Join us for an AMA with Jacob Coulter, Senior Director Product Management

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Join us for an AMA with Jacob Coulter, Senior Director Product Management

RyanJaress
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hello Instructor Community!

 

We are excited to bring you another live community event this month! On January 25th from 12:00 to 1:00pm PST we’ll be sitting down with the Senior Director Product Management, Jacob Coulter, in an AMA (Ask me Anything) style interview.

 

During the interview, Jacob will take your questions, so this is your chance to ask him any of your burning questions regarding anything related to the Udemy platform and product. Feel free to start off by adding your questions in the comments below!

 

Sign up to the webinar here!

 

We recognize that in trying to accommodate the time zones this time might not be the ideal time frame for some of you, however, a replay of the AMA will be available in the community later in the week.

 

*Please note that this event is being held in English.* 

 

We look forward to connecting with you virtually on January 25th at 12:00PM PST! Until then, please let us know if you have any follow-up questions.

 

 

 

40 Comments
LawrenceMMiller
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

My question is about desired functionality to facilitate more deep learning and instructor led communities around either topics or courses. Note that many leading instructors have created their own course "stores" on platforms such as Zenler and others because of the need or desire for additional functions. In order to maintain competitive advantage, it seems to me that Udemy must add additional student facing functionality. For example:

* Coaching session scheduling and live conferencing (like Zoom). Zenler integrates with Zoom to provide this feature.

* Course bundling: If you examine instructor's dedicated sites you will notice that most provide a bundle of courses for a higher fee. 

* Live meet-ups with the instructor: Some instructors may host a weekly or monthly live meeting, “office hours”, that may be a lecture and also a Q&A session.

* Certification paths: Some instructors provide a programmed path of instructions, along with certification tests, that enable a professional degree that will be recognized by employers.

 

Without these and similar functions, Udemy is requiring instructors to take important teaching functions outside the Udemy platform. What is the plan to keep instructors within the Udemy platform?

 

 

AnupShukla
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

I have the same questions as @LawrenceMMiller 

 

Is Udemy going to integrate the features that help instructors to use Udemy as a single platform to give learners a wholesome learning experience, including one to one sessions, live coaching, better doubt clearing session, bundle of courses as offering etc..

SoyMarketer
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

I could not have said it better than Lawrence.

 

I too subscribe to this question and desire to know the answer.

 

Anybody in my position (a "good" marketer with four courses in Udemy) is very inclined to start considering going off Udemy with a full blown funnel. The marketing Udemy does is very well done and keeps me here. But the lack of features as described above make me truly wonder.

ismailkhuz16
Observer
Observer

Great 

SamuelLenk
Trailblazer Trailblazer
Trailblazer

I would like to know:

1) how personal plan is doing and how it will continue?

2) how is content selected for iclusion in personal-plan?

3) what are the big things planned for this year and beyond?

Thanks!

Marious
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

What tools are we planning to get to help engage our students more? (e.g. interactive videos, drag&drop questions?)

i would suggest that all or most instructors grant the grace to all or most of their students the Acryonym or the title(s) they will receive at the point of graduation from program Viz course program , certification, diploma 

 

Sri Sri Grandmaster Hari

Maram_Shtaya
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

Nice webinar!!!

DuncanWallace
Observer
Observer

Hi, i did my research and work on udemy and its still not actually doing what you said it would do a year ago.

My courses are designed for a global area of need - about the move to hybrid working and the need for how to do hybrid meetings well.  and there is also an quick intro level course

The courses are fully rated, we did all our work at our end of getting 30 or so people to do the courses and give them decent reviews from different angles.  We are still in a niche area that is much needed across all workforces and businesses and locally in Scotland we are achieving great success in supporting companies through to having really good hybrid working/hybrid meeting conditions.

