Introducing the August 2023 Instructor Insider

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Hey, instructors! We’re back this month to give you an update on what’s been going on here at Udemy, a mix of news, stats, updates, and our plans for the coming months. It’s part of an ongoing series that we’re calling The Instructor Insider. 

How things are going

The best thing is this: the work you do keeps transforming the lives of learners around the globe. And the numbers are positive too. Traffic to our marketplace remains strong, and Udemy Business helps more enterprise learners fill skills gaps than ever before. We’re thrilled that for the second year in a row, Stack Overflow’s 2023 survey rated Udemy the most popular online destination for learning to code. 

And, of course, we’re continuing to make improvements on the things you need, as we introduce new features and innovations — which you’ll read about below.

How we’re helping you do what you do best

We’re working hard to bring you improvements to tools and resources so you can measure your performance, create engaging experiences, and get the information you need:

Deeper Analytics: You can never have enough data. By looking back at past successes (and maybe some not-successes), you can see your way forward. Since our last update, we’ve continued to work on analytics around course engagement, with more historical data and easier historical comparisons. You can see these now in your Performance dashboard.

Coding exercises: Learners love coding exercises — in fact, Udemy Business courses with coding exercises see 90% more enrollments. We’ve now finished all the big updates we announced last time, including an IDE-like interface, more coding languages, AI-assisted coding exercise creation, and new landing page features that show which courses have coding exercises. 

Resources: Teaching and learning are the heart of what we do. So we’re working on new resources and opportunities for you to connect. This means refreshed articles in the Teaching Center along with hosted coffee chats and webinars in the instructor community on topics like learning design and social media.

How we’re improving the Udemy experience

You’re now seeing part of a Udemy evolution. Last time we came to you, we told you how we’re creating a more cohesive Udemy experience, one that’s less about the Marketplace or Udemy Business, but rather the entire Udemy experience. Here’s some of what you can expect there:

One website: You’ll start seeing changes to the English-language homepage as we test designs that present a full picture of what we (and you) have to offer to both individual learners and enterprise learners.

Certifications: Courses that help learners prepare for certification exams should be easy to find and identify. We’re happy to say this is now live, and you should definitely take a look.

Gamification: Getting your learners to stay engaged is good for their goals and your bottom line. Guided by learning design principles, our efforts continue on learning streaks along with other incentives to keep learners engaged with your courses. Your learners should be seeing some of these changes in action now.

Personalization: We’ve been working with AI to offer more personalized search for learners, which means better discoverability for your courses. After all, learners sometimes want very specific information from a course, and with the help of AI we can help them better formulate their queries and deliver the right content, whether that’s a course, a lecture, or a specific moment

Tip: You can really benefit from our personalization efforts updates by making sure your course sections are labeled clearly. The more specific and descriptive, the better chance we can return the right content for a search.

The future:

We aim to be the leading platform for online skills development. We know there’s plenty of work to do to help you meet the needs of learners and organizations around the world. So, here are a few of the projects we’re focusing on in the coming months:

Practice tests: We’re now taking what we’ve learned from coding exercise improvements and applying it to practice tests. That means making the process easier for you and better for your learners’ goals. 

Smarter insights for Udemy Business: Our Marketplace Insights tool already helps you discover what individual learners want to learn next, but we’re exploring how we can help you discover what our Udemy Business customers want next too.

New marketing tests: We’re always trying new techniques and technologies for marketing Udemy and your courses. But as we roll out changes to our website, you’ll see us testing new ways to bring more learners in, with a focus on connecting them to the learning experiences that will serve them best.

Events and community: We think one of the best things about teaching with Udemy is that you know you’re not doing this alone. So we’re planning more opportunities for you to engage with one another. You can see some of those events now — plus enter a new giveaway — over in the instructor community.

 

We hope we’ve gotten you excited about what we’re working on and what’s to come. As always, reach out to us in the Instructor Community and let us know what you think.