State of Udemy 2018

State of Udemy 2018

 

We just wrapped up our company’s annual planning workshop, where we had the opportunity to reflect on 2017 and align on where we’re headed in 2018. Needless to say, we talked a lot about the critical role instructors play in our marketplace and the vital importance of developing our platform with your needs top of mind.

While we accomplished a lot together in 2017, including surpassing 20 million students, we know we’ve only scratched the surface. At Udemy LIVE, on Facebook, and in individual conversations with many of you, we’ve heard what you need to be successful and have set our 2018 priorities accordingly. While you’re hard at work developing awesome new courses, improving existing courses, and serving your Udemy students, we’ll be working hard to support you in reaching your goals. In 2018, we want you to be able to connect more meaningfully and easily with your students than ever before and reach your full potential as an instructor.

So, while we’re still feeling that new year buzz, we wanted to share a glimpse of what we’re working on for you this year. While we won’t cover every detail about what we’re building for you here, we’ll keep you well-informed as we make progress.

 

Adding key instructor features to our mobile app

We first told you about this at Udemy LIVE 2017, and the response was tremendous! We know you’re counting on us to follow through, so we’re making this one of our most important launches for the year ahead. We’re excited to unveil the first version of the app at Udemy LIVE 2018.

 

Providing better analytics and insights

The rollout of Marketplace Insights was definitely a highlight of 2017, but we’re not done yet. In the next couple months we’ll introduce supply-and-demand data in languages beyond English so you can identify more opportunities in the marketplace. We’re also investing in bringing you new insights so you can better understand your students and how they interact with your courses. As we add these new tools to the ones you already have, we’ll also work to consolidate them in one centralized, easy-to-use dashboard.

 

Enabling better global reach

With Udemy students in 190 countries, speaking 50 languages, we understand the huge opportunity you have to reach learners worldwide, but we also know localization can be difficult and complicated. As Udemy continues to grow globally, we’re investing more deeply in helping you cater to students of all backgrounds. You saw the beginnings of this with the auto-generated captions and caption-editing tool we introduced in 2017. We’ll evolve both of these and build on them, so you can offer courses relevant to this growing global audience. One way we’ll do this is by experimenting with machine translating captions.

 

Improving the review system

We know the review system isn’t perfect, so, as we shared with you in December 2017, we intend to improve it. Over the next few months, you’ll see us make improvements to the spam review filter and start to treat ratings differently based on factors like how much of your course a student has consumed. In addition, we’re going to start collecting and surfacing more relevant, useful feedback from students in 2018. As we make these improvements and add new features, we’ll regularly communicate them to you.

 

Evolving how we think about pricing

Over the years, we’ve learned it’s extremely difficult to develop a pricing strategy that supports both consistent growth and instructor control. We recognize that our platform currently tends to have a one-size-fits-all pricing model, however, this has been instrumental in making Udemy courses accessible to 20 million students around the world. Affordability remains a primary concern, but we believe that, in the future, courses on different topics, of different lengths, or with different attributes might need to be priced differently. We’re going to take a methodical and iterative approach to evolving pricing, and we’re committed to working with you on this challenge throughout 2018.

 

Protecting your content

We are committed to making Udemy the best place to teach online, and we’re redoubling our efforts to enforce your rights as a content creator. To help us remove content that turns up on other platforms without your permission, we partner with an anti-piracy service called Pirashield that files copyright infringement reports on your behalf and at no cost to you. Additionally, our legal team will pursue legal action where appropriate. If you’d like to learn more about how we protect your content, we encourage you to read our intellectual property policy, which also has instructions and the link to file your claim with PiraShield.

 

Making the hard work pay off

At Udemy, we set ambitious goals for ourselves—just like you. And, just like you, we never shy away from hard work. While it won’t be easy, we believe that with these investments and your partnership, we’ll be able to help you achieve your goals in 2018. Thank you again for a wonderful 2017, and we look forward to an even better year to come!

Frank Visciano

Vice President of Marketplace Operations