perhaps get academically rigorous education on topics I missed out on back then.
While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.
This same week, Egghead (https://egghead.io) started offering $500 lifetime access to everything they ever made or will make. There's definitely some excellent material in their catalog. But the signals sure seem to point toward the decline of centralized human-created coursework.
Egghead.io is not worth it, the courses there have a shelf life even shorter than frontendmasters. Authors mostly use it to dump their wares then never update the course afterwards while breaking API changes litter their backlog making most content, unless it was released in the last 3 months, worthless.
Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO.
Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
(meta: genuinely curious why my observation was downvoted. I may take a further karma hit for mentioning it but worth it if it elicits a meaningful response. what gives?)
It’s funny because everyone under the sun has been telling these two companies to come together since 2018 when online learning courses started to fade away. They are finally doing it after both went public and lost 80% of their value. At least the management team is going to make some money.
I've been an instructor on Udemy for a decade. Lots of web devs tell me they got their career started on my courses there, which is something that is very dear to me. Udemy got me started in online dev education.
The best courses I wanted to take are split between Coursera, Udemy, and EdX. The first two can give certificates cheaply. A merger could be really helpful if they do it in a month or two. ;)
Trying the merger as a survival option, not a "let's take over world" option. MOOCs need to reinvent themselves again, for the hybrid workforce that is AI+human.
Tangent: Does anyone know what happened to EdX and MitX in particular? It seems they stopped adding content ~10 years ago. Those were [are still] a fantastic resource!
Good thing Youtube is free because this consolidation is only going to raise their prices. Thank you to all the hard working educational Youtubers out there.
End of an era: video (with broadband Internet penetration) was the best tool we had for 15+ years. But LLMs are now good enough, including in image+infographic generation and factuality (especially when grounding resources are provided... which is where human experts still matter). I think video is now better only for learning physical hands-on skills... and those videos tend to be on YouTube rather than on Udemy or Coursera.
Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...
A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
LLMs are not remotely good enough to use as a learning tool. They still make shit up a ton of the time, and you can only catch it if you already know the material (so, not useful for learning). They probably never will be useful for learning, since even after all this time hallucinations are still just as bad as they ever were.
I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away.
From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
One of the challenges is that few people are genuinely interested in a comprehensive view of a topic. Most of the time, I want just enough to get to the next step and get rid of a problem.
I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
LLMs could be a boost to MOOCs because you can use them as a tutor to help with the material. People tend to have trouble finishing MOOCs, and it can be frustrating to get stuck on a particular aspect without much instructor support. Anything that makes it more interactive could help with both of those. I think LLMs are a great complement to MOOCs.
I use Udemy courses all the time; great for compliance, game engine training, and insightful training of soft skills. Good instructors have insight and comprehensive coverage that questioning LLMs do not have.
both have had questionable content for a while, it's a wonder people are still paying for them. especially given that LLMs exist (and youtube for that matter).
If I were a professor at a decent school, I'd probably look at the landscape of MOOCs and go "Why am I spending any time on this?" It seemed like something new and potentially exciting at one point. I certainly wouldn't today.
I honest dislike the idea of having yet another niche going with less competitors.
Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.
Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable
I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
nickjj|2 months ago
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
ravenstine|2 months ago
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
gustavopezzi|2 months ago
zenoprax|2 months ago
Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked!
(the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)
musebox35|2 months ago
elric|2 months ago
Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road.
Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.
linhns|2 months ago
codezero|2 months ago
renjieliu|2 months ago
j45|2 months ago
Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.
ljlolel|2 months ago
iris-digital|2 months ago
elric|2 months ago
kace91|2 months ago
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
azangru|2 months ago
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
ChrisMarshallNY|2 months ago
Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).
What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.
My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.
I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.
The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).
I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
Aurornis|2 months ago
I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.
Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.
Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
SamDc73|2 months ago
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
arvindh-manian|2 months ago
3abiton|2 months ago
nsagent|2 months ago
philipwhiuk|2 months ago
How is that a viable model?
nkmnz|2 months ago
ziml77|2 months ago
I bought a handful before realizing what was happening. I haven't done it since then and I definitely need to consciously override any temptations.
I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
BeetleB|2 months ago
And another comment:
> I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
I'm not understanding the problem. I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through. That a big percentage don't get far is not at all a criticism. It's plain human nature.
Counting what percentage finish a course is a fairly useless metric (and you can always make the course trivially easy to game that metric). One needs to measure (absolute) output. How many succeeded - not what percentage succeeded.
I gained a lot from both Udemy and Coursera. Stuff that has helped me a fair amount in my career. It may well be true that I didn't finish most of the courses I signed up for. Why should I care? Why should Udemy/Coursera? It was a win/win.
echelon|2 months ago
E-learning can be like Steam to some people. You buy the course and then it sits there. You get a dopamine hit when you buy, and you can finish the course later. Sometime.