However it seems udemy has done nothing at your end to truely promote, integrate these products.  Yet you said if you have a real well researched need that is globally needed, and your ahead of others, then Udemy is a good platform to reach the audiences.  I also did the 'make your course free for a period to drive traffic, but dont do it more than once trick' and that did drive traffic.. but again Udemy didn't pick up on this and take it further.

6 months later and having engaged with other platforms, i'm wondering if there is anything else you would have expected me to do before you do your bit?

workflow
Specialist Specialist
Specialist

Insight into the way that revenue has shifted quite significantly from organic sales to UFB sales over the last 24 months or so would be interesting. Why has there been what seems like a significant decline in organic sales? Why can't both elements of the Udemy offering grow? What has changed in terms of Udemy marketing which has resulted in this trend? (Might be the wrong person to pose this question to and apologies if so!)

Dave

SubhasishGu362
Observer
Observer

Hi All and Happy New Year! I have been coaching to my Company for sometime and thinking of extending my teaching through UDEMY. I am excited for my decision but wondering how to start. I am going to start teaching on Scrum Master first. Would appreciate, if you could give some ideas?

Regards, Subh

hello I am new here anyone can give me a little more details

Three questions:

 

1.  Would it be possible to develop A/B testing for the course landing page so we can optimize conversion percentage.  Right now, we update various elements of that page such as title, subtitle, or just the description, and have no idea whether or not we have improved or hurt conversion.  We can check the 7 day conversion percentages the following few days, but those go up and down so much based on many factors, so are not reliable indication of whether or not changes improved things.  If we could have a "primary" and "alternate" landing page, shown 50% of the time each to visitors, with conversion percentages available for each, the instructors themselves could help greatly increase conversion for their own courses, increasing conversion across the entire Udemy platform.

 

2. Reports on information such as conversion percentage, minutes consumed, and others are often delayed by a day, or only updated once a day.  Real-time is always better, reducing friction, and enabling faster decision making and optimizations.  Would it be possible to get all reporting information updated real time?

 

3. Can you make available what has become known in the instructor community as the "Lawrence Miller Reports" @LawrenceMMiller available as part of the Udemy reporting system? 

https://community.udemy.com/t5/Community-News/Webinar-Replay-Data-amp-Analytics-with-Larry-Miller/bc...

That is, as shown by Lawrence during his Udemy webinar, the same reports and graphs builtin to Udemy reporting?  And of course, critically important, available for selectable date ranges, the way most platforms do, including for "all time".

RobinSolone924
Observer
Observer

s

Malcolm
Researcher
Researcher

I've noticed sometimes that a person registers for my course and the platform indicates they have watched 100% of my course. But when I go to the performance tracker (say a week later) it does not show up at all. Why is that?

GeorgeCalle641
Trailblazer Trailblazer
Trailblazer

What is the vision of UDEMY for the coming years and how is it coping with new technologies and new platforms offering online courses?

Hassan Sarhan
Rookie
Rookie

My question is about the course language

 

Can I create my course in other languages?

like for example, I want to create my 3D animation course in Arabic and sponsor it on other sites to bring Arab students to watch it in udemy

so will I be allowed to upload my course in Arabic language?

 

 

Anonymous
Not applicable

I have the following questions/suggestions.

  1. The rating system needs an overhaul. The "5 stars" is unclear enough to understand the rating. Reduce it to a "like" based binary. Profiles must show a clear trending rating for the last 90 days and a separate overall rating.
  2. There are categories where old courses pile on irrelevant content and still retain the highest rating and sales. How is it fair?
  3. UFB inclusion is a mystery; now, a personal plan has become part of the mix.
  4. Inactive accounts and a trolling tendency among students needs to be penalized. A dissatisfactory review and an irrelevant review have no separation.
  5. Course categorization is again not helping new courses in a crowded space. The "Marketing tool" advice of great opportunity leads to creating a dud which no one will end up seeing in search results. How are new categories being selected and shaped for instructors?
  6. Any plans to reduce the content clutter by removing inactive courses?
  7. No data is available to decide if making a course in the local language is a worthy endeavor. Without search evolving, such content may remain hidden. Any suggestions on this front?

