First course and the first bad review
So I received my first bad review and it is painful to say the least. I responsed to the student's comments and kept it positive. Basically, said "Thanks for the feedback and I'm always growing and making better courses".
I find it odd that some one gave me a bad review when they never even message me and asked for help. i think this just drives me more to continue to grow and make better courses.
I'm not foolish enough to believe that I'm always going to get five stars, but this first one is painful. Anyone else remember their first bad review?
Comments
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Oh yeah. It hurts and especially when it's out of the blue, when you never received a single question from the student.
I tried to follow up etc but it honestly never helped.
Just take in the feedback if there's any, reply politely and move on
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Dan, I also get bad reviews and they hurt, especially when you check the stats and see that they completed less than 10% of the course and didn't even give it a chance. I try to reply to all of the feedback which is positive overall. When someone just gives you a couple of stars without a comment, there is not much to say. At least when they give constructive feedback, you can reply with something specific. I have added a lot of content to my courses based on feedback from the students. It is nice when I can reply back to their feedback, explaining that I have updated the course, based on their feedback. I feel your pain. Just move on. There will always be haters.
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I have recently started my free courses and learning how to be online instructor. I completely agreed with this kind of reviews sometimes make all instructors little disappointed and discourage specially when there is no conversation and discussion happened . I would like to suggest on this issue, if it is possible to not to publish the review less than 4 stars without mention it. This will give all instructors to improve the quality of course.
@PaperedChef
wrote:Dan, I also get bad reviews and they hurt, especially when you check the stats and see that they completed less than 10% of the course and didn't even give it a chance. I try to reply to all of the feedback which is positive overall. When someone just gives you a couple of stars without a comment, there is not much to say. At least when they give constructive feedback, you can reply with something specific. I have added a lot of content to my courses based on feedback from the students. It is nice when I can reply back to their feedback, explaining that I have updated the course, based on their feedback. I feel your pain. Just move on. There will always be haters.
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It is tough indeed. If you think the feedback is worth it, it's a good way to improve your courses. After a while, if most of your feedback is positive, you will just ignore them. Like @Thor
mentioned once, even the Atlantic ocean has a 3.9 stars on Google. Haters gonna hate
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I just got my first bad review (and it was really bad... 1 star for every concept), and yes, it did hurt, but what was really annoying was the fact that the rating didn't include any comment whatsoever... I understand it's not the student's job to help me get better at this but the fact that they didn't even bother to leave a comment makes me wonder about the seriousness of their rating... should I flag this review?
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@mchojrin
wrote:I understand it's not the student's job to help me get better at this but the fact that they didn't even bother to leave a comment makes me wonder about the seriousness of their rating... should I flag this review?
The student hasn't done anything wrong or violated any policy (as comments aren't mandatory).
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How does an instructor go about improving their course when Udemy allows students to leave a 1 or 2 star rating with no comments? And this seems to happen most of the time, not just to me, but to a lot of instructors, as I look at their ratings and reviews.
Of all the ratings I've gotten that are 1 or 2 stars, maybe 10% leave any comments and maybe 1% leave a comment that is useful.
It's been my experience that roughly 1 in 5 students leave a rating. About 1 in 5 of those that do give a rating leave any comments. And, only 1 in 5 of of those that leave a comment leave a useful comment. It's virtually impossible to know how to improve a course when Udemy allows this.
I've read many of your posts on this subject and your typical response is, "improve your course". Well, that's good advice but Udemy seems to be working against instructors being able to do this effectively.
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I guess you're right... though it doesn't seem fair to let them so easily give a bad review. Is there a way to see how many classes this particular student watched? Since they didn't ask any question is hard for me to know how to take this.
BTW, of course I'd prefer to have good reviews rather than bad ones and it's ok for someone not to like my material. I'm ok with the 30-day money back guarantee, I just feel like there should be some minimum requirements for someone to leave a review (Perhaps 50% of minutes watched or something)
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I know it's frustrating to get 1-star ratings without comments. With that said, you can do several things to improve your course:
- Look at your competition and compare to what you are doing. Do you see a difference in video quality, editing, audio quality, etc...
