Udemy

Online education suffers from something of an embarrassment of riches. With platforms as varied as Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, learners can enroll in just about any course that sparks curiosity, and often at no cost. But what about learners who also want to share their expertise? Whereas learning management systems like Coursera and edX curate courses from universities, and Udacity and Khan Academy host their own content, Udemy (free) is unique because it allows any user to act as either learner or instructor.

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An open invitation to instructors has enabled Udemy to amass a massive catalog of courses, about a third of which are free. The revenue raised by the other two-thirds has made some users rich. Not everyone can expect such material riches; however, Udemy may enable the right kind of user to supplement his or her existing income.

Background, Foregrounded
Udemy offers self-paced courses. While some teachers respond to discussion posts or offer office hours (namely via Google Hangouts), make no mistake: These classes bear little comparison to traditional courses. Classes are short, solitary, and lack personalized feedback or a sense of cohort. Students receive little in the way of accreditation, save a Certificate of Completion, which they may share via social media.

Udemy courses are divided into sections and lectures. Lectures can be video micro-lectures, but they can also include audio, text, and presentation slides. From a right-aligned sidebar users can access related materials, discussion threads, and a lesson-specific notepad. Every course has a landing page with a course description (not quite a syllabus), user reviews, and often a video introduction.

For this review, I enrolled in several courses and attempted to build my own, too. Although my perspective is shaped by my background in tech journalism and my experience as a student, teacher, and administrator in a traditional higher-education institution, I will mostly focus on the question most pertinent to PCMag readers: How does Udemy do as an adult education platform? To ensure both thoroughness and uniformity, I have repurposed sections of my edX, Udacity, and Coursera reviews, and I hope that, like them, this review generates conversation that extends beyond the comments section.

On MOOCs
To call Udemy classes "online courses" is somewhat misleading. Udemy courses do possess features of online education, including discussion forums; machine-graded assessments; and, of course, video micro-lectures. However, unlike an online course at my home institution, Udemy is open to anyone interested in the course, which means wide-ranging or sporadic participation. Moreover, credentials are not meaningful: Students enroll in classes not for accreditation (Certificates of Completion), but rather for job-related skills developed through them.

Instead, Udemy and competitors Udacity, Coursera, and edX can be better understood as MOOCs. Coined by Dave Cormier in 2008, MOOCs, or "massive open online courses," invite unlimited participation via the Web. On account of their scale, MOOCs must offer a different kind of education. (About which you can read more in Joshua Kim's excellent Inside Higher Ed piece). Because there are so many different types of MOOCs, including those that seek to reproduce traditional courses (xMOOCs), promote connectivist philosophy (cMOOCs), and enable vocational training (vMOOCs), it can be difficult to evaluate their pedagogical efficacy.

On Efficacy
In its much-cited 2009 report, the U.S. Department of Education found that "classes with online learning (whether taught completely online or blended) on average produce stronger student learning outcomes than classes with solely face-to-face instruction. Were you to read (I am not sure I would recommend it), you would find that a combination of online and face-to-face exercises, sometimes called "blended" or "hybrid" learning, is deemed most effective. The question is, however, for whom is online learning effective?

A recent study from the Community College Research Center found that "online courses may exacerbate already persistent achievement gaps between student subgroups." Suffice it to say, MOOCs will not work for everyone, a point underscored by eyebrow-raising attrition rates. However, just as I do not think it is fair to expect MOOCs to suit every kind of learner, I also do not think it is appropriate for advocates to present them as a panacea for the problems of higher education. Rather, MOOCs are well-suited to tech-savvy self-starters, and for those interested in both online learning and teaching, Udemy offers a unique platform.

The Catalog
Udemy is also unique in the scale of its platform. You can sort through courses by categories as wide-ranging as Health and Fitness to Graduate Entry Exams. From there, you can filter classes based upon language, price, instruction level, and features (such as classes that include quizzes). For example, I found 117 courses available in the humanities. Searching for free courses, however, quickly trimmed the list: Most classes (76) were priced at less than fifty dollars, with thirty listed for free. These stats align with the pricing across the catalog: paid courses outnumber free courses at least two-to-one. Within the humanities, I found that the vast majority (89) of classes were listed as appropriate for all instruction levels, with just two courses recommended for advanced learners.

