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Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.
Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good. My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider’s React courses, and Chris Croft’s management courses.
Udemy is selling a dream, more so, than an education. They mostly target lower income internet natives, who have heard of coding, not enough to do anything dangerous but certainly enough to long for the good money and great perks. You are not really committed to switching up your life, but a "premium product" at 90% off down to 20$, how could you not give it a try? It's an affordable dream and makes for an easy sale.
I don't have a ton of experience with Udemy. But I took an introduction to Autodesk Inventor class there in January and I thought it was quite good. Was only something like €10 and I was able to do quite complex drawings (at least for what I need) after two days. Much cheaper and probably almost as effective as one of those expensive corporate training classes that are often a €1000,- for just two days.
It’s frustrating that the main advantage of paying a lot for a course, is having some proper time to do it.
I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube. Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc. That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?
I've had really good luck with programming topics, specifically Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and Elasticsearch. These are narrow topics that you are unlikely to find on Coursera and many of the courses are published by well known figures in their respective communities. I have yet to hit a bad one. Udemy has a 30 day refund policy as well, so you can try a course out with low risk.
I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube. Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc. That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?
The ai lectures on udemy are a bit weaker in my opinion. YouTube and university content is better.
In contrast, I have never paid for coursera, edx or audacity. A key thing is the price point of 15 bucks .. I don't feel bad at all blowing cash on the udemy courses .. it is like a movie ticket. A 100 usd course feels like real money.
Did Udemy get around to putting controls in place to stop course stealing? I remember Troy Hunt in particular had issues with people taking his material, narrating over the top of it, and selling it on their Udemy channels.
Even sentdex had to deal with the same issue - https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8sl76u/sentdex_on_u...
For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures).
The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffic coming from Google results in them taking 50%+ too. If you opt out of their controlled pricing then your course will be hidden from all search results, in which case you'll make nothing because no one will be able to find you and that defeats the entire purpose of using a marketplace.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Udemy heavily hand tunes search results and cuts behind the scenes deals with instructors in certain niches, and when those deals happen, other people in the same niche get completely fucked over night.
For example, I was selling close to 50+ courses a day, then Udemy signed a contract with another person in the same niche (they told me directly). A few days after their course went live, the traffic to my course dropped by over an order of magnitude and my sales dropped by 20x. My graphs literally looks like a nose dive and I went from being able to sustain myself to having to stop creating courses.
The hilarious thing is my course is even higher rated than theirs and I've had people message me privately saying they took both courses and much preferred mine, yet it sits barely on the first page with a 4.7 average rating and like 1 sale a day with little to no traffic.
Every time I email Udemy asking about this they say they don't modify search results, but then every time I show them screenshots of very strange ranking behavior they change what they say and usually I get in a bump in sales for a day and then it drops off.
For the last few years I've spent a lot of time (and a lot of hard work) attempting to build my own audience instead of making new courses so I can drop Udemy all together. I'm not there yet, but one day I hope I'll never have to deal with that platform again and I wouldn't recommend using Udemy for both buying or selling courses to my worst enemy.
Oh, and one fun thing about being on Udemy too is, you can expect people to black mail you for unreasonable things. I've had more than 1 person on the platform email me saying things like I "MUST" help them with their custom project for free and if I don't then they they are going to give my course a 1 star review. I think due to Udemy's low prices, it attracts a certain type of person.