Some people need structure. But mostly structure is a way of dragging along those who aren't soaking up learning already, who aren't naturally seeking the next problem and breaking it apart. Not everyone does this, and so structure helps as a forcing function.
There are some subjects where you need academic and theoretical grounding. Or expensive equipment. For everything else, it's best to get hands on and just throw yourself at the subject. There's nothing really stopping a motivated person.
levocardia|2 months ago
jspann|2 months ago
Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case
NetOpWibby|2 months ago
sharadov|2 months ago
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
robotresearcher|2 months ago
I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.
That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
vunderba|2 months ago
If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash
- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride
- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky
bigstrat2003|2 months ago
That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.
ravenstine|2 months ago
For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.
Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.
That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
johanyc|2 months ago
DougN7|2 months ago
raincole|2 months ago
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
iambateman|2 months ago
But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.
These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.
apwheele|2 months ago
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
zozbot234|2 months ago
Blackthorn|2 months ago
As another comment here said:
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.
layer8|2 months ago
I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.
unknown|2 months ago
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criddell|2 months ago
On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO.
The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
modeless|2 months ago
To give an idea of how cutting-edge it was at the time, the well-known RMSProp optimizer was unpublished work that Hinton presented in the course, and people had to cite the presentation slides when they used it in papers published later.
n8cpdx|2 months ago
Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.
The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.
Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.
I plan to take the follow up soon.
AntiqueFig|2 months ago
The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
Blackthorn|2 months ago
lepton|2 months ago
Perry Mehrling’s course on Money and Banking is good too.
sesm|2 months ago
joshdavham|2 months ago
the__alchemist|2 months ago
mc3301|2 months ago
karel-3d|2 months ago
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
levocardia|2 months ago
SamDc73|2 months ago
cheriot|2 months ago
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
XenophileJKO|2 months ago
The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
elAhmo|2 months ago
They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.
I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.
I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.
andrewrn|2 months ago
SamDc73|2 months ago
michaelcampbell|2 months ago
There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.
SilverSlash|2 months ago
Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.
I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
synergy20|2 months ago
tompark|2 months ago
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
stef25|2 months ago
joshdavham|2 months ago
seattle_spring|2 months ago
Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.
I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
coffeecoders|2 months ago
Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me.
What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual.
To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".
MarkLowenstein|2 months ago
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
languagehacker|2 months ago
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
But what do I know.
ee64a4a|2 months ago
crimsoneer|2 months ago
random9749832|2 months ago
ghaff|2 months ago
zigman1|2 months ago
oersted|2 months ago
Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
p-e-w|2 months ago
layer8|2 months ago
master-lincoln|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
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braza|2 months ago
I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.
I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
belter|2 months ago
The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.
The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
zelphirkalt|2 months ago
No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.
zelphirkalt|2 months ago
astrostl|2 months ago
- create a platform to host content others create
- get employees to ask for company-provided access
- almost none of these employees really use it
- collect subscription revenue indefinitely
unknown|2 months ago
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piyushpr134|2 months ago
Blackthorn|2 months ago
f6v|2 months ago
vmilner|2 months ago
torginus|2 months ago
While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.
chrisweekly|2 months ago
azemetre|2 months ago
Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO.
Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
SoftTalker|2 months ago
chrisweekly|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
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chrisgd|2 months ago
tmaly|2 months ago
fuzztester|2 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani
everdev|2 months ago
qmr|2 months ago
random9749832|2 months ago
Apocryphon|2 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710
kirykl|2 months ago
TonyAlicea10|2 months ago
I'm very sorry to see it go.
nickpsecurity|2 months ago
zkmon|2 months ago
the__alchemist|2 months ago
sp4cec0wb0y|2 months ago
guluarte|2 months ago
stonogo|2 months ago
anshumankmr|2 months ago
chrismsimpson|2 months ago
softwaredoug|2 months ago
config_yml|2 months ago
wagslane|2 months ago
zhyder|2 months ago
Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...
A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
bigstrat2003|2 months ago
qwertytyyuu|2 months ago
mathattack|2 months ago
I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
ghaff|2 months ago
It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away.
From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
throwawaysleep|2 months ago
I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
HPsquared|2 months ago
brobdingnagians|2 months ago
Xenoamorphous|2 months ago
tootyskooty|2 months ago
ghaff|2 months ago
chirau|2 months ago
broretore|2 months ago
joshdavham|2 months ago
SilverElfin|2 months ago
motbus3|2 months ago
Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.
Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable
I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
FabHK|2 months ago
Apocryphon|2 months ago
KnuthIsGod|2 months ago
Udemy was generally crap.
Coursera was decent.
Crap eats decent.
t0lo|2 months ago
alexpadula|2 months ago
deknos|2 months ago
anshumankmr|2 months ago
Rakshath_1|2 months ago
ninahenderson|2 months ago
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beeboop0|2 months ago
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dhruv3006|2 months ago