Coursera to combine with Udemy • Hacker News Board

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#111

Post by Blackthorn » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #37

What are the best online courses you’ve taken? 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…

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#112

Post by gustavopezzi » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #83

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 r…

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#113

Post by belter » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#114

Post by nkmnz » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#115

Post by Blackthorn » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #108

Blackthorn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was true, no music teacher selling independent lessons would be able to survive.

It's not clear to me that independent tutors are generally getting rich. But there clearly are activities that benefit from individual training. I imagine music is one of those. But that mostly probably falls into the luxury goods category.

"Getting rich" is a substantial movement of the goalposts. The point is that people are spending money outside the trade paperback range on education, either for themselves or for their children (I've seen quite a wide distribution while in the waiting room), that has nothing to do with income.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#116

Post by vmilner » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

piyushpr134 wrote: post #14

Universities are not going anywhere MOOC are a dead end

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#117

Post by wahnfrieden » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #70

sharadov wrote: post #35

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.

I would use an agent (Codex) for this task: use the Pro model in ChatGPT for deep research and to assemble the information and citations, then have Codex systematically go through the citations with a task list to web search and verify or correct each. Codex can be used like a test suite.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#118

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #68

torben-friis wrote: post #27

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…

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,…

> Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash

It's by Shel Silverstein; Johnny Cash just performed it.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#119

Post by ghaff » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

XenophileJKO wrote: post #65

ghaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much it has to do with LLMs. 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 va…

I think what killed all MOOC learning was that they ALL saw this giant TAM for corporate training and thought.. we have to get into that market. That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value. Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value t…

I largely disagree. If you look at the people involved (and what they said at the time), I think there was a legitimate "We can rethink higher education" which obviously didn't happen for a variety of reasons.

It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#120

Post by layer8 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

iambateman wrote: post #12

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 clar…

> 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.