I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years.
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever.
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.
The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category.
Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate.
> If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard
Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.
> Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.
There is a difference between being dead and not actively maintained. If a popular FLOSS package isn't touched for many moons, do you think it just means it's done?
I wish the underlying platforms would also consider providing a "done" version now and again, instead of bundling bug/security fixes with new problems. You can rarely just write something and call it done on something like Android. Anything other than a simple crud/webview wrapper will usually need to use permissions of some sort to do useful things, and as soon as you start using anything like that, your code is probably obsolete in a day or two.
> If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.
That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.
Very few projects update dependencies that often, and only very big ones are found with security issues that often.
> lack integrations with new platforms
You don't need a new intration _every 2 days_, not to mention that many projects don't need such integrations at all. Moreover some popular and updated projects lack such integrations despite having lot of commits.
> lack support for new HW architectures
This is something that many projects get for free. But also, you don't get a new HW architecture every 2 days.
> lack newer privacy guarantees
What more privacy guarantees do I need from projects that don't communicate with external services or store data at all?
People who are earnestly engaging with their point have assumed “two days” was hyperbole so that they can instead respond to the greater idea, yet you have not: you’re stuck on an unserious detail like it’s the lynchpin of their claim.
I suspect that CVE inflation has poisoned the minds of many developers.
A db driver may have an issue with unsanitized user input when run against SQLite, but you only use it with oracle and sanitize input anyway, but that shows up as a 9.1 critical deployment blocker for corporate employees.
Unexploitable CVEs with inflated ratings make using any open source software a pain in the butt at BigCo.
Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating.
> Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating.
If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
Also, if the project is actively maintained then there is always a multitude of low-priority issues and features to address.
Being FLOSS also means anyone in the whole world is able to contribute anything. If no one bothers to do so, that is aligned with the fact the project is indeed dead.
> If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
Did I miss a new C++ version released <2 days ago perhaps?
If you somehow believe this kind of work is done in a couple of days, that's a good way to explain to the world how oblivious you are about the topic you are discussing.
> If you somehow believe this kind of work is done in a couple of days, that's a good way to explain to the world how oblivious you are about the topic you are discussing.
And, in turn, you appear to be oblivious to the point - the release cadence of this best-case scenario still means like a decade between updates to the project.
C++26 was released 4months ago; pointless to update it until compilers and deps are updated. So, best case is maybe you'll have complete bug-tested support in the supported compilers in 2030.
If we're looking at 2035-ish for the next release, we're still only looking at 2040 before you update.
You still have to take into account that updating might not even be necessary. It's not like C++ < C++26 suddenly doesn't work.
There's a python course in plursight that I loved, it's quite the deep dive into the language and I learned a lot.
One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much!
I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies.
> Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old.
Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast.
If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.
But are you teaching the basics of programming with 30 year old textbooks? Can you learn the principles of web dev by building like they did 30 years ago? Sure. But it will be a pain in the ass vs using something that is up to date.
> Does it though? I mean I'm still teaching thread-safety and recursion to my interns... a solid foundation is a solid foundation.
I think you are confusing interiorizing some fundamentals with things moving fast. There are languages and frameworks rolling out higher level support for features covering concurrency and parallelism. While you focus on thread-safety, a framework you already use can and often does roll out features that outright eliminate those concerns with idiomatic approaches that are far easier to maintain. Wouldn't you classify that as moving fast?
See you in ten years! We're a hop, skip and a jump from one click automated conversion from every legacy Java app to web and electron desktop compatible code and we can just retire Java entirely. in 2025, Java is not the most performant. It does not run in the most places. it is not the easiest to write or reason about. its advantage over anything else is momentum and it's losing that too.
React is just a formalizatio of a UI update pattern that exists in every app ever made except the ones that are bad.
Source: written a lot of java and nobody is currently paying enough to make it worth doing again.
Yes. The autodesk fusion course that I learned 3D printing design off of on Udemy had a bunch of instructions for UI elements that had moved in the application.
It wasn’t a big deal but I would have still appreciated it if the author inserted some new recorded segments or re-recorded some content to make up for it.
> Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast.
Some areas do, some areas not so much.
I have a colleague that's incredibly strong with databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant.
I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living. Once you get past the "cloud native" abstractions (and other BS) it's penguins all the way down, and I get to reuse most of my core Linux competencies I learned 10+ years ago (eg: I do tcpdump in prod, and it's quicker and more effective than many of the modern shiny tools).
> databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant
And there's lots of changes here, e.g. vector stores, all the different query engine improvements, PostgreSQL IO improvements, etc and they all may impact your job. Your optimal query back then might not be the same. Living off the old learnings is like taking a 50% discount on the max potential.
> I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living.
And these have had changes consistently too e.g. io-uring and gateway api. You can only be in legacy for so long.
JS frameworks and chasing AI fads, perhaps. But fundamentals? Engineering principles? How CPUs work? Linux, networking, x86? Stuff that is decades old still applies.
> but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?"
I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining.
My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described.
It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.
“why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago.
I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible.
When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
> “why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago.
you could've used docker for 12 years and never hit it if you used it on Linux, and followed sensible practices (mount the data dir from outside so it can be reattached to upgraded version of the container)
12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.
you hadn’t heard of RAID, readahead, write-back/write-through, stride or even just the concept of fragmentation?
Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.
The people who knew about those things back then know modern infrastructure today. I'm sure if you asked the average web dev 12 years ago what write-back io is they wouldn't have any idea.
Perhaps the only trend is more companies not hiring anyone who specialises in infrastructure and just leaving it as a side task for React devs to look at once every few months.
I knew about RAID and fragmentation, but I haven't had to work with it since I went from tech support to backend, it just never came up so it's easy to forget.
> “why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge only 12 years ago.
Yes and no. The world has also changed all these years. Why something is slow 10+ years ago might not be today or at least for the same reason. E.g. Docker on Mac especially with Apple silicon has undergone major changes the last few years.
Keeping tech fast, if my worldview holds. One reason I left frontend work before was that none of my colleagues seemed to care that we shipped MBs of code to the client. I also tire of APIs that are in the multi-second response time arena, often because no one seems to bother with database indexes or JOIN optimisation. This should be banal, everyday stuff.
Maybe we have too many layers of abstraction. Or there's just too much work to do now that businesses combine many roles into one?
Some owed in tech like relearning the same lessons over and over with new instead of realizing there’s a lot that is transferable and new technologies world be better implemented, sooner if it understood what had been done to date.