If new instructors cannot succeed in the existing ecosystem, stop accepting new courses for a quarter or so. With so few student interaction tools, it's hard already; the rest of the hidden signals make it closer to being miserable.

 

edit: feature requests 

drip content

optional content flag to allow a partial coverage based completion 

allow multiple levels for content like “beginner and intermediate” or other permutations.

PrateekNarang
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

My question is regarding auto-generated captions, the auto-generated captions are quite poor, I have multiple courses and writing mannual captions isn't easy thing however I have figured out the Google Speech API/ Youtube auto-generated Captions work really well on my videos and capture the terms related to coding as well where Udemy's algorithm fails miserably to translate techical terms into captions. I am from India and lot of non-Indian find it hard to understand my accent hence captions is must for them. Really want overhaul in the captions engine or an option to use google API's during uploading process.

Rahul Iyer
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

12 pm PST is 1:30 am IST. Sorry, I will miss the session. I will see the recorded version. Thank you for the initiative.

Bibhatsu
Researcher
Researcher

I would like to know if we can create specific courses excluded in udemy for business.
For example, I want a particular course to sell at $199 and the rest of my courses at udemy default dynamic pricing. Can I do that? 


peter_dalmaris
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Hello all, here is my question for Jacob:

 

Will Udemy make it possible to sell:

 

1. ebooks.

2. Multi-tiered support.

 

The context for 1: I have written books for several courses to complement and supplement the video. On my platform (outside of Udemy), more than half of the students that purchase the video course also purchase the ebook. If Udemy could sell a course eBook along with the video course, I would expect a similar effect in sales. 

 

The context for 2: Not all students want or need the same level of support. Most students are happy with going solo (i.e. no support) in exchange for a lower price. Others want premium access to the instructor and are willing to pay for it. It would be nice if Udemy would support multiple student support levels, say, from "no support" to "community support" and up to "one-on-one coaching".

 

Thank you for your consideration 🙂

 

PuspitaDas964
Rookie
Rookie

Hi 

Please give me any suggestion about online management courses,

I have more than 12 + experience on CRM.

Dagnechess
Researcher
Researcher

Hello All,

 

I'm relatively new to Udemy. Trying to get my head round how things work here.
Starting with the search algorithm:
Tried to search by the main keywords. Don't seem to find my course (which has both keywords in the title) anywhere near the first 35 pages and beyond.
It starts by finding the courses with both keywords, then drops to the courses with just one. Mine has both and still not showing up.

So it seems the search algorithm looks at keywords plus reviews/number of students. Then one of the keywords plus reviews/number of students but not just keywords minus reviews/number of students. Is that right?

Many thanks.

Kind regards, Dagne

AnupShukla
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Hi @Dagnechess 

 

 

You got it right! The search results consider the age of the course, its rating, number of students enrolled into the course, course length etc. also.

KevinOxland
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

Hi there,

 

There was some talk a while ago about receiving Udemy payments directly into our bank account (I'm specifically referring to the UK) rather than going through PayPal, which is expensive. Is that ever likely to happen? I can have a U.S dollar bank account at my UK bank and then transfer it using the bank's rates when it suits me, or spend it directly from there.

 

Many thanks.

Kevin...

JuliusDibia709
Observer
Observer

Hi

am just a beginner in social media for online trainer .

However, my career is strictly electrical i did electrical electronics engineering .

i had  over 18 year field experience in power distribution, electrical installation, industrial motor control panel construction and schematic diagram drawing .

i need to be trained on how to properly plan and design training resources for electrical .

I just registered for Eplan training yesterday with Udemy platform but have not gotten my training  software and other resources yet.

 

in a summary, i need instructor training and resources .

