Udemy

Well, @ThomasMitchell is strictly correct.  However at the same time, if you have a course, then in the final Bonus Lecture, and only in the final Bonus Lecture, you can do as much promotion as you wish, including links to ebooks of your course, or anything else you wish: https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229232847-Bonus-Lecture-Rules-and-Guidelines   Having said that, I have not had many sales of my own course as an ebook from this Bonus Lecture, so you should probably expect any revenue from it to be much less than the revenue / enrollments to your course itself.  In other words, if we round down the results, Thomas is correct again 😉   Cheers, William ... View more

Hi @ChrystieV  , one change to my comment.  I see now that I have been seeing posts to the entire "community".  When I click on the "Published Instructor Club", then I only see posts from published instructors.  My finger mistake.  ... View more

Hi, a thought for our Udemy community reps @RyanJaress , @MarinaT  , @Bella    This group is described by Udemy as "Published Instructor Club is an exclusive space for published Udemy instructors to discuss topics, such as marketing and course management." (Emphasis added)   My understanding was that the StudioU group was for help in publishing a course.  Once one had a course published, then one could join this group.  However, the last few weeks, this group has been flooded with very generic posts like "How do I publish a course".    As a result I think it is fair to say the group has become not useful to published instructors any longer.  I check in every once in awhile, see the flooding of very basic questions, and then check out, and I imagine most published instructors are now doing the same thing.   Perhaps this group could return to published instructors only?   Hope this suggestions is helpful.   William ... View more

Hear hear.   "Be authentic, who you really are.  It might not work.  But for sure, nothing else will." ... View more

Hi, I also had an unexpected conflict and missed this, hopefully the recording will be posted? Thanks much, Bill ... View more

Welcome @MarinaT !  Udemy is a great help to the world. Cheers, Bill ... View more

This takes me back.  For those that don't know, TeX is a typesetting program written by the greatest ever computer scientist, Donald Knuth, amazingly still alive:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth   He thought TeX would take about six months to write.  It took him ten years.  The intricacies of combining different shapes of letters in the best way is many, many, many times more complex that most people realize.    Most people use LaTeX as the easiest macro language to implement TeX.   Donald intended TeX to produce "beautiful output".  I think he achieved his goal.  Here is a formula from my PhD thesis from 1992 that conveys some of the effect. I'm embarrassed to say I no longer have the slightest idea what I meant by that formula!   Bill ... View more

Thanks, this is very helpful.  I tried some auto-generated music several years ago, but got some complaints.    And in an 8.5 hour course, using some 2 minute royalty free clip on continuous loop does not sound like the best approach.   Do you have suggestions on where to get longer clips of, as you say, soft piano jazz elevator music?   Auto generated would be best.  Royalty free would be better, but I'd be willing to pay a moderate amount if I could get something that work for my whole course.   Thanks so much, Bill   ... View more

Three questions:   1.  Would it be possible to develop A/B testing for the course landing page so we can optimize conversion percentage.  Right now, we update various elements of that page such as title, subtitle, or just the description, and have no idea whether or not we have improved or hurt conversion.  We can check the 7 day conversion percentages the following few days, but those go up and down so much based on many factors, so are not reliable indication of whether or not changes improved things.  If we could have a "primary" and "alternate" landing page, shown 50% of the time each to visitors, with conversion percentages available for each, the instructors themselves could help greatly increase conversion for their own courses, increasing conversion across the entire Udemy platform.   2. Reports on information such as conversion percentage, minutes consumed, and others are often delayed by a day, or only updated once a day.  Real-time is always better, reducing friction, and enabling faster decision making and optimizations.  Would it be possible to get all reporting information updated real time?   3. Can you make available what has become known in the instructor community as the "Lawrence Miller Reports" @LawrenceMMiller available as part of the Udemy reporting system?  https://community.udemy.com/t5/Community-News/Webinar-Replay-Data-amp-Analytics-with-Larry-Miller/bc-p/109710#M2374 That is, as shown by Lawrence during his Udemy webinar, the same reports and graphs builtin to Udemy reporting?  And of course, critically important, available for selectable date ranges, the way most platforms do, including for "all time". ... View more

