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Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

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Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#181

Post by XenophileJKO »

ghaff wrote: post #119
XenophileJKO wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm defining "why" it morphed.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#182

Post by LeoPanthera »

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…

> And they had to take down all their published courses!

No. They chose to take them down, instead of providing reasonable accommodations to those with disabilities.

Choosing to see everything in the most cynical light doesn't make that version of events true.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#183

Post by j45 »

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…

Good for you for building your own garden.

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#184

Post by j45 »

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…

Some owed in tech like relearning the same lessons over and over with new instead of realizing there’s a lot that is transferable and new technologies world be better implemented, sooner if it understood what had been done to date.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#185

Post by zelphirkalt »

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#186

Post by seattle_spring »

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.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#187

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

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.

I'm very sorry to see it go.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#188

Post by xorvoid »

edent wrote: post #167
azangru wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

It sounds almost like you're saying that quality information shouldn't be accessible to anyone if it's not accessible to everyone?

That would be an unreasonably high standard and would set an incentive to withhold. Which is exactly the outcome we got here?

Wouldn't it be better to cheer the improved accessiblity? Then acknowledge shortcomings and ask for community contributions to improve things?

Why must perfect be the enemy of good?

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#189

Post by okokwhatever »

edent wrote: post #167
azangru wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

This is exactly why we can't have nice things in this brand new world... there's always a guardian of ethics, of what's right and what's supposed to be done so as not to upset absolutely anyone...

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#190

Post by andrewrn »

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.
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