Udemy

FrankKane · ‎09-17-2022

Every day you postpone releasing a course is a day of lost sales, and missed opportunities to help people learn important skills. The best month to release is the month when you're done.

FrankKane · ‎09-16-2022

The only reason to send links through there is to hide where the link came from. Probably originating from some pirate site if I had to guess - whoever is using it doesn't want you or Udemy to know about them. But if it's only 3 visitors, it's probably not worth worrying about. It's possible it's nothing nefarious and just someone running a website who is overzealous about privacy.

FrankKane · ‎08-23-2022

The ability to sound energetic, while still speaking clearly and not too fast for foreign audiences. Still working on that one myself...

FrankKane · ‎08-21-2022

Why isn't there a way to unsubscribe from just these notifications? The unsubscribe link takes you to a page where you can unsubscribe from all "helpful resources and important updates," but I just want to unsubscribe from these particular ones. I never opted into them; they just started appearing a few weeks ago.

FrankKane · ‎08-04-2022

Will existing auto-transcribed subtitles be re-processed with the new "improved auto-generation model"? (I hope so!)

FrankKane · ‎07-21-2022

A great reminder that we instructors are part of something much bigger with Udemy, and something that touches more lives than we can imagine in a positive way. Just this week, I've heard from students who landed jobs at Google and Amazon who credited one of my courses for it, and substantially improved their lives as a result. Udemy lets us earn a living by helping people around the world, and that's a rare thing.

FrankKane · ‎07-20-2022

Don't give up too easily. It can be very hard to predict what videos will gain traction on YouTube and which ones will not. Every upload is a roll of the dice, and you have to roll the dice enough to have a chance of a video taking off there.

FrankKane · ‎07-17-2022

For me it's more about the constant sense of accomplishment. Whether it's recording a section of a new course, getting an older course 100% up to date, or implementing some new marketing idea - every day there's an achievable goal you can set for yourself, and it feels good when it's achieved.

FrankKane · ‎07-11-2022

Do you know about how many of those followers have become students?

FrankKane · ‎07-04-2022

Maintenance is generally on an as-needed basis with me; I teach technologies that are changing all the time, and every week there are one or two things I have to change in my courses as a result. Sometimes the software I teach undergoes a major revision and I have to re-record an entire course; I just finished a 2 month effort redoing my Elasticsearch course for example. Something like that happens once or twice a year. It's not something I can schedule or plan for; when changes like that drop, I have to get right on it or my ratings will plummet. What I can schedule and plan for is the long list of ideas I've accrued over time for marketing and promotion. Whenever I get an idea (or more often, learn new ideas from other instructors here,) I write it down in my to-do list. And that's what I plan to spend most of Q3 and Q4 on. That includes things like polishing my own website, writing better and more frequent educational announcements, tweaking my promotional announcements, trying to find a way to make social media work, SEO optimization, and creating more promotional content on YouTube.

FrankKane · ‎06-30-2022

Right! I find it's a full-time effort just to keep my revenue from falling over time, and doing more than that is inviting burnout. (Not complaining; for me it's a good problem to have.) For those of us who are doing this for lifestyle reasons and not looking to grow some huge e-learning content company and sell it later, we need to balance life with course creation and maintenance. My own goal is to finish up two more new courses this year, and then focus on marketing activities and keeping my existing courses up to date for the rest of the year. I've been working more than full time cranking out courses this first half of the year, and it's time to slow down a little.

FrankKane · ‎06-30-2022

Hey @Bella thanks for the response above. One point I was trying to make, and didn't make clearly, is there is a fine line between quizzes and practice exams for many courses. Both provide interactivity, but it's always been in my head that practice exams are intended for simulating certification exams, while quizzes are more lightweight and appropriate for other types of courses. It just seems odd to offer a "select" badge to courses with practice exams but not quizzes, given how similar they are. Unless the intent is specifically to highlight certification prep courses that have practice exams included (instead of offered as an additional purchase.) My concern is that we'd see instructors gaming the system by converting their existing quizzes into practice exams just to gain this new label. But as you said, the experiment isn't at the point of worrying about implementation details like this yet.

