Enables professionals to share or sell their expertise through courses. Users can learn or teach via one intuitive interface. Free courses constantly seek to upsell users to paid offerings. Limited video captioning and language support. Content needs more careful vetting. Online education suffers from something of an embarrassment of riches. With platforms as varied as Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and udemy review reddit, learners can enroll in just about any course that sparks curiosity, and often at no cost. But what about learners who also want to share their expertise. Whereas like Coursera and edX curate courses from universities, and Udacity and Khan Academy host their own content, Udemy free is unique because it allows any user to act as either learner or instructor. An open invitation to instructors has enabled Udemy udemy review reddit amass a massive catalog of courses, about a third of which are free. The revenue raised by the other two-thirds has made some users rich. Not everyone can expect such material riches; however, Udemy may enable the right kind of user to supplement his or her existing income. Background, Foregrounded Udemy offers self-paced courses. While some teachers respond to discussion posts or offer office hours namely viamake no mistake: These classes bear little comparison to traditional courses. Classes are short, solitary, and lack personalized feedback or a sense of cohort. Students receive little in the way of accreditation, save a Certificate of Completion, which they may share via social media. Udemy courses are divided into sections and lectures. Lectures can be video micro-lectures, but they can also include audio, text, and presentation slides. From a right-aligned sidebar users can access related materials, discussion threads, and a lesson-specific notepad. Every course has a landing page with a course description not quite a syllabususer reviews, and often a video introduction. For this review, I enrolled in several courses and attempted to build my own, too. To ensure both thoroughness and uniformity, I have repurposed sections of myUdacity, and reviews, and I hope that, like them, this review generates conversation that extends beyond the comments section. Udemy courses do possess features of online education, including discussion forums; machine-graded assessments; and, of course, video micro-lectures. However, unlike an online course at my home institution, Udemy is open to anyone interested in the course, which means wide-ranging or sporadic participation. Moreover, credentials are not meaningful: Students enroll in classes not for accreditation Certificates of Completionbut rather for job-related skills developed through them. About which you can read more in Joshua Kim's excellent Inside Higher Ed. On Efficacy In itsthe U. The question is, however, for whom is online learning effective. The Catalog Udemy is also unique in the scale of its platform. You can sort through courses by categories as wide-ranging as Health and Fitness to Graduate Entry Exams. From there, you can filter classes based upon language, price, instruction level, and features such as udemy review reddit that include quizzes. For example, I udemy review reddit 117 courses available in the humanities. Searching for free courses, however, quickly trimmed the list: Most classes 76 were priced at less than fifty dollars, with thirty listed for free. These stats align with the pricing across the catalog: paid courses outnumber free courses at least two-to-one. Within the humanities, I found that the vast majority 89 of classes were listed as appropriate for all instruction levels, with just two courses recommended for advanced learners. Given that Udemy is marketed as a means through which workers can gain job-based skills, I also sought to explore its vocational offerings. To this end, I found that Udemy housed a large portfolio of courses related to Office Productivity. In addition to hundreds of courses produced in English 549there were also some classes in Spanish 86German 24Portuguese 5French 4Czech 3Italian 2and Russian 2. This udemy review reddit supports Udemy's claim that two-thirds of their user base lives outside the United States. I found that there were far fewer gratis vocational courses: About one-tenth of classes 60 were listed for free, and some courses were priced at hundreds of dollars. These numbers underscore what could be an uncomfortable reality for some learners: Udemy is a marketplace, and on that marketplace, some knowledge is more valuable than others. Ancient Greek Religion I enrolled in Ancient Greek Religion free to explore Udemy's traditional course catalog. Created by Robert Garland, Professor of Classics at Colgate, Ancient Greek Religion attracted a comparatively large enrollment over nine thousand students with almost universally favorable responses. In contrast to other online education platforms, Udemy foregrounds student reviews by affixing them to course landing pages. Ancient Greek Religion averaged 4. As an educator, I am not entirely comfortable with this form of course evaluation. While I understand that students are savvy critics, I am not convinced that production values and presentation style—about which most reviewers commented—are meaningful values against which to evaluate course