Want an Opinion on Your Upcoming/New Course From a Top Seller?

[ScottDuffy]

Update 02/21: I continue to provide feedback to people leaving comments on this post. I will be traveling for the next week and won't be able to do much in that time. But please be patient, and I will return to this thread when I return.

Hi there, my name is Scott, and I've been on Udemy for nine years — 1.1 million paying students as of now.

If you have a new course (or one that just went live) and want some honest, constructive feedback to make it better, I'll spend 10 minutes looking at your landing page, promo videos, and anything else I can see and give you some solid ideas of things that you can improve. I promise I won't be too harsh but I'll be honest.

Post in the comments, and I'll go to your profile page and find your latest course. Or post a YouTube link to one of the videos if the course is not live yet. 

Any of the other community champions can jump on and give feedback to any of the instructors looking for feedback.

[PhilEbiner]

You’re the best Scott! 

[ScottDuffy]

☝️ I learned from the best... you.

[IngTomasMoravek]

Yes, truly so kind to other instructors. This is incredible kindness.

[MichaelPog]

Kind of a quiet party.

Maybe the invitations got lost in the mail?

Let me bump this post up then:)

[ScottDuffy]

👊 Thanks

[HofmeyrdeVo128]

@ScottDuffy you are awesome! 

[ScottDuffy]

🙏 appreciate it

[AkshayYewal660]

Please review my profile and my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@supplychainsensei6988

[ScottDuffy]

Hi there Akshay,

I checked out your Udemy instructor profile and your impressive list of courses.

I really don't have any feedback on your instructor profile. There are no obvious errors or flaws. 

As for your courses, you have many, and they all have student reviews. None of them have the New tag. I was hoping to help new instructors or existing instructors with a new course. So I don't have any specific comments on any of your existing courses.

Supply Chain Management seems to be a popular topic on Udemy, and there might be room on Page 1 of search to beat some of the existing courses with lower ratings. I might suggest you go and watch those competitor courses and see what they're doing (right or wrong), and also read their low reviews to see what people think can be improved. Your success here might be in being better than your competitors. But at the same time, there's a lot of competition and it might be a tough battle.

Good luck!

[Arabic4U]

Hi Scott,

I hope this message finds you well.

Firstly, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your generous offer.

Currently, I have a small French course on Udemy, with 1086 enrolled students and a rating of 4.64.

My ambition now is to expand upon this foundation by developing a highly comprehensive course, spanning over 100 hours, in order to not only increase its marketability but also to provide even greater value to our students.

I'm contemplating whether to add to the existing course or to create an entirely new one.

Could you please provide insights on the advantages of either approach?

For your reference, here is the link to the current course:

https://www.udemy.com/course/french-language-course-learn-french/?referralCode=EF70CD05931F2EBD7B59 

Thank you once again for your support and guidance.

Warm regards,

Nezha 

[ScottDuffy]

Marhaba Nezha,

I have a trip to the Middle East coming up in 2 weeks, and I will take your beginning Arabic course to learn a few words and phrases. How timely.

As far as the French course goes...

* I love that you have a specific promo video aimed at people who are not yet your student. 

* The videos have a bit of an echo. But other videos you've made (in the Arabic course for instance), don't have an echo. Your voice is clear and understandable, so it's not a huge problem. But there's clearly an echo, and I'd rather there wasn't.

* I love that your promo video has some direct lessons that students can take away and get a taste of your teaching style.

* Even the introduction video teaches something. Your professionalism as a teacher is clear. As opposed to just being a person who knows French and decided to make a course on it, it's clear that you are a language teacher. This makes me trust you if I wanted to learn French.

* Does your course have any handouts? Like if a student wanted some paper exercises they can do, or a summary of the words/phrases for that section? I don't see any downloads but that would be a good addition if there is a way you can do that.

* Your videos are good in that they are not static and the words on screen change every minute or two. 

* You have a high course review score, so obviously students like your videos and your teaching style.

I'm sorry that I don't have a huge number of improvement suggestions for you. I will watch your free Arabic course, however, so thank you for commenting on this post, and I look forward to learning from you.

[ScottDuffy]

Oh, and to the question of adding to the existing course or creating a new course...

As a teacher, I am a bit intimidated by the idea of creating a 100-hour course. That would be a lot of work for you. Would the payback on Udemy be worth it for a 100-hour course? I don't know. I prefer something more targeted to specific outcomes.

How about a course specific to people who want to learn French for business purposes? I can see a 8 or 10-hour course on Business French for that. That can even include cultural notes about working with colleagues in France, holidays, how to avoid being perceived as rude, etc.

Or people who want to learn French for personal travel purposes? A course specific to the needs of a traveller might do. This could include tips for the first time in Paris, or which areas of the city have affordable hotels close to the metro, etc. 

How about French for people who already speak two other European languages? Not sure how feasible that idea is, but most French courses are targetted to people who only know one language (I think). For people who already know - let's say Spanish and English - how hard is it to learn French? Is there a different approach that can be taken?

If it was me, I'd rather try to create one or more unique courses about France/French, as opposed to one massive 100-hour course. That's just me. If you want to become the next Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, or Duolingo, you can. But I prefer a targeted approach.

