Key Takeways
- All Udemy courses are self-paced and asynchronous, using pre-recorded video lectures.
- Instructors may or may not update their course materials as their fields change.
- Anyone can submit a course to Udemy for free.
- A dedicated quality assurance team evaluates Udemy courses to ensure they are valuable.
Need a quick summary or topic refresh? Some classes only run for 30 minutes. Want to fully dive in and master a new skill? Look for bootcamp-style programs featuring 70 hours of lectures and dozens of assignments.
All courses are self-paced and asynchronous, meaning you get lifetime access to pre-recorded video content, which course instructors may or may not update as their respective industries evolve. Many courses include downloadable resources, assignments and projects. Engaged instructors might allow you to contact them via email or another platform. Otherwise, you can ask for help through the course’s Q&A section.
While Udemy’s scale is impressive—more than 34 million unique visitors each month—it left me with a few questions. I couldn’t help but wonder… Where does all this content come from? And how can you be sure you’re getting a quality education? To research this article, I met with Udemy CMO Genefa Murphy and vice president of product management David Koehn.
How Do Courses Get Added On Udemy?
Udemy does not consider itself a publishing platform, Murphy told me, which allows its content to stay fresh and responsive to new trends. Instead of creating its own bootcamps, Udemy relies on external submissions—and it receives around 5,000 each month.
Anyone can submit a course for free. Udemy allows potential instructors to use its Marketplace Insights tool, which reveals trending topics, student demand, estimated payments and current level of competition.
This agile production method means Udemy can react quicker to the market than other learning platforms. Murphy offered two examples: Covid-19 and ChatGPT. In both cases, Udemy had relevant courses on its platform within about 10 days, allowing learners to navigate developing situations with a bit more information.
Of course, those early courses wouldn’t be comprehensive. But they give curious students a place to start learning about new topics (including lifetime access to any content updates).
Quality Assurance
After each course is submitted, Udemy’s quality assurance team reviews it. These professionals ensure the content is valuable, high quality and unproblematic. Restricted topics include relationships, violence, weapons, illegal activities and discrimination.
From there, Udemy can best be described as a meritocracy: The market decides what courses are promoted. Popular, high-rated courses are included in the Personal Plan and business plans.
Udemy’s QA team checks for trends and notifies instructors whose courses receive repeated negative reviews. After a certain number of warnings, the instructor’s content will be removed from the platform.
On one hand, it’s incredible that Udemy boasts such a variety of well-reviewed courses across hundreds of topics. But if you’re brand new to a topic, the “more is more” approach might make it challenging to sift through a dozen similar courses in search of the perfect match. Later in this article, I’ll offer some guidance on choosing the best course for your needs.
Who Teaches Udemy Courses?
Udemy works with more than 75,000 instructors. The company breaks these individuals into two groups. Those who get the most engagement receive additional insights into their courses, including when students interact with the content or where they drop off. Instructors can use this data to improve the course.
On average, top instructors make four and a half updates per course per year, Murphy said, though it’s not clear how extensive these updates are.
Instructors come from all walks of life, which makes sense given the variety of available content on Udemy’s platform. Some have a background in education but have since transitioned to industry jobs; for others, vice versa. Udemy also sees content creators who take a more agile approach to their courses.
Many teach full time with Udemy, and some use Udemy in conjunction with their in-person teaching endeavors. For example, one of Udemy’s top instructors, Dr. Angela Yu, teaches an in-person coding bootcamp in London but offers her full curriculum online through Udemy. I’ll trial this course in a later section.