Hi @KatieBent , just a reminder, can you remind us when UB amounts are typically posted?  I thought it was supposed to be on the fifth business day of the month, but could be wrong.  I know they were delayed a few times in recent months beyond the "expected" day, so have lost track of the expected day.  Is it the fifth business day of the month?  (And if so, since that was last Friday, is there another issue with posting UB revenue?)   Thanks so much for your efforts corralling these many instructor kittens.   Cheers, Bill ... View more

Thanks for all your efforts @KatieBent !  We know you did not cause this, and you certainly worked hard to provide updates.  Hope you get some good sleep now!   When you can, could you remind me on how the UB updates are supposed to work?  I thought they were supposed to be updated on the 5th business day of the month, but might have misremembered that.  I just know that they have been delayed several times recently, so am confused on when they are supposed to be available, and am wondering if you can give us any info on the expected provision time if I have the 5th day expectation wrong. ... View more

Hi @KatieBent , can I also ask what the situation is on providing UB amounts for Sept?  Is it supposed to be on the fifth business day of the month, and if so was that yesterday?  I ask because I don't see that updated yet, so wonder if there is any issue with that?   I know it is not as important as a payment, but knowing the UB amount is an important data point for me at least.  ... View more

H @Bella , couple questions. 1.  Will a new payment category be added for the PS, so that a different line is shown in the revenue report, similar to how UB is broken out separately?   2.  A couple of my courses are in UB, and I can see that note on the course page, as follows: However, I do not see a subscription option for the PS for this course.  Am I just missing something, or is my course not in PS, even though it is in UB? Thanks, Bill ... View more

Please excuse the silly question, but I have not found an explanation of the Personal Subscription, or, very possibly, have forgotten where it is.   1.  That is, are only certain instructors included, and if so how are they selected?   2.  What percentage of PS revenue goes to instructors?  And is it by percentage of time students spend on our courses, like UB?   3.  Finally, what if a student consumed zero minutes in a month.  Does their revenue still go into the pot to be distributed to instructors? ... View more

 @ElianaC and @Abbie - for both the personal subscription and UFB, if a student does not watch any courses in a given month, I assume their payment still goes into the overall pot to be split among the instructors based on minutes watched by everyone else?  Or does their payment for that month go 100% to Udemy? ... View more

Thanks so much @Lili .  It is really nice to see Udemy respond to Instructor feedback.   Thanks again. ... View more

Thanks @Lili , I really appreciate your efforts and clarifications on this. All my best, Bill ... View more

Hi @Abbie , will really need your help on this.    I sent an email to Instructor support, and they replied within minutes with a copy and past message that "Currently, this feature is not currently being built by our Product team. We do share all the suggestions we receive with our Product team, for consideration in future site improvements."   In other words, they did not understand my email.    Honestly, please read just the first page for a Google search on "Project and product management".  Please, just take a look.  Every single link is about the difference between these two completely different categories.    No business combines or mistakes these two roles.  Combining them in the same topic will be very confusing to all your students.    UFB students in particular will roll their eyes.  Project managers will say "They don't understand we are not product managers?"  And Product Managers will say "No respect, don't understand we are a completely separate and important discipline.".   ... View more

Hi, there is a change of “Project Management” subcategory within Business to “Product & Project Management”.  While the words "Product" and "Project" sounds alike, even sharing the first three letters, these two topics are completely, completely different, and are widely understood as different across the industry.  Mixing these into one topic is not a good student experience.   Project Management is about management of scope, schedule, budget, risk, and people.  It has a long history as a certification through the Project Management Institute.   Product Management on the other hand is a very important discipline about deciding what features should go into a product, and optimizing the evolution of that product.    There is no business organization where Project Managers and Product Managers are confused as the same person.  They are very, very different.   If you do a simple Google search for "product and project management", you will find many, many links that explain that these are very different.   This would be a big step backwards.  Here is the key question: how can we ensure Udemy takes a look at this information, and sincerely reconsiders it?  Honestly, just a few minutes of research on the above links will show that Udemy students looking for information on one of these categories will not want their search or topic results confused with the other.   ... View more