🎉 Udemy Founder Eren Bali Returns as Chief Technology Officer 🎉
We’re excited to announce that Eren Bali, who co-founded Udemy in 2010 and served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer until 2014, has returned to Udemy as our new Chief Technology Officer.
Eren will work closely with Udemy’s Chief Product Officer, Prasad Raje, to accelerate Udemy’s product strategy, leading the evolution of learning with AI, and delivering continued innovation and value to all customers.
Check out the full press release [here].
Comments
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I've met Eren and like him. I want to say, "Welcome back", but he never really left since he was on the board. :)
Welcome back anyway. Exciting news.
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Welcome (back) Eren!
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As the largest shareholder it is hard to believe that he will simply be the CTO. Let us pray that a significant change in strategic thinking will follow.
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Now this may actually be exciting news !
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Good News !
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welcome back Eren!!!
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Welcome back, Eren!
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I'm hoping this is good news for Udemy after the rollercoaster. You never really!
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Welcome back our able CTO .Hope you have fresh ideas for management
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Welcome back!
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I would really like to see you connecting with the instructor community to gauge the issues we are facing, and not just go off and blindly pursue a strategy that's been developed by your C-suite. To echo some of the feedback here: the strategy being taken isn't necessarily aligned with many of us in the instructor community. For example I fully understand and support the drive to adopt Ai, but when fundamentals on the platform haven't been looked at like:
-why do students get an email saying "we'll notify once your video has been processed." every time you load up a lecture video, and no video is ever sent? This looks like it was built over 10 years ago, and the product owner for that part of the platform has never gone back and updated this (small CX example, but a large of example of what I think are the challenges with product management you have).
-the chatbot (Alex) now being used for support that doesn't seem to work (no tickets are being raised when you ask it to raise a support ticket and then when you go back to ask for ticket details, it says to check your inbox…but of course there's no email because no ticket is being raised). For example take today's latest bug around course rating scores impacting plenty of the instructor community. Just check the instructor community forum and you'll see the issue being mentioned over and over again, yet nothing no response from Udemy…it wouldn't take much for someone from support to be monitoring and jump onto this and provide an update.
-why there isn't a published product development roadmap available to the instructor community for us to vote on the features WE want, rather than having a product team who seem removed from the realities of instructor life (product management 101).
When you consider that the instructor commission structure was adjusted so that more is going to Udemy, at the expense of instructors (with the carrot of - "you'll earn more", well I'm afraid my earnings have actually gone down, a common theme among most instructors)….you have to scratch your head and wonder "you've got the extra cash, how is any value being returned back to instructors?"
In short - it's time there was a real focus on getting the basics of running the Udemy platform sorted out, and creating a modern learning platform FIRST….before the shiny technology toys are pursued.
Perhaps you could start with asking the community…what are the top 5 frustrations that instructors have, and do something about it? ✏️4