I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made.
Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.
Any idea if some (perhaps many) of those enrolled students were from Udemy's corporate clients?
When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".
I started writing a udemy course some time ago in a very weird specialty and then I saw the $5 promo days. I was planning to charge $50-100 for the course (in line with other training materials in the specialty), and I realized that this was incompatible with udemy's model.
Thanks, funny enough the last 2 are on Udemy (my first courses) where as the others are on my main site.
I've kept the Flask one up to date for almost 10 years, all free updates.
I have so many course ideas but starting a new one is tough because I've lost all search traction to my site and courses in general. I don't want it to end but I also have to be real.
I've put a decade into writing blog posts, hundreds of free YouTube videos (without ads or sponsors), 100+ episode podcast related to programming and none of it has grown an audience in 5-10 years. I mean sure I have 21k subs on YouTube but most videos get like 200 views. I do it because I enjoy it but that doesn't mean it's wrong to also want to be able to sustain myself again doing it like I did between 2015 and 2021.
I took your Build A SaaS course on Udemy some year back, it was really good. I didn't realize it has updates to the day. The Udemy version is still the 10 hour one though, so perhaps that's why.
Wow hey Nick, I took your docker course on udemy a few years ago. Even these days, I am revisiting it. Gotta say it's one of the best courses I have taken.
For me, it was not the recommending system from udemy brought me to it, it was just a google search. I was interested in docker container at that time.
Maybe SEO works better for the niche.
The bitter lesson here is that if you want to control a business you can not avoid or outsource marketing. It is a huge part of any trade and you have to bear the marketing cost.
I totally understand the desire to avoid it and concentrate on the craft and to create. I tried and failed at it numerous times. I decided that I will not start a business if I do not have any partners who understand and are willing to engage in sales and marketing.
I've been bamboozled by Udemy a couple of times, thinking a course was recently made, only to discover the videos were 10 years old and most of the content was woefully out of date, with a few "recent updates" videos tacked on at the end.
Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road.
Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.
Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.
> Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.
It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.
As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
Machine transcriptions are obviously better than they used to be. But requiring perfect human transcriptions in this day and age would IMO be unreasonable for most purposes.
Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.
This was free content. The end result is that the content was made inaccessible to everyone, adding zero benefit to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
People really believe this. And also if you mention other disabilities that affect a similar ratio to the one they care about, ie 0.16% of people, they'll say it's too expensive and doesn't affect enough people. Like what if I want this content to be consumable by people who have such heavy learning disabilities that the whole content would need to be 20x as long and explained much more step by step?
They were uploading these for free. The end result of the videos being taken down is that they are now even more inaccessible to that 4% than they were before.
Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.
This is exactly why we can't have nice things in this brand new world... there's always a guardian of ethics, of what's right and what's supposed to be done so as not to upset absolutely anyone...
You're missing important context, which is that they were required by (federal) law to provide said accommodation, and they failed to do it (some would say they chose not to do it). It was easier (cheaper) to pull the plug.
Don't blame the litigant. If you don't like it, change federal law.
They got sued for not having subtitles… no thanks. I think I’ll blame the chucklefucks that thought, “Oh an opportunity for a quick buck” and resulted in everyone losing a valuable resource.
It's not about money it's about making sure things are accessible. The ADA is one of the reasons America is more accessible then Europe. Lawsuits are the enforcement mechanism
For context: I have cerebral palsy. Play the smallest fiddle for me, it only affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. But I’ve been a part time fitness instructor, properly conditioned I have run decently (10 minute mile) up to a 15K before my slight favoring of my right leg takes it’s toll and I’ve been a gym rat since 1990 and I just left the gym.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
Many interest groups in the US are for hire. Meaning, if you don't like a piece of upcoming legislation, you can give them a donation and they'll find out a way the upcoming legislation hurts their demographic. These groups have overwhelmingly passive members, who don't run the organization in any meaningful way.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
Your argument is that someone sued Berkeley for posting free education materials online purely in the name of accessibility and not to make a quick buck?
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
Yeah, and without subtitles, the course content is not accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing... which the law says it has to be. UC Berkeley decided not to make their content accessible, and when someone complained, they took it all apart rather than making a reasonable (and legally required) accommodation. I guess I don't see why I'd blame the person filing the lawsuit here. UC Berkeley could have just... put up subtitles.
It had subtitles. The demand was better subtitles, and the project had barely any budget.
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
The person could have volunteered to write the subtitles themselves or, if they were deaf, to hire someone or even ask someone to volunteer to write subtitles. Or any other number of solutions.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
Yes but it's stupid to force them to do it. If the state wants to demand this the state can pay for it. To hide free knowledge just because of a few specific pet disabilities... The content is also not accessible to someone with serious enough learning disabilities for example. Should they be forced to create an accessible version of that?
You realize it would cost a significant resources to make the “accommodations” you are suggesting? Money, despite what you may believe, doesn’t grow on trees. Given the range of worthy competing interests where the money could be spent, the university likely had no practical choice but to take it offline, lest it face the bad press and wrath of Progressives.
You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.
Our society is better when the things that are available are available to everyone, not just the privileged. I don't see why accommodations for the disabled are considered some unnecessary burden; they should be considered a cost of doing business, for everyone who does business.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
Almost my entire education has been OJT (On the Job Training). I'm a high school dropout, with a G.E.D. I've spent my entire life, looking up the noses of folks that just assume they are better than me. Gets a bit grating, but the plus side is, is that I have to prove myself, over, and over.
Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).
What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.
My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.
I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.
The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).
I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
Tertiary education in Germany is pretty much a continuum. On one end, you have "Berufsakademien" that offer bachelor's degrees with integrated vocational training – you need to find the employer yourselves, they pay your fees and some salary that you can live off (more or less). On the other end, there's Ivory Tower Academia where no one cares about what happens outside of the classroom. And there is everything in between those two poles.
I remember one night my dad drove up to a building with three letters on it. Walked up to some lady behind a desk inside the front door, and after arguing for a bit, pulled out his checkbook and wrote on it, passing the check to her. I watched as he turned and walked back to the car looking a sad mixture of dejected and pissed.
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.
Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.
Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
You need forced exercises, you need grading, you need something of a schedule. Not to say people can't do it. But, especially for difficult material, even a lot of motivated people won't.
I mean I remember what undergrad (and grad school) was like and I'm pretty sure doing that independently and optionally would be tough.