 

Thanks 

Julius Dibia. 

julius.dibia555@gmail.com

 

 

VanessaVivi260
Researcher
Researcher

I would have loved to attend, but in South Africa that is 10PM and bedtime.

My questions:  How can I make direct contact with students?  I do write them messages on the course platform but never get any response.  I see that some other Instructors do send me (as their student) direct emails.  How do I get students direct contact information?

 

Vanessa Viviers

Hi from the UK Guys!!

 

I'm away on business (travelling at the time of the webinar) so will have to review later.

 

My question however is around student scoring of the courses we have on Udemy. For me we have sold several thousand courses over the years, but the student score is only ever reflective of this current month's score submissions.

 

Meaning that if we do get one or two individuals (rare but it does happen) who (for whatever reason, sometimes suspect) decide to give a course a low score - then the score ducks down to way below what it has been.

 

This has a knock on effect that it then stops other new potential students buying for a while, as they deem the course to be no good (so kinda perpetuates the problem).

 

For me what would make more sense all round for everyone... Udemy; the Student and the Creator, is if the course score was given a lifetime average. In this way, it's far more representative of what's available and thus more objective than just a couple of 'bum' scores posted in a month, that then drops the course rating down instantly.

 

What thoughts has Udemy got on changing this for the better please? We are always willing to accommodate feedback and adjust as necessary by the way. But the current system is open to mis represent the true value of the courses we have on the platform and with little recourse back for us.

 

Best wishes Tony Armstrong - CEO Exceed9 and BMD Global.

DmytroVovk1992
Observer
Observer

I have a question! 

At first i think fee its too much when teacher didnt make a promo-code. My course on udemy already 1 year, i readed a lot of information, made speaciall documents with better conditions through udemy with governement USA and Ukraine, cause im from Ukraine, but 37% of the revenue its too much fee..:(  please make better stimulation of teachers to make discounts or promo-codes, plase. And question is - how i could make better my profile of teacher and my courses, will be nice do more things for profile information, like make posts, promo-codes for mu courses. 

Another question is about quality learning materials. I have seen some of the instructors just reading out onscreen while capturing their face/teaching at the same time. This is bad, cuz i want to mean that they can just show the previously-made slides instead of showing their face while they read out. Udemy should be strict about low quality content management. I wanna ask him if he has any plan about the management of those contents. thanks.

Alexia
Mentor Mentor
Mentor

Hi all, I will be at the webinar. Is there a way to have a chat 💬 function with students, where instructors can post an article or quick video? Substack is offering this option for my newsletter. This way, people can get to know me and see if my newsletter fits what they are interested in. Could the same occur to connect with students on Udemy for Business? 

NinaNwaobil293
Traveler Traveler
Traveler

I had previously registered to attend the AMA.  I had to cancel because I received an email earlier today about another meeting that I had registered for at the beginning of the month.  It is schedule at the same time date and time as the AMA  with Jacob Coulter. I can't cancel that Webinar because it's related to Professional Development in my career. Hopefully, the AMA will be available for me to watch at a later date.

 

Thanks for understanding,

 

Best regards,

 

Ms. Nina Nwaobilo

Can I post any guides on here, I am not that good with people and just started now, I am also a 16-year old student and want to learn more about this business!

 

Bella
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi everyone! Our AMA session with Jacob will be starting in just 10 minutes. There is still time to register and join, just click on this link. We hope to see you all there! 

Michael_D_Nwaogu
Specialist Specialist
Specialist

Great Webinar! Thank you Udemy team

for organising a meeting like this. 

And  thank you Jacob for your time

and everything. I learnt a lot,🧗🏽‍♂

Anonymous
Not applicable

Looking forward to the recording.

NinaNwaobil293
Traveler Traveler
Traveler

Me too!  I want to see the recording.

GeorgeCalle641
Trailblazer Trailblazer
Trailblazer

It was a great webinar and was good to know what future initiatives and plans are in place.

best regards

george

SoyMarketer
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

The recording? Thanks!