Given that Udemy is marketed as a means through which workers can gain job-based skills, I also sought to explore its vocational offerings. To this end, I found that Udemy housed a large portfolio of courses related to Office Productivity. While there were subcategories for Apple, Google, SAP, Salesforce, Intuit and Oracle, I focused on office favorite Microsoft. In addition to hundreds of courses produced in English (549), there were also some classes in Spanish (86), German (24), Portuguese (5), French (4), Czech (3), Italian (2), and Russian (2). This range supports Udemy's claim that two-thirds of their user base lives outside the United States.

I found that there were far fewer gratis vocational courses: About one-tenth of classes (60) were listed for free, and some courses were priced at hundreds of dollars. (Under IT Certification several courses were even priced above five hundred dollars). These numbers underscore what could be an uncomfortable reality for some learners: Udemy is a marketplace, and on that marketplace, some knowledge is more valuable than others.

Ancient Greek Religion
I enrolled in Ancient Greek Religion (free) to explore Udemy's traditional course catalog. Created by Robert Garland, Professor of Classics at Colgate, Ancient Greek Religion attracted a comparatively large enrollment (over nine thousand students) with almost universally favorable responses. In contrast to other online education platforms, Udemy foregrounds student reviews by affixing them to course landing pages. Ancient Greek Religion averaged 4.6 out of 5 stars, based upon 99 student reviews.

As an educator, I am not entirely comfortable with this form of course evaluation. While I understand that students are savvy critics, I am not convinced that production values and presentation style—about which most reviewers commented—are meaningful values against which to evaluate course efficacy. For example, one reviewer wrote, "think the commentary/lecture is interesting, however I do think that visuals in the form of slides, movie clips, PowerPoint presentations would go much further in inspiring the imagination and keeping the attention of the viewer." In the Udemy marketplace, it is not enough to create an informative course; students expect to be entertained. I was also taken aback by the instrumentalism of the course's landing page. Below a one-paragraph course description, read the glib question, "What am I going to get from this course?" The answer: "Over 19 lectures and 5 hours of content!" Why yearn for some understanding of ancient Greece when you can have five hours of content?

Garland's lectures were accessible and generally informative. His videos were seemingly extemporaneous, recorded via webcam in longer increments—usually about twenty minutes each. Considering Udemy's global user base, I was surprised that Garland's lectures—and others in my testing—did not include captioning. Some competitors, such as edX, provide interactive captioning, which is helpful for English Language Learners (ELL). Moreover, unless the lecture is recorded in another language, there is no secondary language support as far as I can tell.

I found Professor Garland's descriptions of ancient Greek deities refreshingly colloquial. "The Olympian gods have better things to do than to listen to our moaning and groaning," he narrates. "They're off somewhere having fun, getting up to mischief, or plotting against one of their own kind…They're an undependable lot. They suffer from attention deficit syndrome." While I appreciated his conversational tone, I found that without readings, exercises, or assessments, I retained little from lectures. In this sense, Ancient Greek Religion is less a course than an afternoon tutorial. When you reach the final lesson, you find a slide thanking you for taking the class and requesting that you take a moment "Write a review and share your feedback."

Microsoft Excel Formula Design
For my second class I enrolled in the top-rated Microsoft vocational course Master Microsoft Excel Formula Design for Beginners ($9). The course was produced by Jed Guinto, who is something of an Udemy wunderkind, having produced more than twenty courses to date.

Unlike Professor Garland's course, which relied upon lengthier videos recorded by webcam, Mr. Guinto's class used screencasts, typically no longer than two minutes each. While the tutorials were well structured (building from adding and subtracting to text concatenation), Mr. Guinto's style was un-scripted. For an Excel layperson (myself included), the class was informative enough to require note taking. Udemy includes a handy notepad in the right-aligned sidebar; the only hitch is that notes are pinned to specific lectures. This means that I could not reference previous notes without reopening those lectures, a cumbersome exercise given the brevity of tutorials. I can see how, with longer lectures (e.g. those of Ancient Greek Religion) the notepad could be helpful, especially given that users can export notes as CSV files.

