Best Of

Hey there @FrankKane

Thank you for your feedback! We value your input and understand your concerns. To clarify, the AI summarizing feature is designed to enhance, and not to replace, the learning experience.   It offers students a brief and high level overview of each lecture, encouraging deeper engagement with the course content. If students are looking for specific information, the AI assistant can direct them to the relevant video, thereby enhancing overall course engagement. A lesson is not marked as viewed just by reading the summary, as our goal is to maintain the integrity of the learning experience and ensure that instructors are credited appropriately.

We want to emphasize that the summarizing tool is designed to help our busy learners quickly and conveniently locate the specific video content they need, ultimately boosting video engagement—and, in turn, increasing revenue for instructors. 

Also for further clarification, we won't use opted-out instructor content. We honor instructor opt-outs as outlined in Section 6 of our Instructor GenAI Policy.

I went into two of my own courses, went to the curriculum, clicked on the Preview button in the upper right corner, then chose a lecture and the AI assistant appears to the right, along with the Course content. I tried it with two of my courses and asked questions. The answers were drawn from my course and the answers were consistent with the definitions and use of language in my course. For example in my course on Consultative Selling, I simply asked "what is consultative selling?" The right answer could only have been drawn from my course. The answer was perfect. In fact I wish I had included such a concise, yet complete, explanation in the course myself.

I had been under the impression that the Assistant would refer you to different lectures or different courses. It doesn't do that, at least from my experiments. It just creates an answer from the information and language within your course. I think that is very good.

So far, from what I have seen with my own courses, I give the AI Assistant and A Plus!

I think that students will become accustomed to using the AI Assistant and if your course is opted out I am afraid you may be at a serious disadvantage.

I have the Udemy Personal Plan and the AI Assistant Beta is enabled on my end, as a student. I have access to the course recommendations and in-course AI assistant. I did a quick test drive of both, and it's clear they're both still in beta. Here's some quick feedback based on some initial testing of them both:

Course Recommendations AI Assistant

1. If you ask it to find a certain category of course, it returns three results, telling you why they're a good fit based on your initial question. If you want to see more courses, you have to tell the chatbot to do so with another prompt.
2. If you ask it about a topic, such as digital marketing, that you're interested in learning, it'll return a list of relevant course categories to explore.
3. It doesn't have the ability to identify best-selling courses. I asked it to find best-sellers and it said it couldn't do that.
4. It doesn't show course badges (best-seller, highest-rated, etc.) and sometimes recommends poorly rated courses over higher rated courses (it recommended a 2.9-start course as its top result in one test).
5. Not all categories are indexed yet. I have the best-selling and highest rated poker courses on Udemy and it couldn't find a single poker course in the Udemy catalog.
6. It presented me with an AI hallucination response of just "[ ]" while using it and sometimes won't show images and links associated with courses, just text.

In Course AI Assistant

1. It'll only answer questions related to the course you're taking, which is both good and bad. It's good because students can't ask completely unrelated questions to the chatbot. But it could be bad because if a student has a somewhat loosely related question, the chatbot may deem it falls too far outside the scope of the course and may choose not to answer it.
2. It's so-so at summarizing lectures. I tested it in one of my courses and one response was "I'm not sure what to say." It seems to do okay with short lectures (2-3 minutes), but struggles with longer ones (10+ mins) that covers lots of sub-topics. The shorter lectures had good, concise summarizes, whereas the longer ones were missing a lot of information.
3. The lecture summaries are short, so for those of you worrying it would replace your lectures - don't worry, it doesn't. They look like they tend to be 4-6 sentence high-level summaries.
4. It looks like it may help decrease Q&A student questions, as it does seem to do a decent job answering student questions. I tested it with actual student Q&A questions and the answers seemed decent.