FrankKane · ‎06-28-2022

OK, sounds like ultimately this is an incentive for instructors to add practice tests or coding exercises to their courses. Practice tests are really only relevant to certification prep courses, and coding exercises to courses teaching coding in the systems the coding exercise feature supports. Just a handful of categories really. Is there some sort of manual review associated with being marked "select"? Is it restricted to certain categories? If not I'd think there's a possibility of instructors just converting their quizzes to practice tests to sneak in.

FrankKane · ‎06-20-2022

I'm proud of really getting back into the groove of creating new courses again. There was a long stretch where new opportunities were hard to find, but since last October I've created (or co-created) 5 new technical courses with a sixth well underway. One of them has even become my new top-selling course. It's made me a lot more optimistic that growth for instructors on Udemy is still very much possible if you put in the work. Another interesting milestone in Q2, if not an accomplishment, is that my revenue from Udemy Business finally exceeded that of marketplace sales. That allows me to shift my strategy to producing courses more aimed at business audiences, which is a welcome change.

FrankKane · ‎06-11-2022

Students gaming the system for free courses seems unavoidable, but if instructors got minutes for those trial period courses we'd also be open to fraud from instructors getting people to consume their courses for free to drive up their piece of the pie. I'd rather have one source of fraud to worry about than two.

FrankKane · ‎06-09-2022

Only a lawyer or accountant where you live can tell you for sure. Udemy itself is of course operating legally, but it's up to you to ensure you are operating in a legal manner in whatever country you live in. There are certainly illegal ways to be a Udemy instructor, such as not properly reporting your income from Udemy on your taxes, or funneling money from Udemy into countries where the United States has a trade embargo (such as Iran and North Korea) You should also consider any legal agreements you may have signed that affect your ability to produce courses on Udemy. Some employers makes you agree not to do any other work on the side, or anything they might consider competitive. That's also on you. If you create your course using materials stolen from someone else, that's illegal. And if you create a course on "how to do illegal things," well, Udemy isn't going to defend you when the authorities come knocking on your door. The answer depends on the laws where you live. Personally, I live in the United States, I don't teach anything associated with illegal activities, all of my content is original or properly licensed, I pay all of the various taxes required on my Udemy income, and nobody has thrown me in jail yet!

FrankKane · ‎06-07-2022

Use the Marketplace Insights tool in your instructor dashboard, and try to find an aspect of mathematics that has reasonable demand yet does not have established courses you'll have difficulty competing with. In other words, find a sub-topic of mathematics that Krista King isn't already teaching! It all starts with smart topic selection. That doesn't guarantee success, but it at least gives you a chance. Once you've chosen a topic, there are some great resources at https://www.udemy.com/teaching/ for getting started. Good luck!

FrankKane · ‎06-07-2022

This post is from last year. Today is the expected payday for this month, but it's only around noontime at Udemy headquarters. Too soon to worry about it.

FrankKane · ‎06-07-2022

If you're teaching a technology that changes frequently (like AWS) you will often need to update your lecture videos to reflect the changes. It is a lot easier to go back and edit in a modified slide and voiceover than to try and recreate the lighting, camera angles, and outfit you had when you recorded the original video.

FrankKane · ‎06-06-2022

What's best for technical courses is minimal use of Powerpoint but with lots of screencasts illustrating how to apply whatever technology you are teaching. A talking head in the corner is unnecessary, potentially distracting, and makes updating the course later very difficult. Generally for technical courses, students want to focus on what you're showing them rather than watching you talk. It is usually a good idea to have at least some "talking head" videos - introducing each section of the course, for example - just to create a personal connection to the student which can help with your review scores. But if you're not comfortable doing that, it's not strictly necessary. I often worry about looking too *old* and not too young!

FrankKane · ‎05-25-2022

I think that old promotion is also what sucked me in with Camtasia, and I still use it to this day. It does what I need, but I have to admit the licensing fee for it seems a bit high for what it is. It's also annoying that I need to buy additional licenses for every computer I might edit on. I do wish Camtasia offered some more modern-looking motion graphics, lower-thirds, and intro/outro templates though. Even with their add-on packages there's not much that really looks like the style I have in mind. I've never used DaVinci Resolve, but I've been eyeing it with curiosity...

