Coursera and Udemy are now one company | Hacker News Reader

Coursera and Udemy are now one company

blog.coursera.org

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Coursera is a money losing company with a 10% y/y growth that IPOed at the top of the 2021 hype cycle. Now that the infinite money glitch is over they are in trouble, so they buy a marginally profitable company and slap Synergy and AI on it and pray to the gods of the market for more bountiful harvests of stocks issued.

Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.

pluralsight and oreilly are really good

It's been a while since I took a Coursera course but I LOVED it at the beginning. Between Machine Learning, the (numerical) optimisation courses and NAND-To-Tetris (even for the platform alone) it had so many great courses to pick from.

I did Andrew Ng's old Machine Learning, Obarsky's Scala course, the Ng's Deep Learning specialization, Nand to Tetris part 1 and a small Data Science course which wasn't very good. I think my very first course was "Model Thinking" course, but I never took the exam there.

I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.

But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.

Odersky ;)

"Model Thinking" was great!

And I really liked the gamification course by Kevin Werbach (The topic was still hot back then) - something I used extensively at my start up.

Whoops, Obarsky was the Amiga synth guy, yeah, I haven't taken any courses with him. Although I might consider it.

Didn’t the gamification course have one of the relatively few well done peer assessments? The course was good, but it’s interesting now that gamification features completely turn me off now on any platform or program attempting to motivate me toward a specific end, regardless of whether that goal is in my interest or the interest of someone else trying to make money.

Yes the peer assessments really did work.

And yeah: Gamification became shallow real fast. Even the Gamification techniques in games! I think the reason is that everyone focused on adopting the easy part (checkboxes, achievements, levels) while skipping the real core (player types, intrinsic motivation)... But the course even warned about this level of shallow implementation.

(Btw: A few months later I enrolled in a course on educational psychology on coursera that was supposed to showcase some SOTA techniques... They canceled it because they could not work out the details. I think academia is often just not good at pulling things off.)

I'll have to look at the Scala course, thanks!

Agreed about Odersky, the Scala course and the Scala Functional Programming course were solid (the latter a bit less so, a blemish was its insistence on Akka, but the concepts were interesting).

There was also a very interesting introduction to Programming Languages (by Dan... something? He was from the University of Washington I think) which covered multiple paradigms and had interesting things to say about the ML family.

Yes, Programming Languages by Dan Grossman! The course was later split up into three parts, with each part focusing on a particular language/paradigm: SML, Racket, and Ruby. Definitely one of the higher quality offerings on Coursera.

Yes, that's the one. I forgot that I discovered and played with Racket because of this course. Really cool language (and course).

The model thinking course was interesting but it should have had a follow up that was much more than a freshman survey course treatment of each model.

Reading online it seems like most people got the impression that it was establishing that all models are essentially useless. Instead it was showing that each of these models were an extremely efficient way to understand some dynamic situations, but that it’s still absurd to focus on only one model when trying to understand the world.

The Odersky Scala course was pretty cool. It gave me a basic understanding of monoids and monads that has stuck with me. Robert Sedgewick's courses were very good. Learned a lot about graphs.

+1 for NAND-to-Tetris. I combined it with a visual logic simulator so I could actually see the structures beyond the VHDL. I would love to go back and do Part 2.

I have the book, but I was unaware of the course. Was the book necessary for the course? Also, do you think the book is sufficient without the course?

The course has all the materials you need. The book itself is sufficient, but I think the course adds a bit more detail to the explanations.

I’ve purchased many Udemy courses over the years. The subscription plan they’ve been pushing makes no sense financially. I hope I’m wrong but I worry that eventually being a subscriber will be the only thing they offer.

Any courses you would particularly recommend? I always found that Udemy's vast catalogue made it hard to actually pick a course.

There was one course I did gor mongoose, muber I think it's called. I really liked it as a student because it's all very bite-sized and you could stop/start whenever. They do recaps at the beginning.

Compare that to a 6 hr video on YouTube, next day you already forgot what the timestamp was about.

I recommend anything by jonas schmedtmann for js/ts/react to work colleagues.

Yes! I have had unfettered access to it via a couple employers and the Illusion of Choice is real. The best thing they could do (for users like me, not sure if this is true for the majority) would be to go back to being a curator of quality and not a marketplace for anyone to make a course.