Although discussions are available in the sidebar, I found that most students did not use them, and when they did, they rarely interacted with one another. In one Python programming class, for example, there were literally no discussion threads. Other times, teachers lead by example. In Ancient Greek Religion, Professor Garland responded to students, but most discussions had dried up two years ago. Unfortunately, this is not unusual: Discussions often wither in online classes—they require careful scaffolding and moderation—and they often fail in on-demand classes.

Unlike Ancient Greek Religion, Excel Formula Design for Beginners did include a fifteen question multiple-choice quiz. In taking the quiz, I found myself pining for two components of Khan Academy assessment. First, in my review of Khan Academy I highlighted how their SAT Test Prep assessment offered explanatory videos; in my Excel quiz, I would have liked to know not just what answers I got wrong, but where I went wrong. Second, Udemy quizzes aren't just low-stakes—they're no stakes. You can miss half the questions and still finish the course. Even if teachers do not create large question banks (in the mode of Khan Academy), students ought to be required to answer some number of questions correctly before advancing.

This problem also appears in Udemy's wealth of free and paid coding classes. The variety of courses, from beginner Web development to intermediate software engineering to expert e-commerce, may rival services like Editors' Choice Lynda.com, but the quality is a lot spottier. There are free, comprehensive lessons for building impressive, professional-looking websites in a relatively short amount of time. Many provide dozens of lectures and hours of footage you can access on your mobile device. However, the limited quiz and note-taking options make it harder to retain the information, especially while watching the more tedious and technical video tutorials. The free interactive courses on Khan Academy do a much better job at making sure coding knowledge sticks, even if the knowledge offered is a little more basic.

As a learner, Udemy's interface is intuitive. Lectures flow from one to the next via an Autoplay feature, and the sidebar thoughtfully organizes lesson materials, notes, and discussions (where applicable). My main critique is that I always felt like a customer when using Udemy. After every lesson, the platform notifies you of the percentage of the class you have completed, which is tedious considering many classes can completed in a few hours. The site also prompts you to recommend the class to friends, which you must delay not once (Ask me later), but twice (Ask me at the end of the course). Add to this, instructor pitches. In a nineteen-lesson course, Mr. Guinto included two sales pitches: "Lesson 3: All My Courses" promoted his other course offerings, and "Lesson 18: Help Me Inspire More People" sought to upsell me to a $200 course.

Udemy as a Teaching Platform
In addition to serving as an extensive learning platform, Udemy also enables users with specialized knowledge to build their own courses using a set of development tools. To learn more about the instructor experience, I enrolled in a one-hour tutorial, entitled How to Create Your Udemy Course, before attempting to build my own course. Business-savvy, metric-minded users will not likely need the tutorial.

Click-through-rates. Conversion-rates. Instructor Analytics. Udemy's tutorial underscores that it's not enough to build a course and let it loose in the wild; instructors must tailor features and pricing to the marketplace and student feedback. In an ideal world, this emphasis would produce better classes and better learning outcomes. Udemy's metric-minded approach to online education enables instructors to upload videos for review using Udemy's File Uploader, solicit feedback from other instructors using the Udemy Studio Facebook Group, and track student usage using Instructor Analytics. Students, meanwhile, benefit from a generous selection of courses as well as Yelp-style peer reviews.

My concern, as I touched upon in previous sections, is that students are often more attentive to production values than content quality. That concern ought to be assuaged by the fact that every class is subject to a review process by Udemy's "content quality team." However, as far as I can tell, that team preferences course mechanics rather than course content. Consider Udemy's Quality Review Standards. Only in point seven do I see any mention of content needing to be "clear of obvious mistakes." Moreover, most of those mistakes are not content-oriented. Alongside "mistakes that are not edited out," point seven lists "pauses," "ums and ahs," and "rambling" as "obvious mistakes." Mind you, this is just one point from a rubric of twenty recommended and required standards, and Udemy's team has just forty-eight hours to respond to a prospective class after its submission. This is not exactly an exhaustive vetting process, and it relies heavily on student intervention to identify content issues.

