Udemy is an online learning site that sells video courses on an array of topics. Its sweet spot is personal and professional development, with excellent management training, software tutorials, programming courses, and more. You can pay for Udemy courses one by one, with prices varying per course, or you can get access to a catalog of content with a business subscription. Regrettably, the prices are high, and you need a minimum of five people for a business account.
In addition to offering online courses, Udemy welcomes instructors who want to make courses and sell them on the platform. Compared with other sites that host learning content, Udemy has amazing resources for teachers, including a list of in-demand topics that it updates regularly.
While Udemy offers a strong platform for self-paced, non-degree learning, it costs more than other sites and doesn’t allow individuals to sign up for subscriptions. Other sites do, making them much more compelling for continued learning and skills development.
Udemy offers a few classes you can try for free, but otherwise you have to pay to learn. The prices are all over the map, often with a high list price that may or may not be steeply discounted as a promotional offer. There are two ways you can get access.
First, you can pay for individual classes as you want them. On the one hand, anyone who makes and sells a course on Udemy can offer it directly to their audience without the learner having to pay for a monthly subscription. The website Teachable works the same way. On the other hand, learners miss out on having a subscription to a wide catalog of content that they might explore and feel inspired to learn something new or dive deeper into a subject of interest. Udemy has been testing out a personal subscription plan, but as of this writing it isn’t available to all members, only a select few. You won’t see it listed on Udemy’s site publicly, but you may see an offer to upgrade to a subscription if you create an account and log in.
The second way to access courses is with a Udemy business account. Business plans are designed for teams and organizations that want their staff to have training and development opportunities at their fingertips, or because the organization wants to administer selected training courses to specific people. Everyone in a business account gets access to more than 14,000 courses they can explore and watch at will. The content leans heavily toward professional and technical skills development, as well as personal wellbeing.
Business plans come in two tiers, Team and Enterprise. The Team subscription costs $360 per person per year and is for teams of five to 20 people. You can get a 14-day free trial of this plan, though you must provide contact information and other details about your business first. Nonprofit organizations can apply for reduced pricing. Enterprise accounts use custom pricing based on the size and needs of the organization. The Enterprise account gives managers or an administrator the ability to assign courses to specific people in the organization, track who completes what, and otherwise manage the account.
The cost of online learning is all over the map. Like Udemy, many services charge a per-course fee, though most sell a subscription that lets you watch and complete all the courses.
Coursera, an Editors’ Choice winner, has a mix of free and paid courses, including those that can result in a degree or professional certificate, and they cover an incredible breadth of subjects. Coursera Business accounts ($399 per person per year) cost a little more than Udemy Business. Another Editors’ Choice pick, MasterClass, hosts hours-long, in-depth classes with masters in their fields and sells access to its entire catalog for $180 per year.
LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) gives you a month for free to try out the service. After that, it costs $29.99 per month or $239.88 per year. LinkedIn Learning’s content ranges from soft business skills, like management, to more technical ones.
Wondrium (formerly The Great Courses Plus) starts at 18 euros per month and its content is along the lines of what you’d expect from an educational television show. Khan Academy is free, and it’s almost exclusively focused on academics. It’s a nonprofit organization, and you can make a donation to the site if you want to support it monetarily.
Skillshare has a free tier of service with limited content, as well as an all-access Premium membership for $8.03 per month or $31 per year. Skillshare is quite different from all the services mentioned so far because it focuses on subjects in the arts and creative fields. It has classes to learn sewing, memoir writing, building an Etsy store, and things of that nature. Skillshare is an Editors’ Choice winner, but what it offers is quite different from Udemy so it doesn’t compare as well as some of the other learning sites mentioned so far.
Udemy has a range of content. When you explore the content broadly, there are 13 categories: development, business, finance and accounting, IT and software, office productivity, personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography and video, health and fitness, music, and teaching and academics. Each category is further divided into subcategories.
In the first round of testing, Udemy gave me access to six courses, most of which covered professional development topics, such as embracing a culture of feedback, public speaking, and uncovering unconscious bias. I asked for at least one course on software skills, too, and got a beginner Adobe Photoshop class. For follow-up testing and review, I looked at some free courses and signed up through a business subscription for classes related to management and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Professional skills—of both the hard and soft variety—aren’t the only topics covered, although they are the crux of the Team and Enterprise memberships. If you come to Udemy looking to learn something else, you can probably find it. That said, it’s more likely that you would discover the training elsewhere, such as on the instructor’s own website or through an instructor’s social media accounts and get linked to Udemy from there.
What else can you learn? There are courses on cinematography, meditation, macroeconomics, woodworking, sourdough bread making, how to publish a children’s picture book, and much more. Dive into the depths of Udemy, and you can find a class on CPR for pets ($19.99), one on becoming a gold prospector ($24.99), and even psychic development for beginners ($159.99).
The professional development and software courses are strikingly similar those on LinkedIn Learning in overall style. The Udemy instructors were professional and presented material clearly. From the learner’s perspective, you’re mostly watching a talking head and occasionally reading bullet points or summaries that appear on screen. That’s similar to what you get on LinkedIn, except that on Udemy, the instructors had a much more relaxed style. The LinkedIn Learning speakers all look like they got one take to read straight off a prompter. The content is spot-on, but LinkedIn ends up with presenters who are either too stiff or sound like they’re on stage at a motivational speaking event. That style doesn’t work for video.
Software classes are what you would expect from any good tutorial, showing the program most of the time, zooming in close to provide more detail when needed, and when they’re very good, taking a moment at the start to let you see the instructor’s face before they become a voice over.
