Udemy

Udemy Instructors,   We’re thrilled to share that Udemy announced some exciting news today - $50 million in Series F funding with a valuation of $3.25 billion. This investment reinforces continued confidence in our work together and will enable us to further scale our business around the globe.   We’re grateful to each of you for sharing your knowledge and making a real difference in people’s lives. 2020 has presented a myriad of challenges for each individual across the globe. You’ve helped millions of people survive and even thrive amidst continued uncertainty.    Thank you again for choosing to teach on Udemy. This is only the beginning - we’re excited for our continued partnership and to improve even more lives through learning. ... View more

  Hello Instructors! Each month, we like to recognize you for all of your contributions to the Udemy Instructor Community. Whether you are just getting started on your Udemy journey, or you’ve published your 10th course - all of you help make this community a better place for your fellow instructors.   Top Community Contributors A special thank you to our top community contributors in the month of October! 👍   @FrankKane           @LawrenceMMiller          @Anonymous    Community Posts Highlights A special shout-out and congrats to @FrankKane on reaching a $2 million milestone last month! 🎉 You can read his Ask-Me-Anything in the thread here.   Also in October, we celebrated World Teachers' Day! We asked Udemy students around the world what they appreciate most about their instructors. Check out the video below.     Udemy Announcements In case you missed it, we made several announcements on improvements and updates on the Udemy platform last month. Fall 2020 pricing and marketing updates New Refund System & Policy Updates 2020 Udemy platform improvements Taxonomy update: changes to category & subcategory classifications About the November 4 updates to the Promotions Policy Tips to help you prepare your course for our upcoming Black Friday sale ... View more

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner. Next month, hundreds of thousands of students will be shopping for courses. To set you up for success, we have some tips to make your content even more compelling.   Refresh your course Students can see the last time a course was updated or even filter search results by newest to oldest. Adding fresh, relevant information can put your content at an advantage. It also helps reassure students that what they’ll be learning is as up-to-date as possible.   Add helpful extras Everyone loves a good deal  — especially for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Adding practice activities is a great way to increase the value of your course. If you haven’t already, try including one or more of the following:    Quizzes Practice tests Assignments Coding exercises Downloadable resources   How are you preparing your course for the big event? Let us know in the comments! ... View more

Earlier today, you should have received an email about a few updates to the Promotions Policy that will take effect November 4, 2020. While we've pre-announced several of these changes, we wanted to be sure you have a chance to read more about them and ask any questions you have.   Here's a summary: As announced in April 2020, the Percentage Promotions program will sunset. If you're already opted into Fixed-Price Promotions, this won't affect you. Indonesia will join country markets like Brazil, Australia, and South Africa in having no pre-set minimum price for courses in Udemy Deals. The monthly calculation for Udemy for Business student consumption will update to include time spent on quizzes and coding exercises. The Promotions Policy will update to include the official terms for the Udemy Subscription Program ("Udemy Pro"). You can read more about these changes in the Teaching Center. As always, we welcome your questions and feedback here in the Community.   Update: as of November 4, 2020, these changes are now live. Feel free to continue to ask questions here in the Community. ... View more

As Udemy becomes home to more and more courses and students, the way we organize all your content is increasingly important. We periodically make updates to the site's "taxonomy": the way categories, subcategories, and topics are organized. These updates are made based on industry standards, trends in content creation and student behavior, and feedback from both students and instructors.   Next week, we'll be making a batch of changes to our taxonomy. This includes the introduction of new categories like "No-Code Development" and "Esoteric Practices," removal of some redundant subcategories like "Home Business," and relabeling of some categories and subcategories to improve clarity.    We've summarized the changes and the reasons behind them in the Teaching Center. If your courses have been reclassified as part of these changes (or at any point), you'll get an email summarizing any changes.    Having the right taxonomy for your courses helps students find the content they want more quickly, and helps us make strong recommendations that keep them coming back for more.    If you have general questions about these changes, please feel free to ask them here. You can always request a change to your category, subcategory, or primary topics by writing to instructorsupport@udemy.com. ... View more

