First course and the first bad review

[DanKelly]

So I received my first bad review and it is painful to say the least. I responsed to the student's comments and kept it positive. Basically, said "Thanks for the feedback and I'm always growing and making better courses".

I find it odd that some one gave me a bad review when they never even message me and asked for help. i think this just drives me more to continue to grow and make better courses.

I'm not foolish enough to believe that I'm always going to get five stars, but this first one is painful.  Anyone else remember their first bad review?

[MichaelPog · Accepted solution]

Oh yeah. It hurts and especially when it's out of the blue, when you never received a single question from the student.

I tried to follow up etc but it honestly never helped.

Just take in the feedback if there's any, reply politely and move on

[MichaelPog · Accepted solution]

Oh yeah. It hurts and especially when it's out of the blue, when you never received a single question from the student.

I tried to follow up etc but it honestly never helped.

Just take in the feedback if there's any, reply politely and move on

[PaperedChef]

Dan, I also get bad reviews and they hurt, especially when you check the stats and see that they completed less than 10% of the course and didn't even give it a chance. I try to reply to all of the feedback which is positive overall. When someone just gives you a couple of stars without a comment, there is not much to say. At least when they give constructive feedback, you can reply with something specific. I have added a lot of content to my courses based on feedback from the students. It is nice when I can reply back to their feedback, explaining that I have updated the course, based on their feedback. I feel your pain. Just move on. There will always be haters. 

[AnjaliSingh147 · Accepted solution]

I have recently started my free courses and learning how to be online instructor. I completely agreed with this kind of reviews  sometimes make all instructors little disappointed and discourage specially when there is no conversation and discussion happened . I would like to suggest on this issue, if it is possible to not to publish the review less than 4 stars without mention it. This will give all instructors to improve the quality of course.

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@PaperedChef wrote:

Dan, I also get bad reviews and they hurt, especially when you check the stats and see that they completed less than 10% of the course and didn't even give it a chance. I try to reply to all of the feedback which is positive overall. When someone just gives you a couple of stars without a comment, there is not much to say. At least when they give constructive feedback, you can reply with something specific. I have added a lot of content to my courses based on feedback from the students. It is nice when I can reply back to their feedback, explaining that I have updated the course, based on their feedback. I feel your pain. Just move on. There will always be haters. 

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[JeffSharman592]

The problem with a bad review is that it can pull your overall rating right down if you don't have too many reviews. The other problem is that the reviewer never gives any kind of reason or feedback. I have tried replying to get reasons. Not one reply. 

For instance, I have a 1 star review amongst dozens of 4 and 5 star reviews. No reasons were given. 

I think Udemy should do something about this. If someone gives a 1 or 2 star review, they must have completed at least 50% of the course and there must be reasons given for the review to be published. The review system is very unfair to the instructor right now.

[Jorge Guera Pires, PhD]

Indeed

[GregReverdiau]

It is tough indeed. If you think the feedback is worth it, it's a good way to improve your courses. After a while, if most of your feedback is positive, you will just ignore them. Like @Thor  mentioned once, even the Atlantic ocean has a 3.9 stars on Google. Haters gonna hate 🙂 

[RandyMinder]

@GregReverdiau 

How does an instructor go about improving their course when Udemy allows students to leave a 1 or 2 star rating with no comments? And this seems to happen most of the time, not just to me, but to a lot of instructors, as I look at their ratings and reviews.

Of all the ratings I've gotten that are 1 or 2 stars, maybe 10% leave any comments and maybe 1% leave a comment that is useful.

It's been my experience that roughly 1 in 5 students leave a rating. About 1 in 5 of those that do give a rating leave any comments. And, only 1 in 5 of of those that leave a comment leave a  useful comment. It's virtually impossible to know how to improve a course when Udemy allows this.

I've read many of your posts on this subject and your typical response is, "improve your course". Well, that's good advice but Udemy seems to be working against instructors being able to do this effectively.

[GregReverdiau]

@RandyMinder 

I know it's frustrating to get 1-star ratings without comments. With that said, you can do several things to improve your course: 

• Look at your competition and compare to what you are doing. Do you see a difference in video quality, editing, audio quality, etc...
• Find a group of people who are interested in taking your course and provide you feedback. Give them the course for free. Maybe come up with a few categories that you would like them to give you feedback on. The goal here is not to get a Udemy review but to get feedback on your course. I've done this before by going to Facebook groups that match my audience. I sometimes do it now with my current students. 
• Send your course to friends and family and ask them for honest feedback. Not always easy to do. 
• Pay someone to do the course and give you feedback. 

