Ask HN: How do MOOCs compare from an instructor perspective? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do MOOCs compare from an instructor perspective?

12 pointsbigtunacan1 comment

There are so many options in the MOOC space with Lynda, Coursera, Pluralsight, Udemy, Udacity, and so many others I'm probably not aware of.

I've been thinking for awhile about putting together some classes to submit to one of these (I've been doing live presentations and classes for a few years now), but I'm not sure how they all stack up with each other?

I've looked into Pluralsight and Udemy and it seems like Pluralsight has better revenue share rates, but they are also more prescriptive in how classes should be styled. Udemy takes a bigger cut, but it seems the instructor is free to do things their own preferred way.

I would love feedback from anyone who has experience creating content for any of these programs.

I’ve set up a course on Udemy last October. I have not tried the rest so I’ll just talk about Udemy.

The key thing about Udemy is that it does all the sales for you, which is a HUGE deal if you are just starting out and have little credentials/followings in the MOOC space.

Udemy works on a flash sales model. They regularly give large discounts (90%, 95% etc), especially to their existing student pool. Students pay a one-off fee per course for lifetime access. There are a lot of cross-course selling going on. This model will be favourable for you if your course has a broad target audience. You should expect low revenue per student + high student count.

If you want to build specialised course and charge high fees per student, Udemy is not the place for you. You can try to host your own course on platforms such as usefedora.com (startupclass.co is hosted here!) or patience.io.

Many of the top courses on Udemy have a common theme. They either directly or indirectly teach students to make money. Two styles seem to work best: 1) A course that teaches many skills/topics (eg. Web dev course that teaches HTML, CSS, PHP, JS etc) 2) A course that goes in depth into one skill/topic (eg. Swift, Amazon E-commerce).

Top earners in Udemy can make 50k to 100k a month. Doubt you can earn that from platforms that run on a student subscription model.

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