@ChrystieV I completely understand your intent and I completely support it. This is great that you guys are thinking about it. Here are some thoughts on how I see it. If I take your example of the programming instructor literally, then I'd say this. For technical problems, nobody is going to sit here and answer those questions. Community champions or other people who volunteer their time are not going to replace looking at Documentation and doing the work of Technical Support. If I read your example more figuratively, then the effect may actually be the opposite of what you'd expect. The great thing about this community as it is, is we all teach in different categories and we don't directly compete with each other. If you put programming instructors in one group, business instructors in another, and management in yet another, why would they sit there and help their direct competitors? Here is another observation of mine from using the Udemy community since 2018. Most of the posts here are not about asking for technical help. The majority of what I see is a pure rant, and that's normal. We get peanuts per enrollment, and occasionally get emotionally abused by unfair reviews. We are all by ourselves and nobody around us even understands what exactly we do. So this community is a perfect place to come on a bad day and get some emotional support. (I'm not saying it's all bad, otherwise, we wouldn't be here, but there is this aspect) Another very popular category of posts I noticed is frustration with Udemy: Support, Policy or stuff just breaking, payments being late, etc. For that, talking to an empathetic human being like you, Bella, and other community moderators is a real-life savior. Seriously! Other than that, I don't see any pattern in the community and that's why I don't have any ideas for new groups. If anything, instead of thinking of new groups I would suggest upgrading your roles from "community moderators" to Udemy Spokesperson or something like that. Or dedicating a person on your team to that specifically. The biggest problem I see is the information between instructors and Udemy has no clear channel. Example: I proposed to add analytics for coding exercises ages ago as part of a different group. I've been shooting in every direction trying to figure out what team has it on the roadmap if at all, and when will it be delivered (if at all). Eventually, by accident, I had the chance to ask that during the last AMA, and I was lucky to get the answer, because the person in that AMA (Jacob, I think?) was just the right person, at the right time to know this information. This happens all the time. Having a person with a clear role of digging information out of the internal Udemy teams, product roadmaps, and all the bureaucracy and getting it to us as well as taking our information and bringing it to the right people at Udemy will have the biggest value for instructors. Actually, you've been sort of unofficially doing it already. But you've also indicated at different points that technically it's not your role and you don't have the capacity for that. Well, I think is what we really need. (This was very long, but I hope it helps.)
... View more
•
Mentor