Being a big marketplace is their big differentiator from sites like masterclass

But at the same time I agree that they aren't doing enough to surface the high quality courses

>But at the same time I agree that they aren't doing enough to surface the high > quality courses

They have forced the creators to agree on being scrapped by AI or otherwise not showing up on their own top search. Ironically this has sealed their fate, and most top creators decided to move their content somewhere else.

Lots of hate for coursera and udemy, but what about competitors? Are folks having good results elsewhere?

I enjoyed a course I took last summer on EdX; not a super polished experience, but the content was good and the projects were challenging.

I’ve enjoyed pluralsight in the past, but it is hit or miss whether it will have content you’re interested in.

I’m on mathacademy but that is text only and a very focused niche.

What’s the hip/trendy mooc these days? Who will eat courserudemy’s lunch?

In the last 3-4 years, I've mostly been using niche platforms: frontendmasters, ui.dev (fireship now?), boot.dev, codecrafters, a couple of others. And books. I always have a Manning subscription running.

I've mostly focused on job-relevant upskilling. If I wanted to learn something outside my immediate area, in a university-course-like experience, I'd probably go back to coursera.

Front End Masters, frontendmasters.com has been my go to for many many years. Granted they're much lower volume than udemy and such sites. They're changing their name soon as they've long since expanded to cover topics outside "front end".

TBH I had no idea most people thought of these platforms as being focused on tech content. I've enjoyed a ton of social science courses. I was a big fan of the MOOC model at the peak of its hype cycle for the possibility of opening up education from world-class universities to the masses

Coursera and EdX were the peak of that for me. Udacity and Udemy were definitely more industry-focused. Some universities had their own platforms like MIT Open Courseware. Class Central was a great attempt to aggregate courses across different platforms.

I like Josh Comeau’s frontend courses a lot. Great interactive explanations and lots of relevant exercises to work through.

Coursera has high-quality, curated courses from reputable professors and institutions.

Udemy has almost the opposite.

Hopefully, this is handled well.

I'd go as far as to say Udemy is mostly bad practices and misinformation on nearly all subject matter.

There is the occasional gem but you better be ready to diggy diggy hole to find them.

Coursera used to have good quality courseware, now I get better stuff via a simple search on youtube. Youtube killed these two companies, well Udemy was garbage from the get go.

> Coursera has high-quality,

Coursera had ...

> Hopefully, this is handled well.

Indeed, Coursera will be fast learning best practices from Udemy.

Coursera HAD good courses. I used to use it, now it's fully enshittified.

Hopefully this doesn't change public libraries' access to Udemy.

I hope that the shitty login from Coursera is not in the future used on Udemy. It is the reason, why I am no longer using Coursera, despite in the past having finished 2 MOOCs with certificates there. Recently, I logged in at Udemy without issues and started a course there. Except for the DRM crap for some of the videos, that I need to watch in another browser, since I don't want to enable DRM crap in my main browser, all seems to work well.

Competition is for losers.

Blitzscaling and fast-scaling are hardly new phenomena in online service firms.

It isn't about competition, but rather getting market dominance early. =3

How valid are these certificates in the real world? Does anyone get benefitted by having them? I have always used these sites as a quick one off concept check. That was before llms, and I don’t have a use for these sites for my use case. So I don’t have any understanding of how valid they are in general

I have not noticed good results from candidates who have these certs.

The Computational Neuroscience one helped me get a PhD place many years ago.

But one of the professors on the admissions board was a friend of the professor who ran the Coursera course so they had a lot more trust in it.

> How valid are these certificates in the real world?

Outside of some very rare outlier cases, 0%.

The value is the potential knowledge you gained helping you to jumpstart other things. Employers don't value them at all.

Meh. I would've been more bothered back in the day when Coursera was a treasure trove of high quality courses, but it went downhill.

So to add Udemy's infinite catalogue of poorly structured courses, it only adds to the decline

Recently I've learned lots of stuff from CHATgpt and Gemini chats. And, of course, Youtube has taught me a lot.

> This is also Day 1. We’re being thoughtful and deliberate in how we bring our platforms together to deliver a unified, seamless experience.

So on day 1 they can deliver humongous amount of garbage, imagine what they can do on next day.

I've used both platforms regularly over the years, and I have mixed feelings about both. I mean they both have some truly excellent content, but so much utter trash. There should be some kind of quality control.

They make it reaaaaally hard to find the good stuff. Many courses are time sensitive (e.g. there's no point in learning a 20 year old version of PHP), but they frequently lie about when a course was created which makes it impossible to filter out old stuff.