- Find a group of people who are interested in taking your course and provide you feedback. Give them the course for free. Maybe come up with a few categories that you would like them to give you feedback on. The goal here is not to get a Udemy review but to get feedback on your course. I've done this before by going to Facebook groups that match my audience. I sometimes do it now with my current students.
- Send your course to friends and family and ask them for honest feedback. Not always easy to do.
- Pay someone to do the course and give you feedback.
I hope this helps.
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See https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007512353-When-is-a-Negative-Review-Against-Udemy-Policy- for reasons when Udemy will remove reviews.
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Hi Guys,
I just had the first bad review on my course. Since I have recently started I have only three reviews one of them is pretty bad (one star) the other two are good. I am trying to get feedback from students to find what he/she didn't like about my course. It is painful after so much hard work to receive a low rating without any substantial information.
The law of averages doesn't seem to be on my side as one poor review out of three takes my course rating to 2.65.
Any tips from experienced instructors to a newbie like me would be highly appreciable
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I have a suggestion to Udemy regarding how to use weights to remove intentional bad reviews. In my case, invariably the bad reviews are coming from students who have signed up for over 50 courses, and are most likely professionals and not real students. Udemy could analyze and spot such behavior and lower their weightage.
The purpose of Udemy is to bring new instructors, new contents and new students. An improved weighting system will encourage new instructors and new students to trust the review system and will also help Udemy in Udemy for Business program.
Please feel free to seek my help for using Graph analysis to help you identify patterns in student reviews. It is a nice graph analysis problem.
- Neena
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same for me, just one bad review took my course down, my course was hot&new, then...one bad review...
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It has been a few weeks since I posted my first course & so far I am not getting much enrollment.
So have made my course free for 4 days for the first 100 people, can you people please enroll, review & suggest improvements. This will really help me find gaps and work on improving them. Reach me for the free coupon code for the same.0 -
Hi, I agree.
I have quite good reviews. But one student was quite upset. Complained that the code is not available in the course (actually it is) and the audio quality is poor.
I apologized for the experience and asked which lectures had bad audio. It turns out that there were very specific lectures that had a slight echo. However the student did not respond.
I also told the student to always feel free to reach out and I'll do my best to help.
So I recommend to just be polite and genuinely helpful and try not to take it to heart.
I also was upset but at the same time a little bit amused. My first thought was "Dude, chill".
And yes I totally agree that if the student didn't decide to reach out in the first place then such a bad review or bad response is not pleasant.
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thanks for the advice.. i had same experience with one of my courses.
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Hi, Take it as improvement in your course. I have four courses on udemy on Document and Record Management the first course what i have made is having bad reveiws not about content but about my audio and other things but i took it as improvement phase and published more courses, i am replying to the feedback positively as we can not argue with them, of course the bad reviews they hurt you but try to put one more course with considering their points and keep doing, my ratings have reached 4.8 and still getting bad reviews for the first course, ignorance is bliss, All the best Regards Rajendra1
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It definetely hurts when you see that you put all your dedication to the coruse and see that your rating is suddenly altered with that bad review.
My comment is: keep believing in yourself and the value you deliver, be respectful towards students and keep in mind that each review (even a negative one) is a valuable experience.
Best wishes! Dante
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Moreover, the pain never really goes away; even after more than 10 courses, seeing your rating destroyed by a bad review is hurtful.
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Actually I addressed certain students' complaint and messaged them directly. Some ignored but after I updated my videos in response to their constructive criticism two students updated there review and it seems like a third is on his way.
Definitely a bummer to get a bad review though. I had a couple of weeks of really bad reviews followed by amazing reviews.
