Want an Opinion on Your Upcoming/New Course From a Top Seller?
Update 02/21: I continue to provide feedback to people leaving comments on this post. I will be traveling for the next week and won't be able to do much in that time. But please be patient, and I will return to this thread when I return.
Hi there, my name is Scott, and I've been on Udemy for nine years — 1.1 million paying students as of now.
If you have a new course (or one that just went live) and want some honest, constructive feedback to make it better, I'll spend 10 minutes looking at your landing page, promo videos, and anything else I can see and give you some solid ideas of things that you can improve. I promise I won't be too harsh but I'll be honest.
Post in the comments, and I'll go to your profile page and find your latest course. Or post a YouTube link to one of the videos if the course is not live yet.
Any of the other community champions can jump on and give feedback to any of the instructors looking for feedback.
Comments
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You’re the best Scott!
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Kind of a quiet party.
Maybe the invitations got lost in the mail?
Let me bump this post up then:)
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@ScottDuffy
you are awesome!1 -
appreciate it 1 -
Thanks 1 -
I learned from the best... you. 2 -
Please review my profile and my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@supplychainsensei6988
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Hi Scott,
I hope this message finds you well.
Firstly, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your generous offer.
Currently, I have a small French course on Udemy, with 1086 enrolled students and a rating of 4.64.
My ambition now is to expand upon this foundation by developing a highly comprehensive course, spanning over 100 hours, in order to not only increase its marketability but also to provide even greater value to our students.
I'm contemplating whether to add to the existing course or to create an entirely new one.
Could you please provide insights on the advantages of either approach?
For your reference, here is the link to the current course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/french-language-course-learn-french/?referralCode=EF70CD05931F2EBD7B59
Thank you once again for your support and guidance.
Warm regards,
Nezha
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Greetings Scott,
I just launched a new course, and this is my first on Udemy; if you could please provide your valuable feedback and I appreciate you looking into the course. The course link --
https://www.udemy.com/course/data-analytics-with-r-python-and-sql/?referralCode=7A402B15EAE2818DB23F
Thanks,
-Ramesh
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* I like your title, includes good keywords. Great.
* Your subtitle can be improved. Include the keywords again. Would love for it to be more descriptive and motivate the student to buy. "Visualize your data and get actionable insights using R, Python and SQL."
* I think your course image can be improved. I get that it's a column chart, but I think there are better images to represent data analytics.
* Your audio is clear with no background noise. I can understand you clearly. Congratulations on that. To many, that's one of the most difficult parts.
* I think you can improve your introductory video by telling potential students what to expect to learn in the course and perhaps with a quick demonstration of how you can turn data into insights. Udemy has a "promo video" recipe, and it's worth looking at.
https://teach.udemy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Promo-video-Recipe-cc.pdfIn 90-120 seconds, you should be able to get the students interested in buying your course instead of someone else's course. It's not reasonable that they will spend 10 minutes listening to your entire introduction video before deciding whether to purchase/continue, or look away. Look at the Udemy recipe above.
* I also like to suggest a demo. Even if you haven't taught the students how to use R and Python to analyze the data, if you showed them a sample CSV, you could perhaps craft a 60-second demo of what they should be able to do by the end of the course. A restaurant shows pictures of the food before the diner orders it to get the person interested in the meal, and so a teacher can show a demo of the outcome at the beginning, before taking students step-by-step into how they did it. This is separate from the introduction or promo video.
* Introduce variety in the video. You have a 10-minute video (Lesson 3), and the video never changes the entire time. I think you can do things to keep the student more interested in the video portion. Can you break one slide into 5 slides? Make the text bigger, add relevant pictures, or introduce basic animations (fade in) in PowerPoint? Having the screen unchanging for 7, 8, or 10 minutes is too long, in my view.
You don't even have to re-record the audio. You can just improve the slides and dub the existing audio on top of it. I do that all the time.
* I like that you have lots of "free preview" videos. That's a great way to get students who are unsure of it to get a better idea of your teaching style.
* I like that you have example dataset to download.
* Overall, it looks like the course covers a lot in 6.5 hours, and students interested in the topic would find it helpful.
* I didn't see a video that was the end of the course. There was no thank you or goodbye, and no notes to the student on what to do next. Let's say a student successfully completes your course. Do you want them to do anything to continue their studies? Can you recommend other resources for them to continue?
