Webinar Recap with the AMA featuring Jacob Coulter
Hey there instructors,
On January 25th, we had the pleasure of having an AMA-style webinar with our Senior Director, Product Management Jacob Coulter and we wanted to share a recap of what we discussed.
As background on who Jacob Coulter is and what he does here at Udemy.
Jacob joined Udemy in June of 2022 to bring features to the Udemy platform to help you succeed as an instructor! At the moment his area of expertise is the following:
- Tooling for instructor content management
- Instructor insights (data, reporting, course performance dashboard)
- The learner <> Instructor interactions
Here’s what we covered during the Webinar!
For the first portion of the AMA, we had Jacob answer some of the questions that you posted in the webinar invite.
- Instructors are going off the platform to deliver coaching, bundling, live meet-ups & certifications. Does Udemy plan to build those into the platform?
-Lawrence Miller, Anup Shukla, Peter Dalmaris
The short answer is that these are not currently on the roadmap. As we inspect the needs of our learners, organization, and instructors, the largest gaps we found are practice or applied to learn. So we are working to improve upon practice tools and practice insights for existing content types. We do plan on taking a look at credentials in Udemy this year with the goal of how can we help learners demonstrate skills acquired by learners. This is a larger initiative but it is on the roadmap.
- What tools are we planning to get to help engage our students more? (e.g. interactive videos, drag&drop questions?)
-Marious
Right now we are working on hands-on exercises for a learner to practice a skill whether that’s a quiz, an assessment, a lab, or a coding exercise. This has proven very successful in helping conversion and driving engagement. We received feedback from practice tests about more flexible question types (drag and drop etc). With that feedback, we will be taking a look at those features in Q2 2023.
- How are you planning to provide instructors with more actionable insights?
-Jonathan Turner, William Stewart
When we think about insights, we want to provide something actionable. When we provide you with something, it helps you monetize efforts/time, better cater to learners, or take advantage of a new opportunity. We currently have a new beta insight for UB (Udemy Business) instructors and received great feedback. So with our initiatives for insights are aiming to have a higher impact on the instructors.
Follow-up question - Community Champion Lawrence Miller has been a huge advocate to provide year-over-year insights from teaching, will that be coming?
This is on our roadmap to be explored in Q1. We understand that this is valuable for your business and that the current setup is not explaining seasonality. We don’t have details on how this will look, but it is being explored as we speak.
What are the biggest things planned for this year and beyond?
-Samuel Lenk
Practice and Insights - Practice and insights that will maintain a focus for us. Another project we are focused on is what we call internal Supply Gaps and we know you want guidance on where to focus your content efforts. With Supply Gaps we will evaluate how you can best do that. We currently have the market insights tool but we want to expand further to see what the demand for insights from learners and customers is. We don’t have the full answer to this yet but it is on our roadmap.
Skill Attainment - To expand further, we currently have areas of the importance we are looking into. We are looking into skill attainment. How can a learner get various skills on our platform and present that to a manager showcasing that skill? We are also looking into skills-based guidance which means how can we assess the skills needed to learn, what is the goal of a learner, and with that, we can give that information to the instructor community to continue meeting the needs of these learners.
Active learning - We are looking at coding exercises and practice tests but we are looking at other aspects such as labs or practice tests. We are very interested in expanding this further.
Learning habits and motivation -This is a method to guide learners through their content and continue forward. Not a complete roadmap but it is on our radar.
We would love more feedback from the community so if you have any more suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments below!
Comments
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Thank you @RyanJaress for the Webinar recap.
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