Just look at success for adults learning the things adults commonly take up: languages or musical instruments. There is some good results, but mostly you find people who can say "Hello, how are you" and no more; or they can play some simple songs but nothing major. It takes hours and hours of practice / study time to learn anything hard. You can find a lot of community ed classes that will bring you to about that level in many subjects, but it is hard to find anyone willing to put in the hours needed to learn something to more than a surface level.
There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents/interest.
But most adults won't have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
Stanford's Youtube channel is also a goldmine. There's actually a lot of professors that put their lectures on Youtube, you just have to look (or watch enough that the algorithm finds them for you).
I find the Stanford channel a bit hard to navigate, MIT has a dedicated channel for the courses and another one for the other stuff, I wish Stanford did the same.
The same applies to Harvard too
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
Maybe improving the world is a good idea regardless of whether it's a viable model?
Anyway, in this case, the cost to the university is quite low and there's no real loss of income, as the real value the vast majority of people pay for is clearly in the status that comes from being there in person and getting the diploma.
Udemy never sold knowledge. They are selling that feeling of a new beginning, of a better future, of FINALLY doing (buying!!!) that course you always wanted to finish. 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.
I think Fitness definitely caught on though. You could say it was a constant recurring self-promise some prior generations made, but our current generations are not lacking on a focus on fitness.
Education is not too different. We’re not exactly a society that goes “Going to dig into an interesting course this weekend with the wife”, no, nowhere near that. Takes time, generations.
There's definitely novelty, fashion, and fads. There's no particular reason why rollerblading essentially went away in the US after being a pretty popular activity for a time. In consumer tech, auction sites didn't go away but they certainly declined.
Sometimes, there are reasons--far fewer people shoot pics with dedicated cameras today for obvious reasons. But sometimes, things that were a novelty just get boring for most.
> Buying them is an easy way to feel good in the moment and it's easy to tell yourself that you'll do the courses later.
What's more discouraging is that completing them may be little more than that as well. Sure, you put in the self-discipline and work to ace all the quizzes and maybe even turn in the practical final assignment, and you have a piece of paper to show for it, but did you really learn all that much? How much sticks with you in a couple of years?
I took Odersky's Scala course on coursera, which was fairly tough (relative to the ~10 other similar courses I've taken as an adult). Certainly felt good completing it. Didn't feel so good about dropping out of the sequel course a couple of weeks in as I realized I just couldn't complete the assignments in time without sacrificing too much of family and social life, but no matter. What do I remember of Scala today? Certainly not enough to program in it... Maybe some vague things about covariance and contravariance and how mutability makes it painful.
I also did a bunch of Andrew Ng's courses. The first covered a bunch of non-NN machine learning methods which are a lot less relevant than they were. I remember their names at least, but I certainly couldn't explain them in a code interview. Then I learned to write vectorized hand-calculated backwards passes in Matlab (well, gnu octave), and some early Tensorflow. Also well out of code interview accessible memory by now. Ng's courses were great at giving you a sense of accomplishment and removing all time-consuming frustration not related to the actual focus of the course... But learning these things a few years before most people didn't make me rich, and these days I'd have to ask a chatbot like everyone else. Skills you don't use atrophy, and I couldn't convince anyone to pay me to implement ML models.
So I guess what I'm getting at is, even at their best these courses may not give most graduates what we really hope for.
> 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.
And another comment:
> I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
I'm not understanding the problem. I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through. That a big percentage don't get far is not at all a criticism. It's plain human nature.
Counting what percentage finish a course is a fairly useless metric (and you can always make the course trivially easy to game that metric). One needs to measure (absolute) output. How many succeeded - not what percentage succeeded.
I gained a lot from both Udemy and Coursera. Stuff that has helped me a fair amount in my career. It may well be true that I didn't finish most of the courses I signed up for. Why should I care? Why should Udemy/Coursera? It was a win/win.
> I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through.
Just look at gym memberships. Apparently over 2/3 of people never use it and only about 20% use it regularly. Are the gyms also to blame for that? I don't think so.
This is also true with other sources of knowledge though. Check any youtube course playlist and compare video views for first vs last lecture, often >80% dropoff. What percentage of library borrowers get past the first chapter of a book?
I think the number is probably a bit skewed by the fact a lot of companies offer unlimited access to udemy and such, so people "start" courses without any commitment or cost, and then predictably drop off fast or don't start at all.
Personally I just found none of them really worth doing. They felt almost not genuine in a way, like they cared more about profiting from courses and gaming the system than actually teaching you something. I switched to learning via Youtube videos and found it much more educational than the paid courses.
E-learning can be like Steam to some people. You buy the course and then it sits there. You get a dopamine hit when you buy, and you can finish the course later. Sometime.
Some people need structure. But mostly structure is a way of dragging along those who aren't soaking up learning already, who aren't naturally seeking the next problem and breaking it apart. Not everyone does this, and so structure helps as a forcing function.
There are some subjects where you need academic and theoretical grounding. Or expensive equipment. For everything else, it's best to get hands on and just throw yourself at the subject. There's nothing really stopping a motivated person.
Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me.
I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.
That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
I would use an agent (Codex) for this task: use the Pro model in ChatGPT for deep research and to assemble the information and citations, then have Codex systematically go through the citations with a task list to web search and verify or correct each. Codex can be used like a test suite.
My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.
If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
Masterclass is really a scam in my opinion. Who needs them to teach about generic stuff, when what we need is how to be good like them, that’s why we pay for the course
This. Intro to X courses are better left to the manifold resources available on YouTube. Experts are for expert topics. As Liszt reportedly said when asked why he eventually accepted only advanced pupils: “Wash your dirty linen at home.”
Notable people tend to teach on their own sites, or at least more specialized sites rather than generic sites like Udemy. Udemy would need to pay them instead.
It's not hard to look at each profile, most will proudly shout their top credentials as visibly and often as possible. "1M Subscribers on YouTube!" vs. "I worked in this industry for 10 years" is a pretty easy call. How much of this process should be spoonfed? Active engagement is required at some point.
Udemy functions as open market with the associated pros and cons.
> nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.
Don't ask them to teach you, ask them to make a self-study syllabus/roadmap with online references. It's likely that it ingested the work of others in exactly this scenario, so it shouldn't confabulate as easily.
Parent was writing about a university LECTURE which is different from a TEXTBOOK (which is different from primary sources), so yeah, consulting other sources is checking the facts.
