5 Random Newbie Questions - I would REALLY appreciate the answers.

[CoreyGrayCoaching]

Hey Community,

I'm new here, close (about week or two away) to releasing several new courses for the first time. I have a few random questions that would love to know the answers to and hoping someone here in the community can answer them.  

1. Captions - I have not submitted a course for approval yet. Once I do, and opt for "Captions" does that mean that Udemy will auto generate a transcription and add the captions to my videos?  

2. Accessibility - is it recommended that the scripting is included as a resource for each lesson? If it is, do I just copy the transcription of the videos into PDF's? Are they considered "Articles".... Im just trying to make the course conform to best practices but confused a little bit in this area. Would appreciate an answer as opposed to a link to the knowledgebase if possible... I was going to go through the process of transcribing my lessons and creating PDF's and uploading as articles but wanted to be sure before doing so, also was worried about other people plagiarizing my content if I were to give the exact language away on a silver platter... Does that make sense? 

3. Release Strategy - Is it recommended to give away your first course (or future courses for that matter) for free as a strategy for gaining students and reviews? Im really curious about this and heard conflicting information about it. Also, one of my courses is 2.5 hours of video, I keep seeing reminders that it must be under 2 hours if its to be given away as free.. Do some people simply exclude a lesson or two to conform to this rule?

4. Strategy - If you are new to Udemy, and have multiple courses - should you release all at the same time, or is there a better strategy you recommend, like staggering them?

5. Profile - On the "Edit Profile" page, the "website URL" box is grayed out and will not let me insert my website.... Why is that? Any way to get around it.... ? Assuming its because I havent released a course yet... IDK... 

Many thanks!

Corey

[ElianaC]

Hi @CoreyGrayCoaching Welcome to the instructor's community! Happy to help!

1. The auto-generated subtitles will be created for the course after it receives 20 or more enrollments on the marketplace.

2. The transcripts are based on the course's auto-generated captions or captions the instructors have created and added themselves, so it might not be necessary for you to add them as articles, you could either add your captions and the transcripts will be generated. 

Regarding, your plagiarism question we use a proprietary player and attach a Udemy watermark to all videos, we know this does not always stop a motivated pirate. We offer free services to help our instructors fight piracy. The goal of our Piracy Detection Program is to proactively address and reduce instances of online piracy for courses on our platform. To do this, we work with an anti-piracy service, which helps fight piracy on third-party websites. For more information about Udemy’s Piracy Detection Program, we encourage you to check out our Piracy Detection Program FAQ.

3. Most instructors do not believe it is a good idea to give away your course for free. There is a discussion about having your first course as paid or free here that might be interesting to you. 

4. The answer depends on what you want to accomplish, if you have all the content material for all your courses, you can publish them all at once, but if you are creating content, you can start publishing the ones you have ready and then continue publishing the rest. 

5. The option to add your website will become available once you get your first course published.

[CoreyGrayCoaching]

Thank you so much, very helpful and much appreciated @ElianaC! 

A quick follow up to #2 - What do most instructors include as articles? Can you please give me an example? I was thinking articles are supporting docs, but not clear on what most include in their courses. 

Thanks again, you are awesome! 🙂  

[ElianaC]

Hi @CoreyGrayCoaching Happy New Year! Articles are embedded in the course itself usually, instructors add reading material and resources you can add downloadable material, and external hyperlinks to free websites related to the course topic. You can learn more here about adding resources and the type of format.