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A comment on Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse. Parent comment

Re:Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publis... by NikolaNovak on Thursday February 20, 2020 @08:48AM (#22375007)
I've bought ~20 courses on Udemy; variety of software engineering; music lessons; language lessons; and random; not a single one had reasonable "information density" - i.e., I'm sure if I watched all 20 hours I'd pick up some useful information, but probably only an hour's worth.

I've since moved to mostly either using free Youtube videos and just picking specific knowledge I need, or paying much more for targeted professional courses.

Mostly though, I've gone back to my preferred method of learning - books - where I can control the speed and repetition as it suits the moment :-/

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Re:Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publis... by michaelbuckbee on Thursday February 20, 2020 @10:12AM (#22375577)
I'm friends with a top course creator on Udemy and the info density issue is caused by the buying habits of users.

- Most buy based on sales (at a crazy discount), ASP is ~$10 off his ostensibly several hundred dollar course

- Most 95%+ never even _open_ the course

- Of the remainder it's about .25% that "finish" the course in any meaningful way

- Most people buying the courses are aspirational about it ("Yeah I should know about that") and aren't making a detailed analysis of the materials

- Most people buy on _length_ - that they'll look at two courses on the same topic and take the one that is longer and/or has more modules or chapters

- Udemy has a new program for enterprises that pays based on minutes/month of content consumed.

Should be noted this is a highly technical course aimed at developers/devops (situation might be different for guitar lessons).

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Re:Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publis... by ghaff on Thursday February 20, 2020 @10:51AM (#22375889)
>Udemy has a new program for enterprises that pays based on minutes/month of content consumed.

LinkedIn has something similar with what used to be Lynda. (Not sure what the payment scheme looks like.) I imagine this sort of thing is fairly common. Corporations have a relatively modest set of online courses they create (or have created) on topics specifically relevant to their products/market and they want to fill out their training catalog with a lot of general and relatively low cost material.

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Re:Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publis... by rumanator on Friday February 21, 2020 @05:39PM (#22387681)
> Of the remainder it's about .25% that "finish" the course in any meaningful way

Some users don't pay for courses to "finish" them, but to check key lessons and refer to them when needed. Personally I've paid for a few MOOCs just to routinely watch/listen some parts, skip a bunch of lessons, and listen others passively.

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Re:Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publis... by sauwan on Thursday February 20, 2020 @09:56AM (#22375444)
As a non-software person trying to learn to code, I'll say that Fred Baptiste's python courses are an excellent blend between practical and theoretical with very high information density.

There are a few other good courses out there, but it's hard to know whether the teachers are that good. The review system is as broken and manipulated as any.

Ultimately, I'd love it if someone could come up with a third-party tool (kind of like review meta) that gave customized ratings and recommendations based on how similar other reviewers reviews were to mine. Not sure how possible that would be, but a cross platform product would be amazing.

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Re:Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publis... by heyozapzap on Thursday February 20, 2020 @10:56AM (#22375927)
Course creators are incentivized to add quantity not quality of content. 'Become a web developer from scratch' is ~40 hours of mostly shite content and it has sold tens of thousands on Udemy.

Most people don't take their courses so content doesn't really matter.

Udemy is a flash sale coupon course platform. Some people do actually learning on it but not very many.

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