Udemy

RyanJaress · ‎06-12-2024

Hey there instructor community!

Your June Instructor Insider is here, and we have some good news in store: New features have launched, more opportunities for the marketplace and subscriptions await, and we have a special callout for your inspiring stories. There are also some challenges too, and we’re working hard to address them.

All this is super important as we work towards our larger goal of being the #1 place for individuals and organizations to bridge skills gaps in a skills-based economy.

We’ve organized this edition of the Insider into three main sections based on our priorities for you:

Making it easier for you to create content, so you can do what you do best.
Building better discovery and engagement for learners, so they can find your courses and increase engagement
Attracting new learners to Udemy

But first, we know we’ve talked a lot about AI recently, and we know that recent advancements have created a lot of change in the world. Yet our commitment to helping you share your knowledge remains the same. And so we’ve established a set of principles on AI to help guide us as we make decisions on what and how we build and to address the questions and concerns we’ve heard directly from you, our instructor community. We’ve created our principles around the key ideas of giving you choice, protecting your intellectual property, using AI in service of our mission, and making sure we all benefit from what GenAI can offer. Want to know more? Read our full statement of principles.

Easier content creation:

Promotional emails & course announcements:

If you’re sending promotional emails and course announcements, you can now see the click-through rates for each one. This can help you fine-tune your messaging and see what’s working best. Go take a look on your Dashboard to see it in action.

Text-to-speech courses

There are a lot of good reasons for allowing courses that use text-to-speech to deliver lectures, such as clarity, localization, and accessibility. After hearing so many requests from so many of you and seeing the advancements in technology, we’re now allowing text-to-speech lectures. Of course, courses must still meet quality guidelines. There’s more discussion about text-to-speech in the community.

Course setup lecture

We now have the option of a course setup lecture to outline any necessary resources for your course. These setup lectures need to be free of promotional language, but it means learners can more easily get any discounts on course-essential tools right up front.

Interactive learning

Practice tests are well-liked by learners who’re preparing for certification. These comprehensive, timed assessments help them make sure they’re ready for their exams. So recently, we launched a new creation experience for practice tests which has a host of new features. There’s a new question type and GenAI-assisted explanations for English-language development topics. We also have a new guide for creating practice tests.

We have our first insights for practice tests, which you can see in your Course Engagement Dashboard. We’re continuing to make overall improvements to expand practice test insights and engagement.

This work goes hand-in-hand with our recent work on the coding exercise experience. By the way, if you teach Kotlin or C++20, you’ll be glad to see they’re now supported.

Udemy Business content opportunities:

Our look into in-demand content for Udemy Business* was refreshed in April. Udemy Business content opportunities works a lot like Marketplace Insights, but is geared towards helping you find in-demand topics for new Udemy Business courses. So if you’re looking to create additional Udemy Business courses (or even your first), you’ll want to have a look at the update.

*Note: Available to instructors with 4.2 star rating and 25+ ratings for English or 10+ for non-English courses. Curation into Udemy Business is not guaranteed.

Better discovery

Traffic

The marketplace is the front door of Udemy. It’s how so many learners find their way to your courses. And, some of you have pointed out in the instructor community, it’s what feeds Udemy Business, and not just in terms of courses. A learner in the marketplace today can become a decision maker at a business tomorrow.

So our goal is to keep growing the marketplace. Traffic is up 7% year over year to an average of 37M monthly visitors, and that’s a good sign.

We’ve hired a new senior vice president of consumer growth, Kaleb Miller. One of the key focuses of Kaleb's role will be identifying new avenues for growth, including forging strategic partnerships that will enhance our consumer business’ success by driving additional traffic and revenue to the marketplace over time.

Attracting new learners to Udemy

Partnerships

We’re continuing to invest in the Udemy brand to make us — and your content — known around the world. And it's working: We now have 16,000 organizations and 71 million learners that trust Udemy to help them gain the skills they need.

Partnerships are a big part of that. Having our logo on the McLaren Racing helmet gives us worldwide visibility, and instills a confidence that a major organization has chosen us as their official learning partner. Getting our name into new places, brings in more site visitors and potential enrollments. Here are some updates on how we’re doing that:

The San Jose Earthquakes: We’ve become the official learning partner for the San Jose Earthquakes, one of Major League Soccer’s original teams. We’ll be featured in the stadium and (appropriate for a learning company) on the training jerseys. In addition to getting our name and your content in front of more people and learners, we’ll be engaging in community partnerships to help those in underserved communities develop the skills they need to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive job market.
McLaren Racing: We’re continuing to deepen our partnership with McLaren. We recently held a Global PowerUp at the McLaren OKX Technology Centre. This brought together McLaren employees, Udemy leadership, and a special guest instructor for two days of learning. It’s important to us in all our partnerships that we’re not just having our logo displayed (though we like that), but we’re embodying our ethos of teaching and learning.

Stories

We mentioned in the last Insider that we want your stories so we can show the power of learning to the world. That call is still open. So, tell us how your teaching has changed lives — whether it’s yours, someone else’s, or both. You can see some examples on our Stories page.

Wrapping up

Security and simplicity

We are introducing passwordless authentication beginning in June to make logging in easier and accounts safer. It reduces our dependence on passwords by requiring you to verify your email before accessing your account. During the rollout, you will either experience the new passwordless approach or continue with the existing password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) process. Over time, we will fully transition to the passwordless method, eliminating the need for passwords and MFA.

Global updates

We’ve made changes across the globe to get your courses in front of more learners in more places:

OxxO payments for Mexico: This popular form of payment will help learners checkout using cash. We’re looking into other payment options for other countries in Latin America too.
Team Plan in Japan: Team Plan is now truly global, and we’re excited to have subscriptions rolled out everywhere.

Coming together

The instructor communities continue to inspire us. Your questions, thoughts, and interactions give us insights into how you work and what your challenges are. We’ve found we’ve outgrown the platform we’ve been using, so we’ll be moving to a brand new community platform soon.

In the meantime, keep posting and keep asking questions. The community is not slowing down, and we have plenty of upcoming coffee chats, AMAs (Ask Me Anything), and other community events.

Looking ahead

Recently we revamped our company vision to bring it in line with our new tagline: The power of possibilities. This is Udemy as simply as we could put it:

Our vision is a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the skills they need to unlock their potential — a world where they can create possibilities for themselves and for others.

Whether it’s bringing in more learners through our promos and advertising or extending learning to underserved communities, we are committed to making this vision a reality and fulfilling our mission to improve lives through learning.

We hope the work we’ve done, and continue to do, helps to make what you do easier and more fulfilling. After all, improving lives through learning includes yours too.