The December 2024 Instructor Insider

Español | Deutsch | 日本語  | Français | Italiano | Türkçe | Polski | Português | 한국어| 中文(繁體)|Tiếng Việt| Bahasa Indonesia |

Hello, Instructors

It’s been a busy three months since we came to you last with the Instructor Insider. And we’re happy to announce a bunch of new features and updates designed to help you and your learners. We also have recent GenAI updates — plus, we have some updates on practice tests, and a few other pieces of business. So let’s begin.

GenAI

A whopping 98% of you joined our GenAI Program, which is a really exciting step towards our goal of revolutionizing how people learn and grow through greater personalization. But it’s also about freeing you from time-consuming tasks, allowing you to concentrate on your content and opening up new opportunities. Here are some of the ways it can help you now:

Udemy AI Assistant – This is a big update to the entire Udemy experience, one that can benefit learners and you. The AI Assistant is available across the Marketplace and Udemy Business. Its job is to point learners to your content. The AI Assistant goes beyond search to provide much more relevant results, as it gathers learners’ needs conversationally, in real time. A learner taking your course can also ask the AI Assistant questions that might have otherwise gone to your Q&A queue, meaning you can spend less time on easily-answered questions.

Skills Mapping and AI-powered learning paths – Skills Mapping and AI-powered learning paths help Udemy Business administrators quickly define the critical skills their organizations need and create tailored learning paths, streamlining a time-consuming process. Delivering the right results faster can lead to greater discoverability and course consumption.

Gen-AI-powered practice test answers and coding exercise solutions – If you’re teaching a course in Development or you offer practice tests, you’re probably already appreciating these time-saving tools. If you haven’t tried them out yet, you definitely should. We have answer explanations for more English-language topics coming soon.

New features talk

This has been a big year for working on the tools that help you optimize your content and discover your next opportunity. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Practice tests – Practice tests are a popular feature that gives your learners a chance to make a dry run for their certification prep exams. Recently we released practice test insights to help you see where learners spend their time, so you can optimize your practice tests. We also made some improvements to help you more easily answer the questions learners ask when they take their practice tests. As we announced in November, we’ve been rolling out Practice Mode and learners are loving it! 

Udemy Business Content Opportunities – We updated this feature with more must-learn topics in November, along with other improvements. 

Note: Udemy Business Content Opportunities access is limited to instructors with 4.2 star rating or above and 25+ ratings for English-language courses (or 10+ for non-English language courses).

Dashboard improvements – If you have multiple courses, they’ll be easier to find in your Instructor Dashboard now. Alphabetization has brought order to lengthy course lists, and it’s now easier to search for and select the course you want.

Instructor Dashboard best practices – OK, this isn’t a new tool, but we’ve published a new article about your Dashboard that will help you get more out of it.

Marketing initiatives

One big reason to teach on Udemy is that we have big marketing reach to drive traffic to the platform and help learners engage with your content. This year, site traffic has been up at 38+ million visitors per month. But we want to do better than that, while also increasing conversion:

Marketing investments – One of the big reasons to teach with Udemy is that you benefit from our big marketing reach. Which is why we’re working on a number of things to get more people to the platform and your courses, such as making investments in SEO and conversion optimization. Additionally we’ve added over 800 new affiliates and we’re increasing our social media efforts to build sustainable hype for the brand. Also, we’re working on engagement strategies, like gamification. On the Udemy Business side, we’ve partnered with WorkDay, a leading HR, finance, and planning platform, to integrate with the Workday Skills Platform. This brings the world of Udemy Business into their skills alignment offering — another route to more course consumption.

Policies and payouts

With the beginning of the year approaching, it’s a good time to review tax information. We updated our terms on November 13 to make electronic delivery of tax forms the default. Also, as a general reminder, the deadline is approaching to update your tax information with us if your name, address, tax status, or other personal circumstances have changed. Visit our help center for more information on the tax forms Udemy provides and how to update your tax info.

We mentioned this last time, but our new payouts reports are live, which will make it easier for you to see payout activity and keep personal records.

Summing up a year

As is our annual tradition, we’ve launched our video lookback at the year. Along with the pretty amazing stats you’ve helped us to achieve, some of your fellow instructors share a bit about their teaching journeys, so please take a look.

But as we close out the year, it’s not just a look back, but a look ahead. And there’s a lot of good stuff coming. Thank you for making Udemy the best place to teach new skills and help people everywhere advance their careers and unlock limitless possibilities.