Empowering instructors with our AI-powered learning tools

We’re excited to share more about our upcoming and existing generative AI (GenAI) features designed to enhance the Udemy experience for both learners and instructors. Building on our GenAI principles announced in May, these innovations focus on GenAI solutions that benefit our entire community. As we launch these innovations and policy changes, we want to provide you with clear information about how they’ll work and what they mean for you as a valued Udemy instructor.

How AI-powered learning benefits you

We’ve always believed in the power of human connection and expertise. Our mission to transform lives through learning remains at the heart of everything we do. By embracing AI responsibly, we can create new opportunities for growth, enhance the learning experience, and improve ROI for instructors. As we introduce these innovations, we’ll focus on three key areas:

• Boosting course engagement: Our data suggests that offering more personalized learning options have the potential to drive increased engagement and revenue for both you and Udemy. 
• Increasing content visibility: AI-powered features can amplify your presence beyond traditional search and recommendations. These features connect learners to your courses in new ways by directly aligning with both organizational goals and individual learner needs.
• Saving you time and effort: AI tools can reduce the amount of time you spend on routine tasks, allowing you to focus more on creating impactful content and connecting with your learners.

As you familiarize yourself with these new features, refer to our GenAI Program FAQs article to answer questions you may have.

Introducing our AI tools

1. AI Assistant for learners (coming soon)

Those learning new skills are often overwhelmed by the amount of learning options available to them. Once they do find the right content, they can get stuck without answers to questions in real-time, which blocks the learning process and ultimately reduces the ability to deliver on company objectives. Our new AI Assistant is a virtual companion that guides learners through dynamic conversation, recommending relevant content and answering course-related questions in real-time. This makes the Udemy learning process more efficient and effective than it’s ever been.

The AI Assistant may appear within your course and leverage content from that course as needed to answer learner questions. Learners will also be able to find your course through a new discovery experience where the AI Assistant answers learning and career-related questions to recommend highly relevant course content in real-time.

What it means for you:  Enhances your course visibility, provides learners with timely support, and potentially reduces your Q&A workload. By enhancing learner engagement and satisfaction, this feature has the potential to increase revenue for your courses.

2. AI-powered learning paths for organization administrators (coming soon)

As companies transition to skills-based organizations, there’s an increasing demand for efficient ways to align learning content with critical business skills. However, identifying necessary skills and curating relevant content is often a manual, time-consuming process for organizational L&D leaders. Our AI-powered learning paths tool addresses this challenge head-on.

This innovative tool will help Udemy Business administrators quickly define critical skills and create tailored learning paths, streamlining a process that typically takes over 20 hours of manual work per learning path. It aligns your content directly with organizational needs, resulting in optimized learning programs that drive business goals.

Your content may be included in the relevant learning paths and used to help organizations better define their skills needs via a structured skill tree (a hierarchical breakdown of high-level skills into specific sub-skills)

What it means for you: Increases your Udemy Business course discoverability by aligning with high-priority organizational needs, potentially leading to higher course consumption and revenue.

3. Content AI tools for instructors 

We’ve already built several AI tools to enable you to share your industry expertise more effectively and reduce time-intensive tasks. This is just the beginning, and we have more features in store for 2025 and beyond. Our current offerings include:

• Practice tests: Easily explain practice test answers for multiple-choice and multi-select questions to help your learners when they get stuck.
• Coding exercises: Reduce the workload of creating solution code and test cases.
• Q&A (limited beta): Maintain your personal touch while making it more manageable to help your learners. 

What it means for you: Streamlines course creation and maintenance, allowing you to produce high-quality, interactive content more efficiently.

Our commitment to you

As we introduce AI-powered tools, we want to reaffirm these core principles:

• We respect intellectual property rights
• We use AI responsibly and in support of our mission
• We win together

Importantly, and in accordance with these principles, you’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to your content. We’re confident that your participation in the GenAI program will benefit you and your learners, but ultimately, the choice to participate is yours to make. That’s why we’re giving you the opportunity to opt out if you decide this isn’t right for you or your content.

To clarify the terms of your participation in the GenAI program, we’re releasing a formal Instructor Generative AI Policy on August 14. This comprehensive document will outline all the details of the program, including how your content may be used and the process for opting out. We encourage you to review this policy carefully so you can make an informed decision about your participation. During our initial pre-release testing phases, which will run through the end of 2024, we’ll refine these tools based on feedback from learners, organizations, and instructors like you. 

Instructor compensation for GenAI content usage

We believe that when Udemy wins, instructors win too. We expect our new AI features to drive learner engagement, increase customer retention, and ultimately, grow revenue for both Udemy and instructors. As we implement new GenAI offerings, we’re committed to ensuring instructors participating in the GenAI program benefit from the additional value their content brings to these tools. 

In situations where the benefit of using instructor content in our new AI features may not be sufficiently captured by our existing consumption-based pool allocation model, we’re developing ways to recognize the following:

• When your content is used by our AI tools
• Any AI Assistant interactions within your courses

Our goal is to create a model that aligns with our shared success. We’ll keep you informed of these changes as we finalize the details of this updated revenue sharing model.

What’s next?

We’re committed to keeping you informed throughout this process:

• August 7: Instructor event where our product team will walk through these AI tools
• August 14: Release of comprehensive AI policy
• August 21-September 12: GenAI program opt-out period for instructors
• December 31, 2024: Opted-out instructor content excluded from GenAI program*

* We’re committed to fully processing all opt-out requests ahead of publicly launching any of these AI offerings. Excluding opted-out content from our GenAI tools takes substantial effort to implement, especially when model regeneration is required. This timeline allows us to process opt-out requests while also refining our tools based on valuable pre-release testing with learners and customers.

We believe that by approaching AI responsibly and collaboratively, we can strengthen Udemy, create new opportunities for instructors, and further our shared mission to transform lives through learning.

Your thoughts and feedback are crucial as we move forward, and we invite you to share your perspectives in the Instructor Community. As we develop the program, we’ll update this article and the GenAI Program FAQ article. Together, we’ll shape the future of online education on Udemy.