Oh I see what you're saying. It was slightly ambiguous.
But in any case, I didn't read a single textbook at uni; it was all lecture notes provided by the lecturers (fill-in-the-gaps actually which worked waaaay better than you'd think). So the answer is still no - I didn't fact check them and I didn't need to because they didn't wildly hallucinate like AI does.
You should have a mental model about how the world works and the fundamental rules of the context where you're operating. Even though you might not know something, you eventually develop an intuition of what makes sense and what doesn't. And yes, that applies even to "university lectures" since a lot of professors make mistakes/are wrong plenty of times.
Taking an LLM's output at face value would be dumb, yes. But it would be equally dumb to take only what's written on a book at face value, or a YouTube video, or anyone you listen to. You have to dig in, you have to do the homework.
LLMs make it much easier for you to do this homework. Sure, they still make mistakes, but they get you 90% of the way in minutes(!) and almost for free.
I don't think it's (necessarily) equally dumb. Maybe if comparing LLM output to a book chosen at random. But I would feel much safer taking a passage from Knuth at face value than a comparable LLM passage on algorithms.
That's true, but they are also a) a lot more expensive and b) unlike LLMs, the vast majority of professionals have family and friends and need sleep and food, and as such are not available 24/7/365
I was being facetious but am now extremely curious about large portion of the knowledge obtained by subject matter experts in any given field has never been published - this is not only strange to me in the small but you are claiming that this is large portion so I am wondering if you have any example(s) to share?
Academics, whose entire careers are based on publishing knowledge, only publish a fraction of their total knowledge obtained over their career. Estimates are that only 10-20% of all knowledge is explicit.
Nah they have definitely reduced massively. I suspect that's just because as models get more powerful their answers are just more likely to be true rather than hallucinations.
I don't think anyone has found any new techniques to prevent them. But maybe we don't need that anyway if models just get so good that they naturally don't hallucinate much.
Not in my experience. For example models often say "no you can't do that" now whereas they used to always say you could do things and just hallucinate something if it was impossible. Of course sometimes they say you can't do things when you can (e.g. ChatGPT told me you can't execute commands at the top level of a Makefile a few months ago), but it's definitely less.
> They're just not as egregious.
Uhm yeah, that's what I'm saying. The hallucination situation has improved.
I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.
For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.
Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.
That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.
But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.
Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar.
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
> Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera.
The meaningful competitor wrt. raw educational content is freely available OpenCourseware made available under CC licenses, which prevent any after-the-fact rugpull. Of course online learning also has a big service-provision and perhaps certification component, which is where specialty platforms like Coursera and Udemy may have a real advantage.
The platforms lost because they enshittified and everyone left because of it, not because YouTube existed (it already did when they started). Compare the ancient "legacy" stuff that Coursera had to the stuff it has today. Little wonder nobody actually wants what they're selling.
As another comment here said:
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.
> It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.
I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.
Geoff Hinton's 2012 Coursera course "Neural Networks for Machine Learning" was incredible. Anyone who took that course got in on the ground floor of deep learning just when it was about to take off. It certainly changed the course of my career.
To give an idea of how cutting-edge it was at the time, the well-known RMSProp optimizer was unpublished work that Hinton presented in the course, and people had to cite the presentation slides when they used it in papers published later.
Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.
The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.
Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.
There was a set of three "legacy" courses on something called Saylor Academy back in the day by an instructor named Kenneth Manning. Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Materials. They were all basically just filmed classroom lectures, but the filming was done well. Great instructor.
Barry Nalebuff’s Intro to Negotiation is pretty fantastic. Had you negotiating against strangers in well-designed scenarios, then getting feedback from others on the recordings.
Perry Mehrling’s course on Money and Banking is good too.
I recently bought a course on the Spring Boot from codewithmosh. Despite spring boot being a dry subject, it was probably the best intro backend course I’d ever taken!
Udemy always had that scammy vibe with courses "90% off" (from to $200 to $20 and things like that), plagiarism, as well as anti-patterns and very questionable quality control on the courses themselves.
They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.
I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.
I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.
"Coursera to Combine with Udemy to Empower the Global Workforce with Skills for the AI Era"
Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.
I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
Ironically the very first coursera course was (IIRC) Andrew Ng's machine learning course, which was fantastic, and the deep learning specialization, which was also phenomenal. I can unironically say that Andrew Ng was the best instructor I ever had in grad school (and I didn't go to Stanford...).
Honestly, I feel like it's easy to filter out good/bad courses on Coursera by stuff like University name (although gotta admit last time did a course there were 3 years ago)
Udemy figured out that selling to enterprise is way more profitable than individuals. Coursera figured out that University/Company brand is more valuable than Joe's Ultimate Course.
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
I think that window is closing pretty fast. Models can currently construct pretty good learning material by themselves. I setup a project using claude code as the agent that researches and constructs learning material and lessons.
The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
As a counterpoint to the negativity in here. I purchased one of Angela Yu's basic webdev courses a couple years back and it springboarded my coding ability. I left it rather quickly to just build random stuff I wanted, but still, it was the spark.
Angela Yu course is good, told my brother about it and he had hard time figuring some stuff out cause some pieces were outdated (he has zero experience)
Same here; I've gotten a lot of utility from Udemy. Actually kind of got me a job (tbf, the manager I'd known for years and he'd've hired me regardless, but I was able to actually DO the job he wanted me to do basically day 0, even when he was willing to hire me and let me learn as I went).
There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.
The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses.
I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.
I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.
After Coursera/Udacity/EdX discontinued courses that I wanted to take, or removed access to ones I only partially completed, I switched to buying classes on Udemy. I completed only a handful of many purchases, and the quality level was okay-to-mediocre but better than nothing, so I got more value out of Udemy than Coursera.
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
I get so much decision fatigue when choosing a course series on YouTube. On every technical topic, there are like 15 people making courses anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours.
For a basic crash course in Python, is there anything better than the top rated Udemy course, can YT offer something better ? I really don't mind paying the 12$ it costs on Udemy.
The dream never dies, possibly because people remember when class time was supplanted by a movie. Anyone remember "I Am Joe's Heart"? Those movies showed that you could just sit and watch passively like TV, and you'd learn quite a bit, with professional diagrams and animations to help.
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth.
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
Remember Conglomerates? It just keeps changing name.
Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
Yes, "Late Stage Capitalism" the idea from the text written in 1902 by Werner Sombart.
The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.
