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Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

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Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#321

Post by nickjj »

chirau wrote: post #283
nickjj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, funny enough the last 2 are on Udemy (my first courses) where as the others are on my main site. I've kept the Flask one up to date for almost 10 years, all free updates. I have so many course ideas but starting a new one is tough because I've lost all search traction to my site and courses in general. I don't want it to end but I also have to be real. I've put a decade into writing blog posts, hundreds of fr…

I took your Build A SaaS course on Udemy some year back, it was really good. I didn't realize it has updates to the day. The Udemy version is still the 10 hour one though, so perhaps that's why.

Thank you.

Yep on my site there's around 30 hours of content for the same course. Basically a bunch of updates and refactors along with building a 2nd app.

I was trying to differentiate my site vs Udemy by adding extra perks.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#322

Post by vintermann »

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.

> 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.

What's more discouraging is that completing them may be little more than that as well. Sure, you put in the self-discipline and work to ace all the quizzes and maybe even turn in the practical final assignment, and you have a piece of paper to show for it, but did you really learn all that much? How much sticks with you in a couple of years?

I took Odersky's Scala course on coursera, which was fairly tough (relative to the ~10 other similar courses I've taken as an adult). Certainly felt good completing it. Didn't feel so good about dropping out of the sequel course a couple of weeks in as I realized I just couldn't complete the assignments in time without sacrificing too much of family and social life, but no matter. What do I remember of Scala today? Certainly not enough to program in it... Maybe some vague things about covariance and contravariance and how mutability makes it painful.

I also did a bunch of Andrew Ng's courses. The first covered a bunch of non-NN machine learning methods which are a lot less relevant than they were. I remember their names at least, but I certainly couldn't explain them in a code interview. Then I learned to write vectorized hand-calculated backwards passes in Matlab (well, gnu octave), and some early Tensorflow. Also well out of code interview accessible memory by now. Ng's courses were great at giving you a sense of accomplishment and removing all time-consuming frustration not related to the actual focus of the course... But learning these things a few years before most people didn't make me rich, and these days I'd have to ask a chatbot like everyone else. Skills you don't use atrophy, and I couldn't convince anyone to pay me to implement ML models.

So I guess what I'm getting at is, even at their best these courses may not give most graduates what we really hope for.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#323

Post by elAhmo »

Udemy always had that scammy vibe with courses "90% off" (from to $200 to $20 and things like that), plagiarism, as well as anti-patterns and very questionable quality control on the courses themselves.

They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.

I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.

I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#324

Post by walthamstow »

vmilner wrote: post #116
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.

And that's with all the foreign student bonanza money. My inlaws live in Notts and all they see getting built is student blocks. Imagine what'll happen when the next government drastically limits student visas.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#325

Post by GuestFAUniverse »

SoftTalker wrote: post #97
user_7832 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably not a uni specific issue. I went to a top EU uni, and there absolutely were courses that could've just been an ~~email~~ video. Admitedly not everything was bad, but the quality of education isn't as high as it should be.

We have a lot more students in university, and a lot more professors. Inevitably this means converging on "average."

More students _per course_ than a MOOC cohort? -- doubt. If you add up all courses of a while discipline, edu portals still serve way more students.

In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers?

I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#326

Post by geraldwhen »

goodpoint wrote: post #315
JoshTriplett wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'd expect if I see a project with no commits in 2 years. Not 2 days.

There's ton of perfectly usable 2-years old software.

I suspect that CVE inflation has poisoned the minds of many developers.

A db driver may have an issue with unsanitized user input when run against SQLite, but you only use it with oracle and sanitize input anyway, but that shows up as a 9.1 critical deployment blocker for corporate employees.

Unexploitable CVEs with inflated ratings make using any open source software a pain in the butt at BigCo.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#327

Post by techcode »

gustavopezzi wrote: post #112
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…

Any idea if some (perhaps many) of those enrolled students were from Udemy's corporate clients?

When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#328

Post by Libidinalecon »

master-lincoln wrote: post #24
zigman1 wrote: post #5

Interesting, can this be an expected outcome of AI adoption? Mergers of big competitors?

just capitalism in the final stage

Yes, "Late Stage Capitalism" the idea from the text written in 1902 by Werner Sombart.

The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#329

Post by pnt12 »

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…

There's a python course in plursight that I loved, it's quite the deep dive into the language and I learned a lot.

One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much!

I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies.

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#330

Post by braza »

The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses.

I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.

I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.

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