I hope this helps. 

[BaleTraining]

thanks for the advice.. i had same experience with one of my courses.

[mchojrin]

I just got my first bad review (and it was really bad... 1 star for every concept), and yes, it did hurt, but what was really annoying was the fact that the rating didn't include any comment whatsoever... I understand it's not the student's job to help me get better at this but the fact that they didn't even bother to leave a comment makes me wonder about the seriousness of their rating... should I flag this review? 

[CarstenMuessig]

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@mchojrin wrote:

I understand it's not the student's job to help me get better at this but the fact that they didn't even bother to leave a comment makes me wonder about the seriousness of their rating... should I flag this review? 

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The student hasn't done anything wrong or violated any policy (as comments aren't mandatory).

[mchojrin]

I guess you're right... though it doesn't seem fair to let them so easily give a bad review. Is there a way to see how many classes this particular student watched? Since they didn't ask any question is hard for me to know how to take this.

BTW, of course I'd prefer to have good reviews rather than bad ones and it's ok for someone not to like my material. I'm ok with the 30-day money back guarantee, I just feel like there should be some minimum requirements for someone to leave a review (Perhaps 50% of minutes watched or something) 

[CarstenMuessig]

See https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007512353-When-is-a-Negative-Review-Against-Udemy-Pol... for reasons when Udemy will remove reviews.

[SanjeevRana659]

Hi Guys,

I just had the first bad review on my course. Since I have recently started I have only three reviews one of them is pretty bad (one star) the other two are good. I am trying to get feedback from students to find what he/she didn't like about my course. It is painful after so much hard work to receive a low rating without any substantial information.

The law of averages doesn't seem to be on my side as one poor review out of three takes my course rating to 2.65.

Any tips from experienced instructors to a newbie like me would be highly appreciable

[NeenaSathi]

I have a suggestion to Udemy regarding how to use weights to remove intentional bad reviews.  In my case, invariably the bad reviews are coming from students who have signed up for over 50 courses, and are most likely professionals and not real students.  Udemy could analyze and spot such behavior and lower their weightage.  

The purpose of Udemy is to bring new instructors, new contents and new students.  An improved weighting system will encourage new instructors and new students to trust the review system and will also help Udemy in Udemy for Business program.

Please feel free to seek my help for using Graph analysis to help you identify patterns in student reviews.  It is a nice graph analysis problem.

- Neena

[Jorge Guera Pires, PhD]

same for me, just one bad review took my course down, my course was hot&new, then...one bad review...

[AkshayKhanna93]

It has been a few weeks since I posted my first course & so far I am not getting much enrollment.
So have made my course free for 4 days for the first 100 people, can you people please enroll, review  & suggest improvements. This will really help me find gaps and work on improving them. Reach me for the free coupon code for the same.

[RonErez]

Hi, I agree.

I have quite good reviews. But one student was quite upset. Complained that the code is not available in the course (actually it is) and the audio quality is poor.

I apologized for the experience and asked which lectures had bad audio. It turns out that there were very specific lectures that had a slight echo. However the student did not respond.

I also told the student to always feel free to reach out and I'll do my best to help.

So I recommend to just be polite and genuinely helpful and try not to take it to heart.

I also was upset but at the same time a little bit amused. My first thought was "Dude, chill".

And yes I totally agree that if the student didn't decide to reach out in the first place then such a bad review or bad response is not pleasant.

[rsalunke]

Hi, Take it as improvement in your course. I have four courses on udemy on Document and Record Management the first course what i have made is having bad reveiws not about content but about my audio and other things but i took it as improvement phase and published more courses, i am replying to the feedback positively as we can not argue with them, of course the bad reviews they hurt you but try to put one more course with considering their points and keep doing, my ratings have reached 4.8 and still getting bad reviews for the first course, ignorance is bliss, All the best Regards Rajendra

[upkaizen]

It definetely hurts when you see that you put all your dedication to the coruse and see that your rating is suddenly altered with that bad review.

My comment is: keep believing in yourself and the value you deliver, be respectful towards students and keep in mind that each review (even a negative one) is a valuable experience.

Best wishes! Dante