It’s funny because everyone under the sun has been telling these two companies to come together since 2018 when online learning courses started to fade away. They are finally doing it after both went public and lost 80% of their value. At least the management team is going to make some money.
Big move. This feels less like a typical merger and more like a bet that AI-driven skills platforms need real scale to matter. Curious to see whether this actually improves learning quality and outcomes—or just creates a larger marketplace with the same challenges.
I once did 2 moocs on coursera about machine learning, and I learned a lot, but some time afterwards, they f'ed up their login so much, that they required Google stuff to be loaded, which made me reconsider even logging in there. The platform seemed to get ever more bloated. Maybe I should check what their status is now, whether one can use their site without implicitly agreeing to being tracked by Google.
No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.
Addendum: Oh OK, they f'ed it up even more now, so that the login page doesn't even appear, when you click login and don't enable JS. How silly. I guess they have also fallen to the "everything must be an SPA" fad.
Tangent: Does anyone know what happened to EdX and MitX in particular? It seems they stopped adding content ~10 years ago. Those were [are still] a fantastic resource!
This same week, Egghead (https://egghead.io) started offering $500 lifetime access to everything they ever made or will make. There's definitely some excellent material in their catalog. But the signals sure seem to point toward the decline of centralized human-created coursework.
Egghead.io is not worth it, the courses there have a shelf life even shorter than frontendmasters. Authors mostly use it to dump their wares then never update the course afterwards while breaking API changes litter their backlog making most content, unless it was released in the last 3 months, worthless.
Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO.
Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
Thanks for replying. Agreed on shelf life, but IME at least some of the egghead materials, at the time of publication, have been worthwhile to me. But that experience (5+ years ago) is quite possibly out of date.
(meta: genuinely curious why my observation was downvoted. I may take a further karma hit for mentioning it but worth it if it elicits a meaningful response. what gives?)
Dead end for what? Quality recordings of real lectures have been amazing for self improvement. I've never gone into it expecting a meaningful certificate, just meaning for me living my life.
You're probably in the small minority at least when it comes to forking over material dollars. Most people spending money, at least beyond trade paperback range, are probably looking for something that has at least a plausible connection to real income.
It's not clear to me that independent tutors are generally getting rich. But there clearly are activities that benefit from individual training. I imagine music is one of those. But that mostly probably falls into the luxury goods category.
"Getting rich" is a substantial movement of the goalposts. The point is that people are spending money outside the trade paperback range on education, either for themselves or for their children (I've seen quite a wide distribution while in the waiting room), that has nothing to do with income.
Turns out that an online certificate isn't worth anything when layoffs happen and the market is oversaturated with people who have real degrees. MOOCs have their place, but it's a very narrow set of disciplines.
Well, I work at a university too. At least in biomedicine, every MOOC is extremely shallow. The most advanced MOOC is an introductory-level when compared to the university courses.
It's probably not a uni specific issue. I went to a top EU uni, and there absolutely were courses that could've just been an ~~email~~ video. Admitedly not everything was bad, but the quality of education isn't as high as it should be.
More students _per course_ than a MOOC cohort? -- doubt.
If you add up all courses of a while discipline, edu portals still serve way more students.
In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities.
I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers?
I personally prefer the interaction on campus.
But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.
I wouldn't be so tough on the online certificates. The key value I get out of Coursera is an unbeatable "time to knowledge" and some proof it was me who attended the course through the id verification.
Compare that to traditional in-person education, where you are bound to fixed course dates, long approval timelines etc. Until you get feedback from HR that you are eligible for a course/training, i've probably already completed it via my Coursera complete subscription.
I'm not sure offline certificates mean a whole lot when layoffs matter either.
But MOOCs and other purely online options just didn't result in any meaningful certification especially outside of a connection to established universities. And, given that, people/companies weren't interested in paying significant bucks for them.
It was probably a useful experiment. Just not a very successful one. And once the experiment faltered, schools/professors became less interested in putting money and energy into it.
All the evidence is that most of the students/potential students who weren't already motivated to pursuing independent learning didn't really connect to all this online material.
It's not a question whether they are or not worth something. It's just that it's a much more meaningful differentiator when there's an overabundance of talent. CVs are going to be filtered based on something. And people with no degree are going to have a much more difficult time getting through the automated screening. That will come as a surprise to people who were promised they'll get a job by paying $1000 for a "nano-degree".
Honestly years out of college, I really want to refresh my engineering education, and perhaps get academically rigorous education on topics I missed out on back then.
While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.
> While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.
That's what Udemy was from the start. If you want depth, it was always Coursera.
My alma mater (University of Nottingham UK) has just stopped all music and modern language teaching, which (for a very popular, respected, large campus institution) seems a bad sign for universities generally.
And that's with all the foreign student bonanza money. My inlaws live in Notts and all they see getting built is student blocks. Imagine what'll happen when the next government drastically limits student visas.
I've been an instructor on Udemy for a decade. Lots of web devs tell me they got their career started on my courses there, which is something that is very dear to me. Udemy got me started in online dev education.
Trying the merger as a survival option, not a "let's take over world" option. MOOCs need to reinvent themselves again, for the hybrid workforce that is AI+human.
Good thing Youtube is free because this consolidation is only going to raise their prices. Thank you to all the hard working educational Youtubers out there.
End of an era: video (with broadband Internet penetration) was the best tool we had for 15+ years. But LLMs are now good enough, including in image+infographic generation and factuality (especially when grounding resources are provided... which is where human experts still matter). I think video is now better only for learning physical hands-on skills... and those videos tend to be on YouTube rather than on Udemy or Coursera.
Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...
A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
LLMs are not remotely good enough to use as a learning tool. They still make shit up a ton of the time, and you can only catch it if you already know the material (so, not useful for learning). They probably never will be useful for learning, since even after all this time hallucinations are still just as bad as they ever were.
Have you tried them with providing a grounding resource, e.g. attaching a file to ChatGPT or NotebookLM? Yes need some human expert to create (or curate) that grounding resource in the first place, but LLMs handle the rest well: presenting info in different ways and paces, interacting with the learner like a tutor, etc.
The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.
You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)
both have had questionable content for a while, it's a wonder people are still paying for them. especially given that LLMs exist (and youtube for that matter).
If I were a professor at a decent school, I'd probably look at the landscape of MOOCs and go "Why am I spending any time on this?" It seemed like something new and potentially exciting at one point. I certainly wouldn't today.
I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away.