Despite all the challenges of this year, incredible instructors like you came together to help new students everywhere succeed through online learning. Our team has been hard at work to ensure we support the entire community and keep the Udemy platform up and running during record-setting traffic and enrollment spikes.    To keep you informed, we wanted to take a moment to review some of the new features, tools, and products developed in 2020.   Student learning experience A flexible, practical experience is essential to helping students commit to and achieve their learning goals. This year, we introduced:    Learning reminders to increase motivation and productivity. Notes for more effective and immersive learning. Dark mode to support early birds and night owls by reducing eye strain. Coding exercises to give data science and development students hands-on practice in nine new languages, libraries, and frameworks.   Most notably, we launched the Free Resource Center to provide a selection of highly rated, free courses to help people anywhere in the world navigate the new challenges they’re facing.   Pricing, payments, and partnerships As Udemy continues to grow globally, we've enhanced the financial systems that underpin your business. To support you in building content and your audience, we've improved our approach on pricing, taxes, refunds, and more.   Here are some of our key revenue initiatives this year:   Differentiated free course experience – Free content helps students discover new topics, instructors, and explore online learning. However, our new differentiated experience helps to distinguish the added value of a longer, interactive paid course. Price tests and enhancements – We’ve rolled out a differentiated pricing model for all global markets and have begun tests to optimize list prices. Refund system revamp – To set student expectations better, identify abusive behavior, and protect you and your content, we’ve built a new refund platform and implemented automatic refund thresholds. Tax withholding – We’ve partnered with Comply Exchange to collect tax forms directly on Udemy and apply appropriate tax withholding in order to help instructors stay compliant with U.S. tax laws. Student sales tax – To maintain global tax compliance across 50+ countries, we’ve updated our tax collection practices, including sales, GST, VAT, and more.   Staying up and running Our site reliability team is more dedicated than ever to ensuring Udemy remains the go-to place to learn from anywhere, in any place in the world. When we began experiencing record-breaking traffic and enrollments, our daily support requests from students and instructors more than doubled. Thank you for your patience as we worked to keep the platform steady and reliable.   While we’re incredibly proud of all of the enhancements we’ve made in 2020, we’re not done yet. With another quarter left in the year, we’ll be running experiments on taxonomy, search, piracy, and more. Stay tuned for additional updates as we continue to build a better experience for you and your students. ... View more

In late July, we announced that we’d be releasing a series of experiments and updates to our existing refund system.    Refunds are an important part of Udemy. They provide students with the ability to explore learning online, the Udemy platform, and new instructors - all risk free. Based on our user research data, Udemy’s refund policy has a noticeable impact on a student’s confidence and willingness to buy a course. This is true for students new to Udemy and existing students unsure whether a new instructor or course is the right fit for their learning goal. While our data shows that the vast majority of students on Udemy never request a refund, we know from our user research studies that the refund policy increases confidence in students’ purchases.    However, we recognize that there is a small subset of students who abuse the refund system. That is why over the last two months, we built a new refund platform that allows us to better set student expectations and identify refund abuse.    We’re excited to announce that improvements to the refund system are now live in three main areas:  The platform Refund policies Credits  Our goal with these improvements is to provide a better experience for revenue-driving students, while protecting your course content — and your revenue — from bad actors.   Learn more about the updates to the refund system below and in our detailed FAQ here.   The Platform Over the last few months, we have rebuilt the refund platform from the ground up. The new platform will allow us to track and process refunds more efficiently for students. Additionally, it gives Udemy the ability to better monitor and enforce existing refund policies, and implement new ones. We’ll now be able to better flag and catch refund abuse, while providing risk-free exploration for students.    Refund Policies In addition to the backend improvements, we have built new refund-abuse rules directly into the platform and will deny refund requests instantly if a student breaks our refund policy. The denials consider our existing policy and new abuse thresholds.    These thresholds are based on:  Account refund rates  Course consumption  Multiple refund requests for the same course   By building the policies directly into the new system, we’ll be able to better identify and deny bad actors before they request a refund. See an example of our new system in action below.   Credits We’re excited to announce that we now have a new alternative mode of refunds for students — credits. Udemy credits are available to students that request a refund. Unlike cash refunds, credits are instantly available in student accounts, encouraging them to explore immediately and find the right course to fit their learning needs.   While these updates cover our refund system revamp, the work on refunds will not stop there. We will continue to monitor refund trends, reasons, and behavior to identify opportunities for additional improvements.  ... View more