Overall, I think you've got a great first course. Just a few minor suggestions to improve the "pace" of the videos to keep students interested. And of course, get them interested with a good promo video that sells the benefits of taking the course in a concise 2-minute fashion.
All the best,
Scott
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Marhaba Nezha,
I have a trip to the Middle East coming up in 2 weeks, and I will take your beginning Arabic course to learn a few words and phrases. How timely.
As far as the French course goes...
* I love that you have a specific promo video aimed at people who are not yet your student.
* The videos have a bit of an echo. But other videos you've made (in the Arabic course for instance), don't have an echo. Your voice is clear and understandable, so it's not a huge problem. But there's clearly an echo, and I'd rather there wasn't.
* I love that your promo video has some direct lessons that students can take away and get a taste of your teaching style.
* Even the introduction video teaches something. Your professionalism as a teacher is clear. As opposed to just being a person who knows French and decided to make a course on it, it's clear that you are a language teacher. This makes me trust you if I wanted to learn French.
* Does your course have any handouts? Like if a student wanted some paper exercises they can do, or a summary of the words/phrases for that section? I don't see any downloads but that would be a good addition if there is a way you can do that.
* Your videos are good in that they are not static and the words on screen change every minute or two.
* You have a high course review score, so obviously students like your videos and your teaching style.
I'm sorry that I don't have a huge number of improvement suggestions for you. I will watch your free Arabic course, however, so thank you for commenting on this post, and I look forward to learning from you.
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Hello @ScottDuffy
What a great initiative! Here at Udemy we are all about values such as community, making an impact and helping all achieve success and this is all about that! Congratulations and lots of kudos for you!!
Kindest regards!
Leonor
Udemy moderation team
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Oh, and to the question of adding to the existing course or creating a new course...
As a teacher, I am a bit intimidated by the idea of creating a 100-hour course. That would be a lot of work for you. Would the payback on Udemy be worth it for a 100-hour course? I don't know. I prefer something more targeted to specific outcomes.
How about a course specific to people who want to learn French for business purposes? I can see a 8 or 10-hour course on Business French for that. That can even include cultural notes about working with colleagues in France, holidays, how to avoid being perceived as rude, etc.
Or people who want to learn French for personal travel purposes? A course specific to the needs of a traveller might do. This could include tips for the first time in Paris, or which areas of the city have affordable hotels close to the metro, etc.
How about French for people who already speak two other European languages? Not sure how feasible that idea is, but most French courses are targetted to people who only know one language (I think). For people who already know - let's say Spanish and English - how hard is it to learn French? Is there a different approach that can be taken?
If it was me, I'd rather try to create one or more unique courses about France/French, as opposed to one massive 100-hour course. That's just me. If you want to become the next Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, or Duolingo, you can. But I prefer a targeted approach.
Another idea would be to poll your students. If you can find 100 people looking to learn French, ask them what they are looking for that they can't get anywhere else. There might be some interesting ideas in there. Read the 1-star reviews of your competitors and see what students think is missing.
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Check out my course on IP if u have time and let me know what can be better
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Hey @ScottDuffy
I would do some on tarot, international trade, Silhouette (cutting machine to do arts and crafts) and maybe one or two on language courses (English, Portuguese and French) to English Portuguese, French and Spanish speakers. Other than that I am a true consumer on courses and at the moment I have taken on a new hobby which is novel writing... taking my baby steps into writing my first story (novel?)... maybe in the future I can adventure into one of these also, time will tell!
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@ScottDuffy What a generous offer! I have a relatively new course that isn't getting as much traction as I'd like (though I have other courses that are quite successful) and would love a second set of eyes: https://www.udemy.com/course/working-parent/ Thank you!
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I love that you have such a wide-variety of interests. If you can, you should try to create content around one or more of those areas. It could be Udemy, YouTube, or social media. It's a worthy pursuit to try to impart your knowledge to others.
When I first started on Udemy in 2014, I used to create one course per month on different topics that interested me. I don't feel as free today as I did back then to be so creatively diverse since I found a topic that really worked, and I feel obligated to follow that same path.
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Thanks so much. I'm a time management and productivity coach, and that's what I typically create content around and write about. And in fact, all these courses are related to time management at their core.
And I have a Youtube channel
And I've been writing a blog and sending it out to my audience weekly for 6 + years.
Udemy is currently a smaller piece of my business but one that I'd like to grow.