efficacy. I was also taken aback by the instrumentalism of the course's landing page. Garland's lectures were accessible and generally informative. His videos udemy review reddit seemingly extemporaneous, recorded via webcam in longer increments—usually about twenty minutes each. Considering Udemy's global user base, I was surprised that Garland's lectures—and others in my testing—did not include captioning. Moreover, unless the lecture is recorded in another language, there is no secondary language support as far as I can tell. I found Professor Garland's descriptions of ancient Greek deities refreshingly colloquial. They suffer from attention deficit syndrome. In this sense, Ancient Greek Religion is less a course than an afternoon tutorial. The course was produced by Jed Guinto, who is something of an Udemy wunderkind, having produced more than twenty courses to date. Unlike Professor Garland's course, which relied upon lengthier videos recorded by webcam, Mr. Guinto's class used screencasts, typically no longer than two minutes each. While the tutorials were well structured building from adding and subtracting to text concatenationMr. For an Excel layperson myself includedthe class was informative enough to require note taking. Udemy includes a handy notepad in the right-aligned sidebar; the only hitch is that notes are pinned to specific lectures. This means that I could not reference previous notes without reopening those lectures, a cumbersome exercise given the brevity of tutorials. I can see how, with longer lectures e. Although discussions udemy review reddit available in the sidebar, I found that most students did not use them, and when they did, they rarely interacted with one another. In one Python programming class, for example, there were literally no discussion threads. Other times, teachers lead by example. In Ancient Greek Religion, Professor Garland responded to students, but most discussions had dried up two years ago. Unfortunately, this is not unusual: Discussions often wither in online classes—they require careful scaffolding and moderation—and they often fail in on-demand classes. Unlike Ancient Greek Religion, Excel Formula Design for Beginners did include a fifteen question multiple-choice quiz. In taking the quiz, I found myself pining for two components of udemy review reddit. Second, Udemy quizzes aren't just low-stakes—they're no stakes. You can miss half the questions and still finish the course. Even if teachers do not create large question banks in the mode of Khan Academystudents ought to be required to answer some number of questions correctly before advancing. This problem also appears in Udemy's wealth of free and paid. The variety of courses, from beginner Web development to intermediate software engineering to expert e-commerce, may rival services like Editors' Choicebut the quality is a lot spottier. There are free, comprehensive lessons for building impressive, professional-looking websites in a relatively short amount of time. Many provide dozens of lectures and hours of footage you can access on your mobile device. However, the limited quiz and note-taking options make it harder to retain the information, especially while watching the more tedious and technical video tutorials. The free interactive courses on Khan Academy do a much better job at making sure coding knowledge sticks, even if the knowledge offered is a little more basic. As a learner, Udemy's interface is intuitive. Lectures flow from one to the next via an Autoplay feature, and the sidebar thoughtfully organizes lesson materials, notes, and discussions where applicable. My main critique is that I always felt like a customer when using Udemy. After every lesson, the platform notifies you of the percentage of the class you have completed, which is tedious considering many classes can completed in a few hours. The site also prompts you to recommend the class to friends, which you must delay not once Ask me laterbut twice Ask udemy review reddit at the end of the course. Add to this, instructor pitches. In a nineteen-lesson course, Mr. Udemy as a Teaching Platform In addition to serving as an extensive learning platform, Udemy also enables users with specialized knowledge to build their own courses using a set of development tools. To learn more about the instructor experience, I enrolled in a one-hour tutorial, entitled How to Create Your Udemy Course, before attempting to build my own course. Business-savvy, metric-minded users will not likely need the tutorial. Udemy's tutorial underscores that it's not enough to build a course and let it loose in the wild; instructors must tailor features and pricing to the marketplace and student feedback. In an ideal world, this emphasis would produce better classes and better learning outcomes. Udemy's metric-minded approach to online education enables instructors to upload videos for review using Udemy's File Uploader, solicit feedback from other instructors using the Udemy Studio Facebook Udemy review reddit, and track student usage using Instructor Analytics. Students, meanwhile, benefit from a generous selection of courses as well as Yelp-style peer reviews. My concern, as I touched upon in previous sections, is that students are often more attentive to production values than content quality. This is not exactly an