From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
I think what killed all MOOC learning was that they ALL saw this giant TAM for corporate training and thought.. we have to get into that market.
That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value.
Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value to the learner. It becauses now it morphs into can we show value to the clients/decision makers/learning admins?
I largely disagree. If you look at the people involved (and what they said at the time), I think there was a legitimate "We can rethink higher education" which obviously didn't happen for a variety of reasons.
It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.
LLMs could be a boost to MOOCs because you can use them as a tutor to help with the material. People tend to have trouble finishing MOOCs, and it can be frustrating to get stuck on a particular aspect without much instructor support. Anything that makes it more interactive could help with both of those. I think LLMs are a great complement to MOOCs.
I use Udemy courses all the time; great for compliance, game engine training, and insightful training of soft skills. Good instructors have insight and comprehensive coverage that questioning LLMs do not have.
All forms of education boil down to people putting in the time to engage their brain with the subject matter. Most organized education is based on coercing, peer pressure, or social pressure to get students in situations where they kind of have to engage e.g. in order to pass exams, or other exercises, or by being forced to listen to a teacher for a few hours in a class room.
Online education is not that different. You basically put in the time watching the videos and doing the homework and tests. The test and certificate become the goal.
Self study whether powered by LLMs or by good old books or whatever source of information, basically relies more on things like curiosity and discipline. Some people do this naturally.
The nice thing about LLMs is that they adapt to your curiosity and that it is easy to dumb down stuff to the point where you can understand things. Lots of people engage with LLMs this way. Some do that to feed their confirmation bias, some do it to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the net result is that you learn.
I think LLMs are still severely underused in education. We romanticize the engaged, wise, teacher that works their ass off to get students to see the light. But the reality is that a lot of teachers have to juggle a lot of not so interested students. Some of them aren't that great at the job to begin with. Burnouts are quite common among teachers. And there are a lot of students that fall through the cracks of the education system. I think there's some room there for creative teachers to lighten their workloads and free up more time to engage with students that need it.
I saw a teacher manually checking a students work on the train a few days ago. Nice red pen. Very old school work. She probably had dozens of such tests to review. I imagine you get quite efficient at it after a few decades. But feeding a pdf to chat GPT probably would generate a very thorough evaluation in seconds given some good criteria. She could probably cut a few hours of her day. There are all sorts of ways to leverage LLMs to help teachers or students here. Also plenty of ways for students to cheat. But there are ways to mitigate that.
Retention is an issue with education more generally (including the meatspace variety) but spaced-repetition systems (SRS) address it quite well. With online video, you can even prompt an LLM to provide a suggested distillation of the content into Q&A flashcards.
watching a few good videos is a great way to FEEL like you're learning. just cuz you watch a 15 hour videoo course on c doesn't mean you can write c any more than watching a 2 hour video course on kung foo means you can kick like bruce lee
The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill.
One of the challenges is that few people are genuinely interested in a comprehensive view of a topic. Most of the time, I want just enough to get to the next step and get rid of a problem.
I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
I honest dislike the idea of having yet another niche going with less competitors.
Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.
Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable
I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
I interviewed for an eng role at Coursera back in 2012, not too long after they were founded. Their claimed goal at the time was a re-imagining of education, insisting that current educational institutions were stuck in the past.
Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.
I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
Udemy course ratings have always felt absurd to me.
The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.
The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
The best courses I wanted to take are split between Coursera, Udemy, and EdX. The first two can give certificates cheaply. A merger could be really helpful if they do it in a month or two. ;)
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category.
Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate.
> If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard
Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.
There is a difference between being dead and not actively maintained. If a popular FLOSS package isn't touched for many moons, do you think it just means it's done?
That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.
Very few projects update dependencies that often, and only very big ones are found with security issues that often.
> lack integrations with new platforms
You don't need a new intration _every 2 days_, not to mention that many projects don't need such integrations at all. Moreover some popular and updated projects lack such integrations despite having lot of commits.
> lack support for new HW architectures
This is something that many projects get for free. But also, you don't get a new HW architecture every 2 days.
> lack newer privacy guarantees
What more privacy guarantees do I need from projects that don't communicate with external services or store data at all?
A db driver may have an issue with unsanitized user input when run against SQLite, but you only use it with oracle and sanitize input anyway, but that shows up as a 9.1 critical deployment blocker for corporate employees.
Unexploitable CVEs with inflated ratings make using any open source software a pain in the butt at BigCo.
If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
Also, if the project is actively maintained then there is always a multitude of low-priority issues and features to address.
Being FLOSS also means anyone in the whole world is able to contribute anything. If no one bothers to do so, that is aligned with the fact the project is indeed dead.
Did I miss a new C++ version released <2 days ago perhaps?
You certainly are missing something. C++26 was officially released 4 months ago, and support is slowly being rolled out to compilers and packages.
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/26.html
If you somehow believe this kind of work is done in a couple of days, that's a good way to explain to the world how oblivious you are about the topic you are discussing.
And, in turn, you appear to be oblivious to the point - the release cadence of this best-case scenario still means like a decade between updates to the project.
C++26 was released 4months ago; pointless to update it until compilers and deps are updated. So, best case is maybe you'll have complete bug-tested support in the supported compilers in 2030.
If we're looking at 2035-ish for the next release, we're still only looking at 2040 before you update.
You still have to take into account that updating might not even be necessary. It's not like C++ < C++26 suddenly doesn't work.
As they stated, tons of 'renewed' stuff are snake oil today. They add nothing new.
One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much!
I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies.
https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire
Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast.
If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.
I think you are confusing interiorizing some fundamentals with things moving fast. There are languages and frameworks rolling out higher level support for features covering concurrency and parallelism. While you focus on thread-safety, a framework you already use can and often does roll out features that outright eliminate those concerns with idiomatic approaches that are far easier to maintain. Wouldn't you classify that as moving fast?
In ten years you'll see greybeards complaining that new kids don't know shit about React fundamentals.
Nah you won't. Js frameworks comme and go all the time
React was released 12 years ago, and since then a few React clones popped up as well such as Preact.
React is just a formalizatio of a UI update pattern that exists in every app ever made except the ones that are bad. Source: written a lot of java and nobody is currently paying enough to make it worth doing again.
It wasn’t a big deal but I would have still appreciated it if the author inserted some new recorded segments or re-recorded some content to make up for it.
Some areas do, some areas not so much.
I have a colleague that's incredibly strong with databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant.
