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Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

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Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#161

Post by ghaff »

ziml77 wrote: post #137
nkmnz wrote: post #114

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.

It's so true. Buying them is an easy way to feel good in the moment and it's easy to tell yourself that you'll do the courses later. 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.

Gym membership for many.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#162

Post by port11 »

oceansky wrote: post #148
ravenstine wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?

Keeping tech fast, if my worldview holds. One reason I left frontend work before was that none of my colleagues seemed to care that we shipped MBs of code to the client. I also tire of APIs that are in the multi-second response time arena, often because no one seems to bother with database indexes or JOIN optimisation. This should be banal, everyday stuff.

Maybe we have too many layers of abstraction. Or there's just too much work to do now that businesses combine many roles into one?

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#163

Post by TheSkyHasEyes »

ravenstine wrote: post #135
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…

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…

> Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old.

Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast.

If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#165

Post by ghaff »

linhns wrote: post #136
jonathanlb wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” MasterClass already is like this, but the content doesn't go as deep as it could to really teach learners.

Masterclass is really a scam in my opinion. Who needs them to teach about generic stuff, when what we need is how to be good like them, that’s why we pay for the course

And you probably don't have the chops to write screenplays like Aaron Sorkin and almost certainly won't develop them from a video.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#166

Post by jspann »

nkmnz wrote: post #114

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.

Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#167

Post by edent »

azangru wrote: post #52
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…

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#168

Post by zhyder »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #155
zhyder wrote: post #122

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…

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.

Have you tried them with providing a grounding resource, e.g. attaching a file to ChatGPT or NotebookLM? Yes need some human expert to create (or curate) that grounding resource in the first place, but LLMs handle the rest well: presenting info in different ways and paces, interacting with the learner like a tutor, etc.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#169

Post by ljlolel »

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…

Try reloading new course with same videos, (or modified or updated version but honestly probably 90% is just new year label) saying 2026

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#170

Post by nickjj »

ravenstine wrote: post #135
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…

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…

Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.

The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category.

Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate.

> 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

Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.

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