Udemy Introduces New MCP Server to Bring AI-Powered Learning Directly Into the Flow of Work

Hi Lawrence,

Thanks for starting this thread and for and highlighting this exciting update. We'd love to hear more feedback and perspectives from others as well. (Just attaching our Community announcement in case anyone missed it. There’s also a video included that shows how it works in practice.)

If Udemy is just going to recommend a couple courses, it’s only gonna really benefit a couple instructors in each vertical. For the vast majority of instructors, I don’t see it being helpful.

Maybe I’m missing some key aspect of it.

This is amazing, The future of global education, Technology

This sounds like an exciting development with great potential for enterprise learning.

But here's a thought: Imagine going to a great restaurant with a big menu. In one case, you choose freely from 50 dishes. In another, the steward says, “These are our top 5, recommended by our best chefs.” Most people will probably go with the recomendations.

If Udemy starts guiding learners too strongly toward only a few “recommended” courses or sections, many valuable courses might get overlooked. Great content could go unseen—not because it lacks quality, but because it’s not on the curated list.

I hope this new model still allows room for content discovery and visibility for all instructors, not just those tagged as “top picks.”

Would love to hear what others think!

With or without the new MCP Server, dominance of one or two courses in a given topic has always been a difficult (or impossible) problem for new instructors to overcome.

There is some hope for a more level playing field if (if, if) the new AI-Powered Learning infrastructure (like the MCP Server) is better able to match learners to courses compared to the current algorithm.

Having said that, I don't see how that will happen, as AI is trained on existing data, which includes very strong signals for dominating courses.

@MarinaT The application of this technology is not easy for many of us to understand or visualize. It would be very helpful if we could see a marketing presentation demonstrating how UB sales reps present this to a client and provide very clear and specific examples of how this is used in a workstream in a company.

@LawrenceMMiller The description from the article hints at a elementary/basic level search engine for text mining, where Udemy has limited the training material to "special curated" courses, and the customer may use search words to define its need for lectures from the "curated" courses. The definition of "curated" is not given, but hopefully it means "premium badge" and includes every Udemy course in a hierarchy or levels of "curation".

When you make a course, you create lots of text, you have the landing page, the video labels, descriptions, and also autogen captions and manually made captions. All of these can be used to aid a client in finding a video with content the customer searches for or indicates and interest in through its choices of content to play. The engine also has an algorithm which is used to rank the order in which results is displayed to the customer.

Considering the MCP-server itself, it is described by its proponents as a type of icebreaker to get at company "information / knowledge / competence silos / entrenchments". Such exist in many places as a type feudal baronies because they are natural results of competition, organization, and hierarchy. The "silo/entrenchment" protects the both the company and the inhabitants from being eaten internally or externally in the competition, but is often criticized as a major obstacle for communism, socialization, and the theft of knowledge (for example from a company to an academic institution such as a university).

Considering Udemy's business customers, most larger UB customers likely use UB for re-skilling of employees during re-organizations. For example, there are 100k+ employee organizations (I use organization instead of company, because a lot of these are para-statal or very close to be GOs) that are re-organized, bankrupt/re-financed, or have 20% employee cuts every 5 or 10 years among the UB customers. For them re-skilling means either occupations for useful employees while awaiting the employees emplacement in a new organization, or a way to fulfill union-contracts stipulating that they must re-educate employees for 1-2 years after firing them, and there UB has a role to play.

I am certain that you understand the various financial aspects and value of this type of UB client and use-case scenario.

Regards

Udemy must find a way to incorporate suggestions from instructors—those who know their courses best—into its recommendation and sales systems. By doing so, the platform could offer a more tailored and effective learning experience for students while also increasing overall course sales.

At the very least, Udemy should allow instructors to organize and display learning paths or curated course bundles directly on their profiles. These bundles could be offered at a discounted price set by Udemy. This isn’t necessarily about increasing the instructor’s earnings per sale, but rather about allowing Udemy to leverage valuable insights provided by instructors—information that could help students engage in a more structured and goal-oriented learning journey curated by the very creators of the content.