I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living. Once you get past the "cloud native" abstractions (and other BS) it's penguins all the way down, and I get to reuse most of my core Linux competencies I learned 10+ years ago (eg: I do tcpdump in prod, and it's quicker and more effective than many of the modern shiny tools).
That is why there isn't much else to go but the heuristic of the most new class with the most ratings.
It still does change and you have to adapt.
E.g.
> databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant
And there's lots of changes here, e.g. vector stores, all the different query engine improvements, PostgreSQL IO improvements, etc and they all may impact your job. Your optimal query back then might not be the same. Living off the old learnings is like taking a 50% discount on the max potential.
> I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living.
And these have had changes consistently too e.g. io-uring and gateway api. You can only be in legacy for so long.
I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining.
My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described.
It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.
I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible.
When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
you could've used docker for 12 years and never hit it if you used it on Linux, and followed sensible practices (mount the data dir from outside so it can be reattached to upgraded version of the container)
Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.
Perhaps the only trend is more companies not hiring anyone who specialises in infrastructure and just leaving it as a side task for React devs to look at once every few months.
It's as if computer science, in terms of data structures and algorithms, isn't taught. Or, perhaps, isn't taught as being relevant.
As for lack of knowledge about filesystems: it might be contributed by mobile devices hiding real filesystems from users.
> the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
Basics do make me feel productive. However, it seems bosses and businesses don't agree.
I fear the day basics can be automated away.
Yes and no. The world has also changed all these years. Why something is slow 10+ years ago might not be today or at least for the same reason. E.g. Docker on Mac especially with Apple silicon has undergone major changes the last few years.
Maybe we have too many layers of abstraction. Or there's just too much work to do now that businesses combine many roles into one?
The person at the root of this comment thread might not like it but they can’t just sit back and collect revenue forever without putting out updates.
When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".
Thanks for not jumping to self promotion, but I'm actually curious to see how you did it - would you mind sharing a link?
Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked!
(the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)
I've kept the Flask one up to date for almost 10 years, all free updates.
I have so many course ideas but starting a new one is tough because I've lost all search traction to my site and courses in general. I don't want it to end but I also have to be real.
I've put a decade into writing blog posts, hundreds of free YouTube videos (without ads or sponsors), 100+ episode podcast related to programming and none of it has grown an audience in 5-10 years. I mean sure I have 21k subs on YouTube but most videos get like 200 views. I do it because I enjoy it but that doesn't mean it's wrong to also want to be able to sustain myself again doing it like I did between 2015 and 2021.
Yep on my site there's around 30 hours of content for the same course. Basically a bunch of updates and refactors along with building a 2nd app.
I was trying to differentiate my site vs Udemy by adding extra perks.
Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road.
Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.
It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.
Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.
That would be an unreasonably high standard and would set an incentive to withhold. Which is exactly the outcome we got here?
Wouldn't it be better to cheer the improved accessiblity? Then acknowledge shortcomings and ask for community contributions to improve things?
Why must perfect be the enemy of good?
Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.
Don't blame the litigant. If you don't like it, change federal law.
It is unfortunate that the ADA is designed so that the only mechanism of enforcement of disability rights is lawsuits. :-\
Maybe there should be some exceptions around things provided on a "best-effort" basis, if they can be very carefully crafted.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
Bullshit.
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
No. They chose to take them down, instead of providing reasonable accommodations to those with disabilities.
Choosing to see everything in the most cynical light doesn't make that version of events true.
You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).
What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.
My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.
I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.
The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).
I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
I asked “what’s I.T.T?”
He said “it stands for Blood Sucking Leeches.”
And we drove home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute
It was expensive. $6,000, for a 2-year, full-time curriculum. I took a loan, and spent 10 years, paying it back.
Best investment I ever made.
It's by Shel Silverstein; Johnny Cash just performed it.
I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.
Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.
Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
I mean I remember what undergrad (and grad school) was like and I'm pretty sure doing that independently and optionally would be tough.
- you need a plan of what you're going to do with the information you're going to learn, after you learn it
- you need measurable improvement and feedback validating your improvement
- you need a community supporting you to keep you accountable
I guess at school, until your final year anyway, you get all three. Item 1 is lost once you realize your academics don't really help you at work.
There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents/interest.
But most adults won't have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
How is that a viable model?
Anyway, in this case, the cost to the university is quite low and there's no real loss of income, as the real value the vast majority of people pay for is clearly in the status that comes from being there in person and getting the diploma.
I bought a handful before realizing what was happening. I haven't done it since then and I definitely need to consciously override any temptations.
I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
Education is not too different. We’re not exactly a society that goes “Going to dig into an interesting course this weekend with the wife”, no, nowhere near that. Takes time, generations.
Fashion, I suppose.
Sometimes, there are reasons--far fewer people shoot pics with dedicated cameras today for obvious reasons. But sometimes, things that were a novelty just get boring for most.
What's more discouraging is that completing them may be little more than that as well. Sure, you put in the self-discipline and work to ace all the quizzes and maybe even turn in the practical final assignment, and you have a piece of paper to show for it, but did you really learn all that much? How much sticks with you in a couple of years?
I took Odersky's Scala course on coursera, which was fairly tough (relative to the ~10 other similar courses I've taken as an adult). Certainly felt good completing it. Didn't feel so good about dropping out of the sequel course a couple of weeks in as I realized I just couldn't complete the assignments in time without sacrificing too much of family and social life, but no matter. What do I remember of Scala today? Certainly not enough to program in it... Maybe some vague things about covariance and contravariance and how mutability makes it painful.
I also did a bunch of Andrew Ng's courses. The first covered a bunch of non-NN machine learning methods which are a lot less relevant than they were. I remember their names at least, but I certainly couldn't explain them in a code interview. Then I learned to write vectorized hand-calculated backwards passes in Matlab (well, gnu octave), and some early Tensorflow. Also well out of code interview accessible memory by now. Ng's courses were great at giving you a sense of accomplishment and removing all time-consuming frustration not related to the actual focus of the course... But learning these things a few years before most people didn't make me rich, and these days I'd have to ask a chatbot like everyone else. Skills you don't use atrophy, and I couldn't convince anyone to pay me to implement ML models.
So I guess what I'm getting at is, even at their best these courses may not give most graduates what we really hope for.
And another comment:
> I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
I'm not understanding the problem. I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through. That a big percentage don't get far is not at all a criticism. It's plain human nature.