exhaustive vetting process, and it relies heavily on student intervention to identify content issues. Potential instructors, meanwhile, need to be savvy self-promoters. Branding is a keyword in the tutorial. Education is a product on Udemy's marketplace, and students are customers. Are you speaking in interesting tones. Or are you speaking in a monotonous way that could bore your students. All of these are super-important to pay attention to. Building a Class With those concerns aired, Udemy does offer a decent set of tools and clear guidelines for building courses. The process is highly prescriptive. When it comes to video micro-lectures, for example, Udemy offers camera recommendations, resolution guidelines, and the chance to upload test videos. Instructors are guided through all required course features. Before I began uploading videos I was prompted to supply learning objectives and to tie my curriculum to those objectives. In practice, this meant that I had to think through the structure of my class my sections and lecturesbefore I added content or assessments. In addition to resources, you can add multiple-choice, fill in the blanks, and true or false assessments. Unfortunately, there is no module for a peer review. udemy review reddit Overall, the tools are well organized, and I suspect most instructors could build a course without enrolling in the tutorial. Premium Instructors Perhaps the most important choice an instructor will make is how to price their course. It's easiest to list your course for free, and, in my experience, many instructors use gratis courses to gain name recognition and to upsell students to paid offerings. If and when you want to create a paid course, you will need to register as a Premium Instructor. Instructors can make twenty-five cents, fifty cents, or ninety-seven cents on the dollar, depending upon how students find their courses. For example, if a Udemy promotional affiliate attracts a student, that affiliate earns fifty percent of the course cost, with Udemy udemy review reddit the instructor splitting the other half. If Udemy's udemy review reddit marketing steers the student to the class, the instructor splits the revenue with the site. If, however, the instructor's brand attracts that same student, she retains ninety-seven cents on the dollar. Thus, building your brand is not just marketing mumbo jumbo; self-promotion exerts a material effect on one's livelihood. Thankfully, Udemy provides a series of tools, including Conversion Analytics, Engagement Analytics, as well as third-party integrations e. Google Analytics by which instructors can track course stats. Udemy has made news for its instructors' earnings. Top earner Rob Percival has made almost three million dollars through his Web-development courses, and other instructors. They are the outliers, however. According to Shannon Hughes, senior marketing director at Udemy, the average Udemy instructor earns about seven thousand dollars a year teaching on Udemy. As touted on the about page, Udemy has more than 14,000 instructors teaching 25,000 courses to 6,000,000 students. If those figures were evenly divided, it would work out to less than two courses per instructor with fewer than 250 students per course. Even if all of those courses were paid they're notthat kind of income won't make anyone a millionaire overnight. Those stats are also not reflective of the Udemy marketplace. In reality, there are all-stars, such as Mr. Guinto, who do well by any metric, and others who receive less attention. Much of udemy review reddit success has to do with their salesmanship, video presence, and the market-rated value of the content they teach. With that said, Udemy courses can both provide supplementary incomes to established professionals and help entrepreneurial professionals build their reputations. Udemy udemy review reddit Business Udemy's approach to education will concern some learners and teachers. Its courses can be better described as tutorials whose limited assessments, emphasis on production values and marketing, and disingenuous claims of student-empowerment conceal inadequate content vetting. A thirty-day money back guarantee may be sufficient for a udemy review reddit, but discovering defects in education can take longer, and the effects of defects may have far-reaching effects. Setting side my philosophical concerns, Udemy is unique because it enables savvy professionals to share or monetize their expertise. As I have shown, there is a lot of useful content available at little or no cost, and Udemy's self-paced structure means that adult learners can acquire new skills on their own schedules. Businesses, too, may choose to subscribe to Udemy's expansive suite of training courses,to encourage employees to continue to seek new forms of professional development. Moreover, as more than just a learning platform, Udemy enables those with specialized expertise to share their knowledge, and perhaps even make some money in the process. As a contributing editor, William Fenton specializes in research and education software. To learn more about his research interests, visit his homepage or follow him on Academia. He's previously written for Kotaku, The A. Club, Cards Against Humanity, and 148Apps. In his spare time, he also writes dumb screenplays that occasionally become.