In short, I do have a clear focus in my business and majority of my content, while maybe that's not as clear looking at the titles of my Udemy courses.
What strategies have helped you grow your Udemy course most?
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Thank you Scott for taking the time, and adding your valuable feedback, appreciate it. I will address these points.
Very good points you have added, taking a look to make sure I have those added in.
Thank you,
-Ramesh
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Hey Scott!
First off, major kudos on your incredible journey of nine years on Udemy and the monumental 1.1 million students reached — that's beyond impressive!
I'm Ventsi, and I've recently launched a new course titled "ChatGPT for Creative Ideas: Generate Powerful Concepts." It's a passion project close to my heart, and I'd be honored to have your experienced eyes take a glance.
Course Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/chatgpt-for-advertising-creative-generate-campaign-concepts/
If you can spare around 10 minutes to share your insights on the landing page, promo videos, or anything you think could use a tweak or polish, it would mean the world to me.
Big thanks for offering your expertise to the Udemy community!
Cheers, Ventsi
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hello Mr. Scott,
My name is Joseph Dzuya. I recently launched a course entitled, ' Machine learning from scratch: Numpy library from scratch' .
Please go through the landing page and the first section of the course and give me the feedback on how you find the course.
I will be glad to hear from you soon.
Thank you very much.
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Hi Joseph,
Nice to meet you. I hope you take these suggestions as constructive help, as they are intended.
Overall, you do have some challenges to get your python/numpy course up to the standard of the top courses on Udemy on the topic. So all of my suggestions are to help you raise your course to a higher standard but I can't promise or guarantee that doing these things will result in many sales for you because Python is a tough, tough category.
* I went to your instructor bio, and I would suggest you rewrite your biography using proper capitalization, including lower-case letters. Using all capital-letters detracts from the professional look you are going for.
* Similar to your course landing page. I would suggest proper capitalization for the course title.
* Your subtitle is a jumble of keywords without spacing. I would suggest you rewrite this to be more natural English sentence structure to get the students interest in what the course is about.
* I don't find your course image to be related to machine learning programming and would suggest choosing something that gives students a positive idea of what the course is about.
* Zero ratings and zero students is going to make people pause before signing up for the course. I would suggest you find 30-50 people that are interested in numpy that would be willing to take the course and offer it to them for free. Ask them to give you feedback on the contents privately to help you improve the course. Don't just post free coupons to the Internet, find people who are target students.
* I would suggest you organize the course into fewer section headings. It appears that many sections only have one lesson. You should have at least 2-3 lessons under every section. So reduce the number of sections and move lessons together into the same section.
* The lesson titles and section titles also have "ALL CAPS" in places. Keep it consistent, using "Title Case" for those titles.
* There are some minor grammar mistakes on the landing page. "learning and the general data science through many worked examples" is one of the "what you'll learn" items and that sentence isn't clear to me.
* Your promo & introduction videos appear to have been filmed on a hand-held mobile phone? I really commend the "talking head" style to get you into the course in some way. There are a few benefits of that. But the talking head part of the videos can be improved. There's a lot of camera shaking, and your face is close to the screen. I would suggest a tripod to keep the camera steady and a bit farther away from you.
* However, your audio is clear and there's no background noise. So that's good.
* Your screen-recorded videos are clear.
* Perhaps you can include a few more free preview videos so that students can see your teaching style beyond the introductory topics.
I wish you the best and much success in your career in online teaching.
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Bump
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Hi Ventseslav,
I see you work at Graffiti BBDO. I worked for many years at Proximity BBDO in Canada. I recognize many of those brands on your instructor bio, as I worked with Gillette, Molson, Campbell Soup, and others on the digital marketing side.
* I like your instructor bio. Shows a lot of authority, and I immediately trust you to teach digital marketing and creative ideas. This bio is a great example of a teacher showing real world authority.
* I like your "what the student should know". They do indeed need to know something about marketing but that shouldn't stop them from the course. Well said.
* Similarly "who this course is for" is dead on too. Well said.
* Description uses bolding and lists well to break up the text and make it easy to skim.
* Nice course image.
* The promo video has an inconsistent creative style. The video editing is a bit harsh. Some places have music in the background and then suddenly (sharply) there is no music. Then there is music again. I also noticed one part of the video where your voice was cut off at both ends. The camera autofocus is struggling to find focus in some places.
