Udemy

Hi Ventseslav,   I see you work at Graffiti BBDO. I worked for many years at Proximity BBDO in Canada. I recognize many of those brands on your instructor bio, as I worked with Gillette, Molson, Campbell Soup, and others on the digital marketing side.   * I like your instructor bio. Shows a lot of authority, and I immediately trust you to teach digital marketing and creative ideas. This bio is a great example of a teacher showing real world authority.   * I like your "what the student should know". They do indeed need to know something about marketing but that shouldn't stop them from the course. Well said.   * Similarly "who this course is for" is dead on too. Well said.   * Description uses bolding and lists well to break up the text and make it easy to skim.    * Nice course image.    * The promo video has an inconsistent creative style. The video editing is a bit harsh. Some places have music in the background and then suddenly (sharply) there is no music. Then there is music again. I also noticed one part of the video where your voice was cut off at both ends. The camera autofocus is struggling to find focus in some places. I say this because you're a strategy officer at a famous worldwide marketing brand. I assume that you wouldn't show that first video to a client, even as an early demo. Maybe take the raw video and take a second shot at editing it so that the style is more consistent throughout. I think the second preview video, "Brief to prompt," is MUCH better. It still has the camera autofocus going in and out of focus at times. So, I guess you'll need to turn off autofocus when doing talking heads in the future.   * I love that you have course downloads to help the students follow along.   * The third video, "Concept Dynamic Connection", also has much better editing than the intro videos.    * Do you actually demonstrate using ChatGPT in this course? None of the preview videos show ChatGPT live at all. I would add videos to the course that DEMONSTRATE the concepts you are teaching about building a prompt.    If those videos do exist, add one of them to the free preview so that students can see some active teaching through demos.   Basically, I think your landing page is great, and some of your course videos appear to be at a good standard for teaching. My main suggestion is to try to create a much better promo/intro video because I can see some people being turned away by that.   "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."   Also, you have a good mix of video and teaching styles (talking heads, b-roll, slides, quizzes) and I would suggest a few more demos of using ChatGPT. Maybe even some type of project that you take the students through.   All the best and good luck!   ... View more

Hi Joseph,   Nice to meet you. I hope you take these suggestions as constructive help, as they are intended.   Overall, you do have some challenges to get your python/numpy course up to the standard of the top courses on Udemy on the topic. So all of my suggestions are to help you raise your course to a higher standard but I can't promise or guarantee that doing these things will result in many sales for you because Python is a tough, tough category.   * I went to your instructor bio, and I would suggest you rewrite your biography using proper capitalization, including lower-case letters. Using all capital-letters detracts from the professional look you are going for.   * Similar to your course landing page. I would suggest proper capitalization for the course title. * Your subtitle is a jumble of keywords without spacing. I would suggest you rewrite this to be more natural English sentence structure to get the students interest in what the course is about. * I don't find your course image to be related to machine learning programming and would suggest choosing something that gives students a positive idea of what the course is about.  * Zero ratings and zero students is going to make people pause before signing up for the course. I would suggest you find 30-50 people that are interested in numpy that would be willing to take the course and offer it to them for free. Ask them to give you feedback on the contents privately to help you improve the course.  Don't just post free coupons to the Internet, find people who are target students. * I would suggest you organize the course into fewer section headings. It appears that many sections only have one lesson. You should have at least 2-3 lessons under every section. So reduce the number of sections and move lessons together into the same section. * The lesson titles and section titles also have "ALL CAPS" in places. Keep it consistent, using "Title Case" for those titles. * There are some minor grammar mistakes on the landing page. "learning and the general data science through many worked examples" is one of the "what you'll learn" items and that sentence isn't clear to me. * Your promo & introduction videos appear to have been filmed on a hand-held mobile phone? I really commend the "talking head" style to get you into the course in some way. There are a few benefits of that. But the talking head part of the videos can be improved. There's a lot of camera shaking, and your face is close to the screen. I would suggest a tripod to keep the camera steady and a bit farther away from you. * However, your audio is clear and there's no background noise. So that's good. * Your screen-recorded videos are clear. * Perhaps you can include a few more free preview videos so that students can see your teaching style beyond the introductory topics.   I wish you the best and much success in your career in online teaching.  ... View more

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.   ... View more

Thanks, @Leonor C.    If you were to one day create your own video course, what topic would it be on?   ... View more

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. ... View more

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.   ... View more

* 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   ... View more

☝️ I learned from the best... you. ... View more

👊 Thanks ... View more

🙏 appreciate it ... View more

Registered ... View more

Congrats everyone! ... View more

@PeteMiller I don't want to alarm you, but the Udemy Black Friday sale usually starts 10 days or 14 days before the actual Black Friday. Usually.   So being ready BY Black Friday will be too late.   ... View more

When does the Black Friday sale start? ... View more

Skillshare doesn't accept courses already published on Udemy. And no, you can't upload a paid course to YouTube. ... View more

It should be approved within a week. And every course needs to go through the same process.   Welcome and good luck!  ... View more

The forum is not for support.   Also, Udemy must have 30,000 Indian instructors. I'm sure one of them can help you with how they do their taxes.    ... View more

All videos must have a human voice. Text only lectures are not allowed for an entire course. ... View more

As Boris said, computer generated voices are prohibited. ... View more

Udemy is a video course platform, not an ebook marketplace. "Ebook only" courses are not allowed. ... View more

Well the short answer is that "creating the course is the easy part, selling the course is the hard part."   You might not like that answer (or agree), but that's the reality for any content creator in any industry.   Why do singers/bands only get 10% of their record sales? Why do book authors only get 5% of their book sales? Why does Amazon only pay 6 cents per hour for videos watched on Amazon Prime?   The reality is that Udemy is doing the hard part. I work for myself with no employees. Udemy has 800 employees working to sell my course. That's a scale that I can't achieve myself. ... View more

I guess community champions don't have a rank? I don't see one beside my name.   But I did get an email earlier that said I was a rookie. I have an acrylic trophy that Udemy gave me calling me a guru a few years ago, so rookie is quite the downgrade from guru. Knocked all the way down the mountain.     ... View more

Just received in Wise. Thanks Udemy. ... View more

I assume it will eventually be OK. But only one time in the past was Udemy 5 days late with a payment. So odd. ... View more

Looking forward to it. ... View more

@JimmyNaraine had some of the best looking and sounding course videos on Udemy at a time when every other instructor looked like their recorded their courses using a 2.0MP camera.   He was recording courses at a beach even. With impeccable quality.   Ask him what gave him the idea to go extremely hard on video quality so many years ago?   And how are his brothers doing?   ... View more

All courses must have a video component. The video must be moving and not a static image.   Perhaps you can partner with a video editor (a trusted friend) to add some moving video to your audio like slides or relevant stock video in exchange for a portion of the revenue. Perhaps someone on this forum would be willing to help if you posted on the main message board (outside this thread) explaining your situation and asking for help.  Don't just trust the first person who volunteers. Chat with them and get to know their motivations.  ... View more

Questions:   - How do you prepare your room for good sound before you start recording?   - How do you remove echo from a video that has already been recorded?   - How do you remove background noise such as dogs, cars and babies?   - How do you ensure all of your videos have about the same level of audio and it doesn't fluctuate from being too quiet in one video and too loud in the next?   - What tools do instructors use around audio?   - Do I need an expensive microphone?   - Should I "edit out" mistakes? If I say the wrong thing, or a demonstration doesn't work the way I planned? How important is that?   - What about ums, uhs, ahs, and long pauses in the audio? What to do about that, if anything? ... View more