🎉Announcement: The AI Assistant and Skills Mapping and AI-powered learning paths are live!🎉
Hey Instructors,
Today we’re thrilled to share that we’ve officially announced Udemy’s newest AI features: Udemy AI Assistant, Skills Mapping and AI-powered learning paths. These transformative features are now accessible to learners and leaders within organizations, providing them a way to offer more personalized learning programs at scale.
For more information, check out the full press release and blog post.
Thank you to all of the instructors who have contributed to all of the ongoing product discovery work. As we continue to innovate, we will remain true to our mission, now enhanced by the power of AI, with humans at the heart.
Teach on,
The Udemy Instructor Team
Comments
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I would like to see this in action. Not just see it in a video, but get a chance to try it. Try conversing with it, and see how it responds. See the courses it recommends. Get a real sense of it. How?
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I agree with @ScottDuffy. These kinds of announcements may be good for getting investors excited and raising the stock price, but they do very little for us instructors.
I feel totally disconnected from how these features are supposed to work as so far we have only seen mock-ups or screenshots. We should get the chance to be one of the first ones to try this out, report issues, and help you build a better product.
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Agree @ValentinDespa - this is something Scott and I have been discussing with regards to how we make this happen.
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I noticed that the AI Assistant was described in today's earnings call as featuring summaries of courses and lectures.
Is that the assistant's primary purpose?
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Useless!
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Hi @FrankKane,
Great question! While summarizing content is one of the AI assistant's features, it also leverages its understanding of Udemy instructor content to recommend relevant courses, explain complex concepts, and more.
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I went back and reviewed the GenAI Product Preview demo and slides, and didn't see any mention of course and lecture summaries. It was toward the end of the FAQ only:
When will the AI Assistant’s “summarize course/lecture” feature show up? How will it impact course watch time and instructor revenue?
Summarization of a course or a lecture will only show up if a learner asks for a summary during content discovery. For in-course, there will be a prompt that learners can click to summarize the lecture or course. These summaries are intended to be brief and act like the Course Landing Page to drive learners to consume more lectures, rather than to replace the lecture.
I feel like this feature was downplayed to us. If it is widely used by learners to quickly skim through courses in a way that doesn't credit us with minutes and moves consumption to a place with zero revshare, then instructors who did not opt out will find themselves at a disadvantage. Is it still the case that these summaries will be too brief and unspecific to be used as a replacement for the actual content? Can UB learners mark a lesson as viewed if all they did was read the summary? It would be really helpful to see it in action to allay our fears.
Also, the opt-out terms said they would go into effect at the end of 2024. Have AI features been deployed into production using data from opted-out instructors?
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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.
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Thank you for the response, @RyanJaress
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I donot understand about the purpose of udemy AI, what is in it for me?
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@RyanJaress Let's see it :)
Create a video using the summarizing feature a few different ways. Create a video using the search feature a few different ways. Let's see it in action.
cc: @GenefaMurph976
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Congrats to the Udemy team for rolling this out - I think it could be interesting to share with instructors some analytics on how this gen AI feature will be used. That is, if someone is using the tool to consolidate a "data engineer" role into specific skills, such as "data remediation", "data profiling", etc, for example, and my course is recommended as part of the composite learning path, then those data bits could be saved, so that insights can be provided for instructors, and I know, in my case, that my courses are recommended by the gen AI engine for "data engineer" roles or for "data profiling" skills in specific, for example. On an aggregate level, could be interesting. Different courses could be recommended for different skills or keywords within the same role or purpose.
We already have some basic analytics on students, regions, skills, etc. But this gen AI engine seems to go much deeper, and making available analytics on those super-specific analytics could help instructors, too. Right now I feel "blind" as to how the tool is used, who uses it, for what roles, and for what skills. Would be good to at least have a few pointers. Eg top 5 roles gen AI recommends my courses for. Top 5 skills gen AI recommends my courses for. Etc.
Because, let's face it, from the moment this tool was announced, with its potential to make or break revenue streams, most, if not all instructors will be optimizing their future courses to be indexed by the tool (creating standalone modules, having modules for specific skills, not referencing other modules in the same course, etc). Knowing what skills/roles our courses are recommended for could help guide this creation further IMHO!
Also, @FrankKane, I think the summarization feature will, in fact, cause instructors to take a small hit. Sure, as Ryan said, reading the summary itself won't mark a lesson as watched, but someone can still… read the summary… and then mark the lesson as watched anyway. You can mark any lesson as watched without watching it in the present (which is why the feature exists, I guess), so some people will in fact read the summary and mark the lesson as watched. It's one of those things where, just due to the fact that this feature exists, you know some people will use it that way. It's just how people are. I do think most people that are watching a course are there to, well, watch, so it won't be a big destabilizer, but there may be 1-2% of people that read summaries and skip out on several lessons, I guess. For example, if there's a course that is mostly on a topic, but has 10% tangential content on other areas that is not crucial - someone can just summarize it as text and skip that part. Would be interesting to see how this applies to courses that touch on various separate, yet important topics, such as masterclasses, and for courses that have an "essential" and a "bonus" part, for example.
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@RyanJaress Thank you. It seems interesting. Hope it benefits all stake holders
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Can we get a specific example, please ? How brief is it ? 50 words … 100 words ?
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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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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.
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Hi @AHardin and @LawrenceMMiller,
Thank you for sharing your hands-on experience and feedback on our AI assistants! We're thrilled to hear that you like them (A+ from Lawrence 👏), and of course, we’ll forward your thoughts to our internal team 😊.
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Good job, Udemy.
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