Hello Instructors! 

We’re so excited to be chatting with you about something that should be fun, Instructor Stories! As you go through your instructor journey, there are going to be events or happenings that will be a great learning experience! We’d love to give you the opportunity to share your stories and network with your fellow instructors during this upcoming Virtual Coffee Chat on Friday, November 4th at 10:00am PT!

What is a virtual coffee chat? 

The community virtual coffee chats are hour-long informal networking sessions held via Zoom. During these sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to network with and get to know other Udemy instructors worldwide.

How does it work?

November’s theme is instructor stories, so for the first 30 minutes, we will discuss various questions about scenarios you may have encountered as an instructor. Then we will open the floor for some questions about your experiences!

How do I sign up?

Glad you asked! You can sign up right here.

We look forward to seeing you on Friday, November 4th at 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET!

*We understand that this time may not be ideal for all time zones, however, we will change the times of the coffee chat each month to accommodate different locations.

Hello instructors,

Our Black Friday sales are almost here!  For those of you who might be new to Udemy, these tend to be Udemy’s largest promotions of the year, bringing in new learners from around the globe and providing you with the potential to grow your enrollments and increase revenue.

To ensure that you are ready for the influx of new learners, The Udemy instructor team has put together an updated list of recommendations for how you can get your course ready in the Teaching Center. 

Some of the tips include:

• Updating your course, practice tests & quizzes
• Update your course landing page
• Ensure that your content is accessible 
• Plus, other tips on ratings & reviews

Head on over to the Teaching Center to read the full article. Then be sure to come back here and let us know how you’ll be preparing your courses for Black Friday in the comments!

Teach on,

Bella 

Building on our update in August, check out the changes we’ve made to coding exercises in the past few months! We are continuing to improve this tool so that you can offer your learners authentic ways to practice and assess their comprehension.

1. We released code snippets and auto-completion features to help learners practice similar to an integrated development environment (IDE). Code snippets are templates that make it easier to enter repeating code patterns.
2. You can now create coding exercises in Java 17 with JUnit5. Java is one of our most popular programming languages, and these improvements could be helpful for the 600,000+ learners who are enrolled in a Java development course. 
3. When learners open coding exercises in a course, they’ll now see a fully-extended environment. It’s a smaller-scale design change, but we’re hoping it improves the user experience for you and your learners.

Beyond these improvements, we’re working on new designs for coding exercises that align with some of the top requests we’ve heard from you and learners. We’ll continue to update the community and this teaching center article as we make progress on the initiative!

Hi everyone,

Following up on September's theme of data & analytics, we wanted to share a few improvements our teams recently made to the Performance dashboard:

1. We've updated the way we calculate course consumption to better reflect overall learner engagement. Before, the Course Engagement page didn't include time spent engaging on-platform practice activities like quizzes, practice tests, and coding exercises. Now time spent on these activities is included in your Course Engagement report.
   
   We also cleaned up the logic around details like repeat viewing and watch speed. For the curious: repeat viewing counts the same as first-time viewing, and two users watching the same video count as the same number of minutes consumed, even if they watch at different speeds. For those of you with content included in subscriptions (Udemy Business and Personal Plan), this updated way of calculating engagement is now consistent with the calculation used in the Revenue Report, which already included engagement with practice activities. 
   
   
2. We've introduced a new metric, minutes consumed per active learner, to save you a trip to your spreadsheets and make it easier to compare engagement across courses. We heard from some of you that this metric provides a clearer idea of which of your courses are successfully driving learner engagement, and which might need some love to get learners moving.
   
   
3. We've added sorting capabilities to the Course Engagement summary report to let you view your courses in ascending or descending order in terms of minutes consumed, number of active students, or the new "minutes consumed per active student" metric. We hope this helps you prioritize your efforts when it comes to updating your courses or planning new ones.
   
   We hope these updates help you continue to create great content that keeps your learners motivated, engaged, and loyal.

Teach on,

Bella Almeida

Udemy Community

The month of September has come to an end and we wanted to showcase the highlights of what we covered!