Using your Dashboard for data-driven insights

Your Instructor Dashboard is a powerful tool for managing your current subscription courses. Like the dashboard in a car, it can tell you about your current journey, but also provide a map of where you can go next. 

It’s something we’re constantly adding to as well. We want to give you the information and context you need to pursue new opportunities and optimize your courses.

Courses page

This is the first tab you’ll come to, and it’s where you can see your courses and find high-level information about enrollments, ratings, and earnings for the month. If you have a number of courses, you can easily search by course name, recency, publication date, and more. This is also where you can go in and manage or edit your courses — just hover your cursor over the course name.

The Performance dashboard

This dashboard has a lot worth paying attention to, so we’ll go into each page separately.

Overview shows your overall revenue, enrollments, and rating. But you can also break it out by Udemy Business vs marketplace in students, reviews, and engagement pages — which is important for seeing how the different audiences are reacting to your courses. You can focus on an individual course as well. This can help you optimize when you see a sudden rating or enrollment change.

Students is a wealth of information on your learners (and in some cases a chance to put a name to a face). You’ll see a map showing where your learners are, the languages they speak, and other topics they’re interested in. All of these can be important for deciding on your next teaching opportunity.

Reviews puts all your course reviews together so you can read, respond, and revel in good vibes. There are multiple ways to sort, including “not answered” reviews — super important for addressing learner concerns or just giving them a thank you. In the Review Insights tab you can see the top trends in feedback at a glance. You can filter by reviews rated 4 stars and above, or those rated 3.5 stars and below to identify what learners in each group are saying. 

The Engagement dashboard is another big one, so we’ll break out each page. But, in short, this is where you’ll see how learners are engaging with your course overall, but also in practice activities.

• Course engagement is your overview of consumption across all your courses. Below the “minutes taught” bar graph you’ll find mobile vs desktop consumption, lecture highlights, most bookmarked lectures, and most dropped lectures — all can be good indicators of what you should do more of, and what you optimize. You can also focus on details for individual courses, such as most-bookmarked and most-dropped lectures, etc. This can give you clues about which lectures are most engaging, and which need work.
• Coding exercise insights is a special power feature for seeing how learners are doing with your coding exercises. You can see the exercises learners are doing well with and the ones that they’re getting stuck on. That way you can adjust your exercises to the perfect Goldilocks zone — not too easy and not too hard.
• Practice test insights does a similar job for instructors with practice tests. Find out the questions that are stumping learners and see the ones that they are getting right. Then optimize, optimize, optimize.
• With Traffic and Conversions you’ll see precisely that for your course landing pages. See how many people land on your page and how many convert. You can change the view from 12 months, to a month, to a week, so you can see the possible effects of your marketing or ours.

The Insights page

Insights is where you can find your next teaching opportunity on Udemy. There are two types of insights: Udemy Business Content Opportunities and Marketplace Insights — both are built on proprietary data and can show you the topics that are most in demand. But we’ll talk about them separately below.

• Udemy Business Content Opportunities
  This tool is built especially for instructors who’re looking to find a course topic that’s in demand by Udemy Business customers. You’ll automatically see a list of in-demand topics and link it to the course you’ll create. While creating a course for an in-demand topic doesn’t guarantee inclusion, it can expedite course review for curation into Udemy Business (once it’s published and meets curation review thresholds). You will be notified if your course has been added to the Udemy Business collection.
  Note: The tool is currently only available to instructors in good standing who have at least one course with a 4.2 average rating across 25+ ratings for English content or 10+ ratings for non-English content. Opportunities currently display in English, even when an opportunity targets a course in another language. The Udemy team is working to enable official translations of all opportunities.
  
• Marketplace Insights
  Marketplace Insights is a powerful ally in helping you find what Marketplace learners want. We pull from different data sources, including Marketplace search volume, learner demand, and revenue for particular topics. Just enter the general or specific topic you have expertise in, and it’ll show you what the opportunity is. You can even narrow down by language and see related topics. And you can start creating your course right from here.

The Communication Page

The Communications page is designed for you to share updates and messages with your learners, and to understand their questions and gain valuable data driven insights. 

• AI Assistant Insights
  The Udemy AI Assistant is a virtual learning companion that guides learners on every step of their skills development journey. AI Assistant Insights gathers learner inputs to the AI Assistant and provides you with a quick and easily digestible overview of the types of topics that come up for learners while engaging with your course. You can build on this knowledge by discovering new topics and areas of interest that can inspire your next successful course.
• Q&A
  The Questions & Answers (Q&A) dashboard is designed to help instructors monitor and respond to student questions with ease and efficiency. You’ll also be able to see the recurring themes in the Q&A Insights tab. So can you quickly identify areas where learners are seeking more clarity and leverage that data to make targeted updates to enhance the quality of your content. This allows you to address common questions proactively, reducing the number of repetitive inquiries and improving the overall learning experience.

Other tools and reports

There’s more to explore in your Dashboard, like Tools for your test video and bulk coupon creation or your Revenue Report shows you your lifetime earnings. Plus, if you’ve been running your own promotions with instructor coupon codes, you can see the revenue performance here. You’ll also find your Payout Report, a transaction-by-transaction list of payments and their statuses.

But this should give you a good start to getting around your Instructor Dashboard — and discovering new opportunities, finding new learners, and optimizing your courses.