I say this because you're a strategy officer at a famous worldwide marketing brand. I assume that you wouldn't show that first video to a client, even as an early demo. Maybe take the raw video and take a second shot at editing it so that the style is more consistent throughout.I think the second preview video, "Brief to prompt," is MUCH better. It still has the camera autofocus going in and out of focus at times. So, I guess you'll need to turn off autofocus when doing talking heads in the future.
* I love that you have course downloads to help the students follow along.
* The third video, "Concept Dynamic Connection", also has much better editing than the intro videos.
* Do you actually demonstrate using ChatGPT in this course? None of the preview videos show ChatGPT live at all. I would add videos to the course that DEMONSTRATE the concepts you are teaching about building a prompt.
If those videos do exist, add one of them to the free preview so that students can see some active teaching through demos.
Basically, I think your landing page is great, and some of your course videos appear to be at a good standard for teaching. My main suggestion is to try to create a much better promo/intro video because I can see some people being turned away by that.
"You never get a second chance to make a first impression."
Also, you have a good mix of video and teaching styles (talking heads, b-roll, slides, quizzes) and I would suggest a few more demos of using ChatGPT. Maybe even some type of project that you take the students through.
All the best and good luck!
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Hi Alexis,
* Great instructor bio. Reasonably shows authority on the subjects you teach.
* I like the title and subtitle of the course. If I was a working parent feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities, that would clearly speak to me. I'm not your target audience, though.
* 4.9 stars?!? 4.9! What! That's awesome. You hardly every see a 4.9 rated course (legitimately) so you are doing great. I don't even know if I can make suggestions to improve the course itself since students have been loving it.* The promo video is also excellent. Professionally done. Audio clear. Your and your co-instructor are clearly presentation pros.
I'm just going to stop there. So you have an incredible course. There's probably nothing I can say to improve the quality of the course itself. What you need is reach. We just need to get this thing in front of more people.
Now there are a couple of approaches for this. First, I would check in the Udemy reporting tools for your conversion rate. If someone goes to your course landing page, what percentage of the time do they buy? I would bet that it's higher than average. If it's not, then we have to look closer at the landing page. But I bet the landing page isn't the problem.
So the next question would be around how many people see your course in search results. How many people are searching the topic of "parenting" and how high is this course in the search results for that search?
Your positioning on the topic pages is not great. Top of page 2 for "parenting". There are some worse-rated courses before you. I don't know why.
For the keyword "parenting", you are on page 3. That's not great either.
I don't think you use the word parenting (with the ing) enough on the course title, subtitle or in the description.
I think this is partly a basic SEO problem. You need to figure out what word or words people use to search for a course such as yours, and use those words more.
The second thing I would suggest is that we spam all the employees at Udemy to have a look at your course. This is a great course, and it's hidden on page 3 of search. I bet many UB customers would love a course such as this.
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Hi Scott,
Thank you so much for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback! I truly appreciate your insights, especially coming from someone with your extensive background in digital marketing.
I'm glad you found the instructor bio and course details well-crafted. Your suggestions about the promo video's consistency and editing are incredibly valuable, and I'll definitely work on refining it to create a more seamless experience for viewers.
I appreciate your keen observations about the autofocus issues, and I'll make sure to address those in future videos by turning off autofocus during talking head segments.
You've highlighted a crucial point about demonstrating the use of ChatGPT live. I do cover it in the course, and I'll take your advice to showcase a demonstration in the free preview to give potential students a clearer understanding.
Your encouragement and constructive suggestions mean a lot. I'm committed to enhancing the course based on your feedback.
Wishing you all the best, and thanks again for your thoughtful review!
Warm regards, Ventsi
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Thank you so much. This is so helpful! (And that's for the kind words. Yes, people are really liking the course, so it's definitely more of a reach thing.)
I'll look into all of those things.
Really appreciate it!
Best,
Alexis
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That’s very kind Scott
just live today with my course
may re record the intro (as I lifted it from other work and had to resize it)
love to hear your thoughts
Vanessa
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Hello Mr. Scott,
Thank you very much for your time in my course preview.
I have made the corrections you have suggested to me. I will be grateful if you could go through the course again and see the corrections i have made.
How do i get the 30-50 people to preview my course as you suggested to me. I will be glad if you can help me find these people.
What has shocked me is that, i have found my course priced at 54.99 US Dollars instead of the price of 19.99 US Dollars i had proposed. I don't understand how they came up with that figure.
Thank you very much Mr. Scott.
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