There are so many courses that could benefit from more interactive tests/quizzes, but it's usually limited to solving a few ridiculously simple multiple choice questions. I'm not sure if that's a platform limitation or a course creator limitation.

So much of the content is extremely stale, and it even matters for languages that you would think are relatively unchanging.

It seems like they must have put almost no incentives in place for the instructors. Setting up a course must take even more effort than running a full semester course in their own school, but since no one is making new versions Coursera must not be paying them like it, or offering equity in the platform. I imagine that teaching students in person is also a lot more rewarding,

I haven’t taken any recent online courses, but EdX looked like it might still be good.

Coursera put NAND to tetris behind a paywal after being free for like a decade. Just puke.

I checked now, and it says "Enroll for free". Am I missing something?

You can “enroll” for free but you can’t access all the materials. Videos, code files etc are now paywalled.

We have free coursera at work. But I really hate it because it enforces random deadlines on you. Even though the courses are completely prerecorded and absolutely don't need any kind of deadlines. I just want to study at my own pace.

I also hate all the gamification.

Many people need deadlines or their own pace ends up being never.

Then have that as a feature, don’t force it

If they don't force it people won't complete the course. While that at first sounds good - they collect money - long term people who complete courses are your best marketing as they tell others and so completion is importation and thus the deadlines.

Though how much force is best is subject to debate.

> long term people who complete courses are your best marketing as they tell others and so completion is importation and thus the deadlines

I don't see why completing courses is a customer satisfaction criterion. I've had many courses that I didn't complete, yet I was quite satisfied with the content and could recommend it to friends.

On the other hand it puts me off. I'd never pay for this myself as it is.

Either way I kinda hate the 'course' format to learn stuff. I don't have the patience for it. Usually the official documentation teaches the same but in much more condensed format so I can absorb it much quicker. Because online trainings are always paced so the slowest participant can keep up and that's agonising when you have a 140+ IQ and ADHD.

I'd rather hyperfocus and learn everything in half a day. I've always done it like that and I'm a deep expert. PS not trying to brag here, these things are both a blessing and a curse.

But my work paid a lot for Coursera so they're always pushing people to use it :(

I'm a paying Udemy customer and they STILL have not acknowledged the recent data leak / hack - and I've asked them twice. Shitty customer service.

Coursera used to be great, the value was unparalleled. Great specializations too; I learned Python and data science techniques through the platform during the COVID pandemic. Lately though they've been pushing for courses to have AI dialogue modules, where an AI agent asks you questions about the content. These modules are absolute slop garbage, often asking repetitive questions that have no grounding in actual course content. I got sick of this and dropped my subscription about a month ago.

Hope this changes the state of things like API access at Udemy

Well, having less competition is a bad thing.

Does it change their subscription pricing?

They should double it. Double amount of fine courses, double subscription price. Simple.

What about LinkedInlearning tho?

That’s even worse right? At least pastime I checked it was just very very shallow ELI5 videos, nothing really technically deep.

For context this is sort of where we started:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119959

If you click the link to those original free courses, you get

   403 Forbidden

Don't know what it means, but Coursera made me sad a long time ago when it locked up all its value behind a paywall while getting rid of human interaction.

Is this the same content? https://online.stanford.edu/free-courses

No.

Blackrock buys more of the world.. cool story.

The pillaging will continue until quarterly earnings improve

What happens when they just stop being shared?

As a purchaser of many Udemy courses (and yes, there are good ones), I'm waiting for the enshittification to begin.

Oh, I have really, really good news for you specifically then!

That was another hype cycle, does everyone remember how they were supposed to replace all universities, and folks no longer needed higher education?

I have access via my employer and mostly they were never that different from other places like Pluralsight.

EDIT: typo, most => that

>> ... were aupposed to replace ...

I would love to hear insights into what has gone wrong, or what are the lessons learnt.

Nobody cares how much learning you did but how hard it was to get into the university you got your piece of paper from. Coding bootcamps eventually figured this out so they started to have selective admissions. Universities like Harvard have rampant grade inflation and you have to try to fail out of yet still have prestige due to selective admissions.

Oh no ...

The most annoying things for me about Coursera et al is that they aren't about education they are about job training. UC Berkeley (before that terrible law suit made them delete) had the best library of courses. Canvas et all has made it harder to get course materials, since everything is behind a paywall. Sometimes I want to learn some programming, but also I want to learn more math, history, philosophy, theology, literature, etc. and those non-job related subjects are largely missing from MOOCS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com