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Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

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Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#221

Post by dokyun »

warkdarrior wrote: post #205
nickjj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+ p…

> If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.

Snake oil

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#222

Post by znpy »

TheSkyHasEyes wrote: post #163
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…

> 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.

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

Some areas do, some areas not so much.

I have a colleague that's incredibly strong with databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant.

I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living. Once you get past the "cloud native" abstractions (and other BS) it's penguins all the way down, and I get to reuse most of my core Linux competencies I learned 10+ years ago (eg: I do tcpdump in prod, and it's quicker and more effective than many of the modern shiny tools).

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#223

Post by ghaff »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #181
ghaff wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it wasn't making any money.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#224

Post by BeetleB »

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…

You're missing important context, which is that they were required by (federal) law to provide said accommodation, and they failed to do it (some would say they chose not to do it). It was easier (cheaper) to pull the plug.

Don't blame the litigant. If you don't like it, change federal law.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#225

Post by dijit »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #213
dijit wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago. I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from…

12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.

you hadn’t heard of RAID, readahead, write-back/write-through, stride or even just the concept of fragmentation?

Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#226

Post by [deleted] »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #199
LeoPanthera wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You realize it would cost a significant resources to make the “accommodations” you are suggesting? Money, despite what you may believe, doesn’t grow on trees. Given the range of worthy competing interests where the money could be spent, the university likely had no practical choice but to take it offline, lest it face the bad press and wrath of Progressives. You remind me of people who insist every single new apartme…

[deleted]

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#227

Post by SchemaLoad »

dijit wrote: post #225
SchemaLoad wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.

you hadn’t heard of RAID, readahead, write-back/write-through, stride or even just the concept of fragmentation? Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.

The people who knew about those things back then know modern infrastructure today. I'm sure if you asked the average web dev 12 years ago what write-back io is they wouldn't have any idea.

Perhaps the only trend is more companies not hiring anyone who specialises in infrastructure and just leaving it as a side task for React devs to look at once every few months.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#228

Post by clw8 »

SamDc73 wrote: post #215
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…

> 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 Courser…

Stanford's Youtube channel is also a goldmine. There's actually a lot of professors that put their lectures on Youtube, you just have to look (or watch enough that the algorithm finds them for you).

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#229

Post by SamDc73 »

clw8 wrote: post #228
SamDc73 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Courser…

Stanford's Youtube channel is also a goldmine. There's actually a lot of professors that put their lectures on Youtube, you just have to look (or watch enough that the algorithm finds them for you).

I find the Stanford channel a bit hard to navigate, MIT has a dedicated channel for the courses and another one for the other stuff, I wish Stanford did the same. The same applies to Harvard too

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#230

Post by BeetleB »

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.

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.

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