The February 2024 Instructor Insider

[RyanJaress]

Thank you for joining us for the first Instructor Insider of 2024. Many of you have told us you want more ways to reach and engage learners — and maximize your earnings potential. And we’ve heard you. So this Insider we’re focusing on:

Your content – We want to make it easier for you to do what you do best: create fantastic content for learners. 

Your brand (and ours) – Where you teach is important, so we’re working hard on building trust and name recognition for new and existing learners.

Your revenue – We’re making enhancements that will help skill-oriented learners discover and engage with your courses (so they keep coming back).

Read on for more of how we’re doing it.

Features and tools

Engagement:

Q&A – Learners love and rely on Q&A, but we know it can also be time consuming and stressful for you. In December, we announced a beta of our Gen AI-powered Q&A. It uses your course content (and only your course content) to help answer those frequently asked questions. It also lets you draft responses with GenAI assistance, so you can focus on answering the question (and not on the grammar). Then you can check and customize your response before publishing it. We’re rolling out this feature slowly based on domain and language — so you may not see it just yet. You should be seeing it in your Q&A experience before too long.

Practice tests – After working through some bugs, we’re happy to announce that an improved experience will be coming to you very soon. There will be a new creation experience and fill-in-the-blank questions. Plus, these interactive activities are also getting an AI bump with auto-generated explanations for English-language Development and IT Certification courses. Beyond these improvements, we are planning to create a new practice test insights report so you can make changes based on learner engagement. And we’re looking to add a way to highlight courses with practice tests, since learners often choose courses with tests.

Learner matching & discovery for subscriptions – In a world where skills requirements are constantly changing, professionals need to keep up with the latest. We’ll be using AI to help subscription learners find the right content faster with two tools we’ll introduce in the latter half of this year. 

There’s more coming as well. We are working on improvements to Udemy Business Content Opportunities, labs, and more. 

You’ll notice that many of these improvements are based on generative AI. We’re committed to using GenAI to help you and your learners get more from our platform. But, as always, it’s your expertise which is at the heart of what we do. It’s your passion, drive, skills, and experience that learners appreciate. As GenAI continues to evolve, so do our efforts and strategies, but it’s our intention to make GenAI work for you. 

Marketing strategy

We’ve been investing in marketing strategies that support the range of ways learners experience your content, including the marketplace, Personal Plan, and Udemy Business. And last year, it really paid off: 10 million new learners came to Udemy and more than 1,800 net new enterprise customers were added, ending the year at 69 million and 15,726 respectively.

To keep the entire Udemy ecosystem healthy, we’re continuing to invest in the marketplace, while we also grow subscriptions. As organizations around the world start to see the value in a skills-based economy, they need a scalable solution. And subscriptions are not just good for learners and organizations, but as generators of recurring revenue for those with courses in our collections. We’ve surpassed 100,000 subscriptions for Personal Plan, our individual subscription offering. And Udemy

Business revenue is up 27% year over year.

We’re expanding Personal Plan into more countries to reach 50 markets. In just the next few weeks it will be in France, Poland, Turkey, and Italy — opening up more potential opportunities for your courses.

Campaigns and initiatives

Positioning Udemy as a global leader in the skills-based economy is a big priority. When we do that marketing, it takes the pressure off you, so that you can create content for our growing community of learners. Genefa Murphy, our Chief Marketing Officer, outlined our efforts in a community post that’s worth a read.

Overall, this year we’ll be reinforcing our key themes of Gen AI, leadership & management, the multi-generational workforce, and leadership excellence. You’ll see global and local campaigns and deepening relationships with partners like Docker, AWS, and McLaren Racing. We’ve also just announced a major partnership with ServiceNow, putting 75 of our power skills courses into their Now Platform.

Skills Rewind – In December 2023 we launched the Skills Rewind — a year-end summary of how learners across Udemy Business, Personal Plan, and the marketplace have spent their time with Udemy. We want learners to be reminded of the value they get from learning, and we want to keep them engaged and sharing their successes.

Updated Pricing Strategies and Policies

Tax Form Policy Requirement

First, this is your gentle reminder about our tax form requirement policy. Whether you’re based in the US or not you need to submit tax forms to receive payout.

Pricing strategy

Last year, we focused on differentiating and establishing course value for learners, while increasing our pricing transparency with you. Building on this work, we will continue refining marketplace pricing to accurately reflect the value of courses. This includes adjusting for location-specific economic trends and aligning pricing with planned product improvements on certification prep courses and other UB catalog content. We have more information in our February pricing update.

Stories 

To really see where courses like yours are making a difference, we invite you to look at our new (and growing) Stories page. You can get a glimpse at how instructors and learners from around the world are transforming their own lives and the lives of others. We just recently showcased the story of Angela Yu and Alvin Lim, but there are many more stories, like the one about Diego Davila connecting with his learner JJ who leads a group of rangers in the Amazon rain forest. Stories like this remind people of the connections that online learning can make — and the value of what you do. Have a story you want to tell? You can submit it on the Stories page.

And speaking of connections, we recently completed an “ask me anything” with our CMO, Genefa Murphy in the community. You can read her AMA if you missed it. To make sure you don’t miss out on future events, you can take a look at what’s coming next in the community (like the Bootcamp in the Spanish community, in March). 

As always there’s lots more to come. But we hope you are excited by what we’ve done, what’s coming up, and what’s possible with learning.

Teach on, 

The Udemy Instructor Team

[FrankKane]

Thanks for the updates. I do have one question - above it says "To keep the entire Udemy ecosystem healthy, we’re continuing to invest in the marketplace, while we also grow subscriptions.". However in the Q4 earnings call, your CFO stated "As a reminder, we are not currently investing behind consumer revenue growth. Therefore, we anticipate it to be down 3% to 5% year-over-year in Q1, and on a full-year basis. "

Am I taking one or both of those statements out of context? I guess there is a difference between "investing" and "investing in growth" that is important there. I think you are just saying that new features are only going to be developed for subscriptions this year, and maybe then ported to the marketplace later. However there will still be marketing investments for Udemy as a whole, in the name of brand awareness.

[ChiragMehta777]

My suggestion is to allow exit of instructors and removal of their course that doesn't sell. 

Udemy can't have both ways of not marketing enough and still keep the course.

Of course there should be policy to retain it for certain no. of years but after that let the creator of the course decide if they still want to host despite low sales. 

If subscription model can be introduced so should lifetime access be tweaked. 

It will both free up server space, save your money and disassociate instructor from platform. 

[upkaizen]

Thank you for the warm welcome to the first Instructor Insider of 2024!

I'm eager to explore the new features and tools, especially the Gen AI-powered Q&A and practice tests.

Looking forward to an amazing year ahead of teaching and learning!

@upkaizen