FrankKane · ‎05-23-2022

Modern webcams, such as the Logitech Brio, can also produce high quality video. Often the lighting matters more than the camera these days, as good cameras are available in lots of forms. "Real" cameras offer more creative choices with different lenses, but you can produce good video with a phone or webcam too. Whatever you use for video, don't neglect your audio quality. That's even more important.

FrankKane · ‎05-21-2022

Oh, you're thinking of publishing your course before it's done? Don't do that. Don't publish it until you have a course that can stand on its own. It's not a question of private vs. public status, just don't publish it at all until it is complete. If students pay money to enroll in your course and they only receive something that is unfinished, you'll just get bad reviews and refunds. It's not like Kickstarter here... students buying courses on Udemy generally expect immediate access to a finished product.

FrankKane · ‎05-12-2022

🎶 ...if I could find a way... I would have bought a boom arm to make it easy to keep my mic at the proper distance and angle from my head. In my first course, I used the desktop stand my mic came with (a Blue Yeti at the time, which is just what I had lying around). That resulted in it being too far and angled in such a way that it picked up a lot of room noise and echo. A boom arm is an inexpensive way to fix that.

FrankKane · ‎05-05-2022

What's right about Udemy is the people behind it. I've met quite a few "Udemates" over the years at every level of the organization, and not one has been a jerk. They're all good people who genuinely want the best outcomes for instructors, learners, and Udemy as a company. Udemy's mission of spreading knowledge around the world at accessible prices attracts altruistic people. I hope they can retain that culture as they expand; so far it seems to be the case. Those people listen to Udemy's customers, including us, and are open to feedback. It's in stark contrast to many of their competitors.

FrankKane · ‎05-04-2022

Ok, the encyclopedias are for show... but I'm making good progress on everything else! Pandemic book hoard.

FrankKane · ‎05-04-2022

I'll chime in with the lowest-tech setup yet 🙂 Today I had to film some "talking head" segments. I really struggle with getting green-screen right, so I've taken to just filming in front of a bookcase with a nice short lens. You can see here my old DSLR camera with a Parrot teleprompter attached to it, my Rode shotgun mic above where I'll be standing, one extra light to fill in the side that's not illuminated by a window.. and my stand-in! That stick with a hat on it is what I use to dial in the lighting and focus before I step into its place, and start yammering. I don't bother moving the chair because it's out of frame. The mic is attached to a digital audio recorder, and I then have to marry the audio with the video from the camera in editing. Most of my recording though is just voice-over on slides or screen captures, and for that it's just a Shure SM7B on a boom arm hooked to my computer via a Blue Icicle. Here's what the camera sees... it's a wider field than I need, so I can zoom & pan in the final edited video to make things more interesting, or to put me off to the side while some graphic is beside me. Also you can count on some strategic cropping to hide my beer belly (I don't even drink much beer, yeesh!)

FrankKane · ‎05-03-2022

It's a subscription service Udemy sells to businesses to give their employees access to a curated set of courses. If your course gets included it can lead to some extra cash, but generally that would only happen if you are teaching business related topics for which not enough good courses exist already.

FrankKane · ‎05-03-2022

I'd go with paid and free coupons, and for a one-hour course you should set the list price to the lowest tier I think. You'll find that Udemy does not surface free courses in search much at all; they are hard to discover. They also come with many restrictions on ways to interact with your students; with a free course, there is no Q&A and no promotional announcements. So there's not much opportunity to leverage Udemy's audience and marketing tools with a free course. With a paid course, you can still push traffic to it yourself with free coupons, and simultaneously benefit from any organic traffic Udemy might generate for you as well. This doesn't apply to you, but another consideration for instructors teaching business-related topics is that free courses are not eligible for inclusion in Udemy Business. Free courses really are best avoided these days.

FrankKane · ‎05-02-2022

Best practices for green screen filming (without a dedicated studio) are always welcome! I still struggle with even lighting on the screen and avoiding color bleed. It's so hard to get right, I just try to film against real physical backgrounds instead whenever possible. But I'd love to learn how to do it better.

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Sundog Education by Frank Kane

FrankKane •
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Founder, Sundog Education. Machine Learning Pro

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Sundog Education by Frank Kane

FrankKane • Community Champion

Founder, Sundog Education. Machine Learning Pro

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FrankKane •
Community Champion