Counting what percentage finish a course is a fairly useless metric (and you can always make the course trivially easy to game that metric). One needs to measure (absolute) output. How many succeeded - not what percentage succeeded.
I gained a lot from both Udemy and Coursera. Stuff that has helped me a fair amount in my career. It may well be true that I didn't finish most of the courses I signed up for. Why should I care? Why should Udemy/Coursera? It was a win/win.
Just look at gym memberships. Apparently over 2/3 of people never use it and only about 20% use it regularly. Are the gyms also to blame for that? I don't think so.
Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case
One thing that's more consistent are average completion rates hovering around 5%.
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav7958 as cited by [1]
[1] https://openpraxis.org/articles/606/files/66d16716e6c09.pdf
Personally I just found none of them really worth doing. They felt almost not genuine in a way, like they cared more about profiting from courses and gaming the system than actually teaching you something. I switched to learning via Youtube videos and found it much more educational than the paid courses.
E-learning can be like Steam to some people. You buy the course and then it sits there. You get a dopamine hit when you buy, and you can finish the course later. Sometime.
Some people need structure. But mostly structure is a way of dragging along those who aren't soaking up learning already, who aren't naturally seeking the next problem and breaking it apart. Not everyone does this, and so structure helps as a forcing function.
There are some subjects where you need academic and theoretical grounding. Or expensive equipment. For everything else, it's best to get hands on and just throw yourself at the subject. There's nothing really stopping a motivated person.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.
That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash
- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride
- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky
MasterClass already is like this, but the content doesn't go as deep as it could to really teach learners.
Udemy functions as open market with the associated pros and cons.
That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.
LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
But in any case, I didn't read a single textbook at uni; it was all lecture notes provided by the lecturers (fill-in-the-gaps actually which worked waaaay better than you'd think). So the answer is still no - I didn't fact check them and I didn't need to because they didn't wildly hallucinate like AI does.
You should have a mental model about how the world works and the fundamental rules of the context where you're operating. Even though you might not know something, you eventually develop an intuition of what makes sense and what doesn't. And yes, that applies even to "university lectures" since a lot of professors make mistakes/are wrong plenty of times.
Taking an LLM's output at face value would be dumb, yes. But it would be equally dumb to take only what's written on a book at face value, or a YouTube video, or anyone you listen to. You have to dig in, you have to do the homework.
LLMs make it much easier for you to do this homework. Sure, they still make mistakes, but they get you 90% of the way in minutes(!) and almost for free.
Also, hallucinations are still a thing, and there's a reason why LLMs do not outperform subject matter experts in nearly every field.
Academics, whose entire careers are based on publishing knowledge, only publish a fraction of their total knowledge obtained over their career. Estimates are that only 10-20% of all knowledge is explicit.
LLMs level the playing field for the other 8 billion people.
Reminds of this article[1] that was featured yesterday and which I think was great!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46254794
https://ocw.mit.edu/
https://onlineeducation.caltech.edu/courses/certificate-gran...
I don't think anyone has found any new techniques to prevent them. But maybe we don't need that anyway if models just get so good that they naturally don't hallucinate much.
> They're just not as egregious.
Uhm yeah, that's what I'm saying. The hallucination situation has improved.
For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.
Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.
That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.
These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera.
Mean while their prices seem to go up every year.
As another comment here said:
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.
I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.
On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO.
The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
To give an idea of how cutting-edge it was at the time, the well-known RMSProp optimizer was unpublished work that Hinton presented in the course, and people had to cite the presentation slides when they used it in papers published later.
Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.
The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.
Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.
I plan to take the follow up soon.
The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
Perry Mehrling’s course on Money and Banking is good too.
They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.
I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.
I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.
Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.
I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.
I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.
I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
Playlists ...
Python Programming Beginner Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXh...
Python OOP Tutorials - Working with Classes https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhw...
Python Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTi...
This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.
Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me.
What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual.
To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
But what do I know.
Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
Centuries, really, with only periodic exceptions.
The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.
- create a platform to host content others create
- get employees to ask for company-provided access
- almost none of these employees really use it
- collect subscription revenue indefinitely
No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.
Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO.
Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
(Might be a problem of that university, still ...)
In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers?
I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.
But MOOCs and other purely online options just didn't result in any meaningful certification especially outside of a connection to established universities. And, given that, people/companies weren't interested in paying significant bucks for them.
It was probably a useful experiment. Just not a very successful one. And once the experiment faltered, schools/professors became less interested in putting money and energy into it.
All the evidence is that most of the students/potential students who weren't already motivated to pursuing independent learning didn't really connect to all this online material.
While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.
That's what Udemy was from the start. If you want depth, it was always Coursera.
https://www.coursera.org/browse/physical-science-and-enginee...
I'm very sorry to see it go.
Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...
A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away.
From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value.
Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value to the learner. It becauses now it morphs into can we show value to the clients/decision makers/learning admins?
It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.
Online education is not that different. You basically put in the time watching the videos and doing the homework and tests. The test and certificate become the goal.
Self study whether powered by LLMs or by good old books or whatever source of information, basically relies more on things like curiosity and discipline. Some people do this naturally.
The nice thing about LLMs is that they adapt to your curiosity and that it is easy to dumb down stuff to the point where you can understand things. Lots of people engage with LLMs this way. Some do that to feed their confirmation bias, some do it to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the net result is that you learn.
I think LLMs are still severely underused in education. We romanticize the engaged, wise, teacher that works their ass off to get students to see the light. But the reality is that a lot of teachers have to juggle a lot of not so interested students. Some of them aren't that great at the job to begin with. Burnouts are quite common among teachers. And there are a lot of students that fall through the cracks of the education system. I think there's some room there for creative teachers to lighten their workloads and free up more time to engage with students that need it.
I saw a teacher manually checking a students work on the train a few days ago. Nice red pen. Very old school work. She probably had dozens of such tests to review. I imagine you get quite efficient at it after a few decades. But feeding a pdf to chat GPT probably would generate a very thorough evaluation in seconds given some good criteria. She could probably cut a few hours of her day. There are all sorts of ways to leverage LLMs to help teachers or students here. Also plenty of ways for students to cheat. But there are ways to mitigate that.
I guess it’s ok for compliance videos but I’m not sure about retention.
I write this as someone who wants online education succeed.
The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill.
TLDR: you learn by DOING
I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.
Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable
I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.
I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani
Udemy was generally crap.
Coursera was decent.
Crap eats decent.
The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.
The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710