For those wondering, the translation of this Hindi phrase is: "People want you to think, but they never want you to talk to them" From a societal standpoint, it's certainly true that there's no shortage of people who want to dictate their views to you while remaining closed-minded about your own views. This is a forum about making online courses however. So let's try to work this into the context of creating courses. As an instructor, I'm kind of guilty of this one-way communication - because I have hundreds of thousands of students and I simply can't talk to all of them. That's the point of Udemy; it allows us to scale up the distribution of our knowledge through video courses. If students were as closed-minded as this quote suggests, then nobody would buy courses! But thankfully, they do. There are still plenty of curious people in the world, even if they're not the loudest. But let's get back to the spirit of this quote: everyone wants to dictate their views to you without listening to your own. If you're teaching objective truths, like science and technology, I don't see the problem. But I can see how the one-way nature of online courses could be an issue when more subjective or controversial topics are being taught. There is the potential for someone posing as an expert spreading misinformation through this form of media. Udemy's community ratings should suppress most of that stuff naturally. Well now you've got me curious as to whether spreading misinformation is a real problem on Udemy. I searched for "Coronavirus" as there is no shortage of crazy conspiracy theories and misinformation out there on the Internet as a whole. I was shocked at how many courses came up; seems a lot of people are trying to capitalize on the search traffic for that word. It's mostly tips for working from home effectively, staying in shape at home, stuff like that. Helpful stuff. That's good. But, if I search explicitly for a known conspiracy theory ("Coronavirus 5G") one course did come up. I can't dig into its content without paying for it, but it appears it might be validating these claims and then going into some anti-vaxxer stuff. The system seems to be doing its job in suppressing this; the course has no reviews and only one student. But Udemy probably does need to be a bit more vigilant in enforcing and updating its restricted topics. "Content that is intentionally misleading or deceptive" is prohibited; does that go far enough? I think this instructor really believes what he's saying - does that make it OK? Does it cross the line into "harmful or otherwise inappropriate content" which is also prohibited? Interesting questions for interesting times. (If Udemy's policy team is reading this, it's possible that within the actual lecture videos he's debunking this stuff - it just doesn't look that way from the lecture titles.) Also, I shouldn't write posts before I've had my coffee. Wow that's more than I planned on writing.
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