Try to pinpoint the issue on your side if there is any issue. In my case it turns out that my course is not absolute beginner friendly and in addition I overdid it with the zoom in.
Of course if someone gives a bad review with no constructive criticism then it's absolutely useless. You could message them directly though and ask how you can help them.
Good luck !
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The problem with a bad review is that it can pull your overall rating right down if you don't have too many reviews. The other problem is that the reviewer never gives any kind of reason or feedback. I have tried replying to get reasons. Not one reply.
For instance, I have a 1 star review amongst dozens of 4 and 5 star reviews. No reasons were given.
I think Udemy should do something about this. If someone gives a 1 or 2 star review, they must have completed at least 50% of the course and there must be reasons given for the review to be published. The review system is very unfair to the instructor right now.
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Hi Dan,
I respond to the student and in addition I message them directly and ask them if there is anyway I can help, etc. Obviously if they don't leave any comments then it's much harder to address the issue. I did actually have around 3-4 students the later updated the review due to my changes. But these were usually students that actually wrote something or at least responded to my message. My course has been out for a year. Started around 5 stars. After several months in a two week period I received several bad reviews taking it down to a 3.9. Sales drop for the next two months. Suddenly the course rating went back up to 4.8 for two reasons I think. People left good reviews again. Oddly enough there were some days that no one left a review but that rating went up so maybe old reviews expire depending on engagement of the reviewer? Still haven't figure that out. Now my course is down to 4.4. Towards the end of last month two students left bad reviews and immediately sales dropped.
The worst case when a student left a really bad review and when I tried to contact the student he was no longer part of the course. I asked Udemy to remove the review since I have no way to remedy the issue since the student is gone. Udemy was not willing to remove the review.
Hopefully you'll get better reviews and I hope the bad review will go away. It's definitely significant when the course is new.
Just a tip. There was a review that I responded to in detail but no matter how I phrased it one could feel my anger. So I asked chatgpt to rephrase my response in a friendly manner. Pretty amazing.
Good luck and I hope you get better reviews
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Indeed
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"Oddly enough there were some days that no one left a review but that rating went up so maybe old reviews expire depending on engagement of the reviewer" indeed, it is very strange, also happens to me.
You summarized all, and very well.
It also happened to me someone left a bad review and left the course.
My feeling is that we have too much false positive: the course is badly reviewed, but it is not true.
Sadly, it seems Udemy is not willing to value the instructor.
They seem like Elon Musk, that sees X as a war field. When I am teaching on Udemy, I feel that I could be attacked from anywhere. One person left a bad review because I have forgotten to close the browser window, which I have closed during the course, with a jazz music. I have tried to find the place, I was unable. I know he must be right since I like to listen that music. I have have forgotten and closed very fast, and it was enough for the person to make a big deal of it.
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I find it tough too. Four courses in, few sales recently and a lot of sweat and red eyes looking at the computer screen while making courses. I guess we pull our sleeves up and struggle on? I remember reading a post by a female instructor, who had thought about giving up, but didn't. She continued on and made her tenth course, which took off. She was finally making an income every month. That is what I hope for me and for all of us here. My fifth course will be finished soon. I try to ignore the negative reviews unless I can reply and say something positive. I try to learn from them if there is anything valuable to learn. Let's be honest too, some people simply need to complain.
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In that case I ask them in which lecture was the issue. For instance someone asked a valid question in the review. I responded and recommended they post questions in the Q&A instead of the review. Another student complained that the course is shallow. I asked in what sense, which topic, if they feel something is missing they can just ask and I can see what I can do.
The majority of reviews are very good and it's easy to focus on the bad reviews.
I think it's cool that you have some Jazz music in the background. They could have simply wrote to you in the Q&A of that specific lecture.
Best to focus on the positive.
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The person left!
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Oh, I see.
I actually wrote to Udemy that I'm worried about the whereabouts of my missing student.
I don't know how one can take seriously a review from a student that is no longer with us.
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