Potential instructors, meanwhile, need to be savvy self-promoters. Branding is a keyword in the tutorial. If questions such as, "How are you going to build your brand?" or "How will you stand out in the marketplace?" make you uncomfortable, than you may struggle within that marketplace. Education is a product on Udemy's marketplace, and students are customers. As the tutorial puts it, "More engaged students generally purchase more courses." While teachers are encouraged to create a "transformative learning experience," most of the tutorial's guidance is not about student transformation, but student appeasement. The speaker asks, "Are you communicating your passion for your topic? Are you speaking in interesting tones? Or are you speaking in a monotonous way that could bore your students? All of these are super-important to pay attention to." If you are uncomfortable with this type of rhetoric, or the values it presupposes, you may not be the ideal Udemy instructor.

Building a Class
With those concerns aired, Udemy does offer a decent set of tools and clear guidelines for building courses. The process is highly prescriptive. When it comes to video micro-lectures, for example, Udemy offers camera recommendations, resolution guidelines, and the chance to upload test videos. Instructors are guided through all required course features. Before I began uploading videos I was prompted to supply learning objectives and to tie my curriculum to those objectives.

In practice, this meant that I had to think through the structure of my class (my sections and lectures), before I added content or assessments. To each lecture you can attach resources, including text, presentations, audio, video, or what Udemy calls "Mashups," videos synced with presentations. In addition to resources, you can add multiple-choice, fill in the blanks, and true or false assessments. Unfortunately, there is no module for a peer review. Overall, the tools are well organized, and I suspect most instructors could build a course without enrolling in the tutorial.

Premium Instructors
Perhaps the most important choice an instructor will make is how to price their course. It's easiest to list your course for free, and, in my experience, many instructors use gratis courses to gain name recognition and to upsell students to paid offerings. If and when you want to create a paid course, you will need to register as a Premium Instructor.

Instructors can make twenty-five cents, fifty cents, or ninety-seven cents on the dollar, depending upon how students find their courses. For example, if a Udemy promotional affiliate attracts a student, that affiliate earns fifty percent of the course cost, with Udemy and the instructor splitting the other half. If Udemy's own marketing steers the student to the class, the instructor splits the revenue with the site. If, however, the instructor's brand attracts that same student, she retains ninety-seven cents on the dollar. Thus, building your brand is not just marketing mumbo jumbo; self-promotion exerts a material effect on one's livelihood. Thankfully, Udemy provides a series of tools, including Conversion Analytics, Engagement Analytics, as well as third-party integrations (e.g. Google Analytics) by which instructors can track course stats.

Udemy has made news for its instructors' earnings. Top earner Rob Percival has made almost three million dollars through his Web-development courses, and other instructors have quit their day jobs. They are the outliers, however. According to Shannon Hughes, senior marketing director at Udemy, the average Udemy instructor earns about seven thousand dollars a year teaching on Udemy.

As touted on the about page, Udemy has more than 14,000 instructors teaching 25,000 courses to 6,000,000 students. If those figures were evenly divided, it would work out to less than two courses per instructor with fewer than 250 students per course. Even if all of those courses were paid (they're not), that kind of income won't make anyone a millionaire overnight. Those stats are also not reflective of the Udemy marketplace. In reality, there are all-stars, such as Mr. Guinto, who do well by any metric, and others who receive less attention. Much of one's success has to do with their salesmanship, video presence, and the market-rated value of the content they teach. With that said, Udemy courses can both provide supplementary incomes to established professionals and help entrepreneurial professionals build their reputations.

Udemy for Business
Udemy's approach to education will concern some learners and teachers. Its courses can be better described as tutorials whose limited assessments, emphasis on production values and marketing, and disingenuous claims of student-empowerment conceal inadequate content vetting. A thirty-day money back guarantee may be sufficient for a sweater, but discovering defects in education can take longer, and the effects of defects may have far-reaching effects.

Setting side my philosophical concerns, Udemy is unique because it enables savvy professionals to share or monetize their expertise. As I have shown, there is a lot of useful content available at little or no cost, and Udemy's self-paced structure means that adult learners can acquire new skills on their own schedules. Businesses, too, may choose to subscribe to Udemy's expansive suite of training courses, Udemy for Business, to encourage employees to continue to seek new forms of professional development.

When it comes to professional vocational training, PCMag readers seeking non-credentialed skills development may find Udemy offers a more affordable alternative to Udacity. Moreover, as more than just a learning platform, Udemy enables those with specialized expertise to share their knowledge, and perhaps even make some money in the process.