You can find weak content and self-serving instructors if you dig. Udemy isn’t immune to poor teaching or wacky topics. One class purports to teach the healing power of crystal therapy, but it is instead one long infomercial for the instructor’s jewelry business. The overwhelming majority of courses, however, are of good quality or better. Student ratings and reviews sometimes help you decide whether a class will be any good, although even the worst courses seem to get three stars or better.
In the business account, I did not find some of the more far-fetched skills I personally would not trust learning via videos, like pet CPR or how to fly a helicopter, much less anything teaching me to becoming a psychic. I did find one on emergency situation training that included human adult and child CPR, however.
Every learner, whether you buy classes singly or have a business account, must create a Udemy account. As you buy or enroll in courses, they get saved to a page called My Learning. Here, you can see not only all your courses, but also the progress you’ve made with them. In your account, you can also save courses to a list (individual account) or Learning Path (business account) if you aren’t sure you’re ready to sign up for them.
When you explore courses, you can read a detailed description, including an info box with the duration of the course, number of assets the instructor gives you, whether the course includes a certificate upon completion, and so forth. Below the description are thumbnail images and short descriptions of similar classes—”Students also bought…” It’s just like what you see on an online retail site.
The meat and potatoes of every course is videos. They can be lecture style or tutorials. Whatever the case, videos typically last no more than about 10 minutes each, and they’re grouped into sections. A course could be three hours long, but no video will be more than 10 minutes.
This format helps instructors make sure their courses have a clear structure. Instructors must break their content into specific, digestible pieces. The result is that students can see the overall scope of the course ahead of time. It also makes it easy for students to pause and take a break from their course when they need to, seeing as a break is never more than nine or ten minutes away. Having short videos also lets learners easily repeat something they didn’t understand or want to refresh. It’s useful if you have some experience with the subject matter already because you can skip any videos that cover what you already know.
Udemy’s video player gives you speed controls, closed captioning, volume controls, resolution options, and a quick button to rewind or fast forward five seconds at a time. Some of the videos have not only closed captioning for the native languages, but also subtitles in other languages. You can also turn on a complete transcript and have it auto-scroll while you watch or listen.
When a lesson includes additional resources, such as worksheets, you can download them from a sidebar on the right. Usually, instructors refer to these materials and discuss them in the course.
Below the video player are a few tabs where students can interact. There’s an Overview, which is very similar to the detailed description of the course you see before you sign up. Q&A is a place for learners to ask questions. People can up-vote questions if they want to give them more prominence. Notes is a place for you to take notes, which you can tie to a specific point in any one of the videos. Finally, an Announcements section allows the instructor to share new information, such as a new related course or a live, interactive event for students.
The amount of community interaction varies by course. Some instructors give an assignment to post in the Q&A, although it’s always optional. Some instructors get multiple questions per day. The site supports the ability to upload images with questions, so it’s possible for students to share their work visually when asked.
Skillshare has similar functionality. Some of its classes have rich student interaction. For example, in some interior design classes, students showed before and after pictures of their redesigned spaces or uploaded working ideas others could critique.
Anyone can become an instructor on Udemy. The same is true for Skillshare and Teachable.
In getting started as an instructor, Udemy provides excellent tools and insight to help you make a good course. It offers not only tips and instruction, but also data regarding what kinds of courses learners are looking for based on keyword and topic searches. The site also tells you whether the number of courses currently offered is in line with the demand, plus the average and top-earning monthly incomes in this topic area.
If you’re thinking of making a course on Udemy, be sure to take advantage of this insight before you design your course. Udemy also makes available a list of topics that are in demand for the current quarter. These resources are valuable.
How much money instructors earn from Udemy depends on how many people bought or watched their courses, plus how the learner found the course. The math isn’t complex, but multiple factors are involved.
In brief, an instructor earns a larger percentage of revenue (97%) if a learner comes to the Udemy course through an instructor’s referral link or uses their coupon code. If the learner comes to the course any other way, the instructor only gets 37% of the revenue. Note, too, that Udemy often slashes the prices of courses to entice people to sign up, so the starting amount of revenue isn’t always the price the instructor sets for their course. Moreover, learners on mobile sites knock down the starting revenue as well because 30% off the top goes to Apple or Google.
Finally, if your course is included in the business subscription offerings, then the calculation is a little different. You get paid based on how many minutes of your courses the subscriber watched, and that number becomes a percent of the total number of minutes watched. You earn that percent from a pool Udemy sets aside, which is 25 percent of all its business subscription revenue for the month.
Udemy has ample content, and most of it is good. The fact that there are only two options to access that content, pay per class or get an expensive Business account with a minimum of five members, severely limits the service’s overall appeal, however. It would be a much better service if it offered a subscription level for individuals.
For instructors, Udemy has wonderful resources. That said, we have not closely compared Udemy’s platform from the instructor perspective with other platforms where teachers host their lessons.
If you’re interested in taking courses for self-improvement, career advancement, curiosity, or simply because you have a love of learning, we think you can do better than Udemy. Three Editors’ Choice winners—MasterClass, Khan Academy, and Coursera—offer better value and on average more interesting and compelling classes. Which service is best depends on what you want to learn. MasterClass is best for feeling inspired and learning deep insights into a subject from a true expert. Khan Academy is best for academic subjects, like trigonometry and organic chemistry. Finally, Coursera has a wide range of content, a lot of it for free, for everything you can’t find elsewhere.
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