Another idea would be to poll your students. If you can find 100 people looking to learn French, ask them what they are looking for that they can't get anywhere else. There might be some interesting ideas in there. Read the 1-star reviews of your competitors and see what students think is missing.

[RBP]

Greetings Scott,

I just launched a new course, and this is my first on Udemy; if you could please provide your valuable feedback and I appreciate you looking into the course. The course link -- 

https://www.udemy.com/course/data-analytics-with-r-python-and-sql/?referralCode=7A402B15EAE2818DB23F

Thanks,

-Ramesh

[ScottDuffy]

* I like your title, includes good keywords. Great.

* Your subtitle can be improved. Include the keywords again. Would love for it to be more descriptive and motivate the student to buy. "Visualize your data and get actionable insights using R, Python and SQL."

* I think your course image can be improved. I get that it's a column chart, but I think there are better images to represent data analytics.

* Your audio is clear with no background noise. I can understand you clearly. Congratulations on that. To many, that's one of the most difficult parts. 

* I think you can improve your introductory video by telling potential students what to expect to learn in the course and perhaps with a quick demonstration of how you can turn data into insights. Udemy has a "promo video" recipe, and it's worth looking at.

https://teach.udemy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Promo-video-Recipe-cc.pdf

In 90-120 seconds, you should be able to get the students interested in buying your course instead of someone else's course. It's not reasonable that they will spend 10 minutes listening to your entire introduction video before deciding whether to purchase/continue, or look away. Look at the Udemy recipe above.

* I also like to suggest a demo. Even if you haven't taught the students how to use R and Python to analyze the data, if you showed them a sample CSV, you could perhaps craft a 60-second demo of what they should be able to do by the end of the course. A restaurant shows pictures of the food before the diner orders it to get the person interested in the meal, and so a teacher can show a demo of the outcome at the beginning, before taking students step-by-step into how they did it. This is separate from the introduction or promo video. 

* Introduce variety in the video. You have a 10-minute video (Lesson 3), and the video never changes the entire time. I think you can do things to keep the student more interested in the video portion. Can you break one slide into 5 slides? Make the text bigger, add relevant pictures, or introduce basic animations (fade in) in PowerPoint? Having the screen unchanging for 7, 8, or 10 minutes is too long, in my view.

You don't even have to re-record the audio. You can just improve the slides and dub the existing audio on top of it. I do that all the time. 

* I like that you have lots of "free preview" videos. That's a great way to get students who are unsure of it to get a better idea of your teaching style.

* I like that you have example dataset to download.

* Overall, it looks like the course covers a lot in 6.5 hours, and students interested in the topic would find it helpful. 

* I didn't see a video that was the end of the course. There was no thank you or goodbye, and no notes to the student on what to do next. Let's say a student successfully completes your course. Do you want them to do anything to continue their studies? Can you recommend other resources for them to continue? 

Overall, I think you've got a great first course. Just a few minor suggestions to improve the "pace" of the videos to keep students interested. And of course, get them interested with a good promo video that sells the benefits of taking the course in a concise 2-minute fashion.

All the best,

Scott

[RBP]

Thank you Scott for taking the time, and adding your valuable feedback, appreciate it. I will address these points. 

Very good points you have added, taking a look to make sure I have those added in. 

Thank you,

-Ramesh

[Leonor C.]

Hello @ScottDuffy 

What a great initiative! Here at Udemy we are all about values such as community, making an impact and helping all achieve success and this is all about that! Congratulations and lots of kudos for you!! 👏👏👏

Kindest regards!

Leonor

Udemy moderation team

[ScottDuffy]

Thanks, @Leonor C. 

If you were to one day create your own video course, what topic would it be on?

[Leonor C.]

Hey @ScottDuffy 👋

I would do some on tarot, international trade, Silhouette (cutting machine to do arts and crafts) and maybe one or two on language courses (English, Portuguese and French) to English Portuguese, French and Spanish speakers. Other than that I am a true consumer on courses and at the moment I have taken on a new hobby which is novel writing... taking my baby steps into writing my first story (novel?)... maybe in the future I can adventure into one of these also, time will tell! 

[ScottDuffy]

I love that you have such a wide-variety of interests. If you can, you should try to create content around one or more of those areas. It could be Udemy, YouTube, or social media. It's a worthy pursuit to try to impart your knowledge to others.

When I first started on Udemy in 2014, I used to create one course per month on different topics that interested me. I don't feel as free today as I did back then to be so creatively diverse since I found a topic that really worked, and I feel obligated to follow that same path.

[ahaselberger]

Thanks so much.  I'm a time management and productivity coach, and that's what I typically create content around and write about.  And in fact, all these courses are related to time management at their core.

And I have a Youtube channel

And I've been writing a blog and sending it out to my audience weekly for 6 + years.

Udemy is currently a smaller piece of my business but one that I'd like to grow.  

In short, I do have a clear focus in my business and majority of my content, while maybe that's not as clear looking at the titles of my Udemy courses.

What strategies have helped you grow your Udemy course most?