9 ms·

Coursera to combine with Udemy

588 points by throwaway019254 9mo ago

the__alchemist 9mo ago
Tangent: Does anyone know what happened to EdX and MitX in particular? It seems they stopped adding content ~10 years ago. Those were [are still] a fantastic resource!
mathattack 9mo ago
This seemed inevitable, no? I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
- Xenoamorphous 9mo ago
  LLMs typically still require some interactivity, no? Much easier to watch some videos in many cases.
  - mathattack 9mo ago
    Do you retain the info? I guess it’s ok for compliance videos but I’m not sure about retention. I write this as someone who wants online education succeed.
    - zozbot234 9mo ago
      Retention is an issue with education more generally (including the meatspace variety) but spaced-repetition systems (SRS) address it quite well. With online video, you can even prompt an LLM to provide a suggested distillation of the content into Q&A flashcards.
  - HPsquared 9mo ago
    Interacting with the material is how you learn.
  - jillesvangurp 9mo ago
    All forms of education boil down to people putting in the time to engage their brain with the subject matter. Most organized education is based on coercing, peer pressure, or social pressure to get students in situations where they kind of have to engage e.g. in order to pass exams, or other exercises, or by being forced to listen to a teacher for a few hours in a class room. Online education is not that different. You basically put in the time watching the videos and doing the homework and tests. The test and certificate become the goal. Self study whether powered by LLMs or by good old books or whatever source of information, basically relies more on things like curiosity and discipline. Some people do this naturally. The nice thing about LLMs is that they adapt to your curiosity and that it is easy to dumb down stuff to the point where you can understand things. Lots of people engage with LLMs this way. Some do that to feed their confirmation bias, some do it to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the net result is that you learn. I think LLMs are still severely underused in education. We romanticize the engaged, wise, teacher that works their ass off to get students to see the light. But the reality is that a lot of teachers have to juggle a lot of not so interested students. Some of them aren't that great at the job to begin with. Burnouts are quite common among teachers. And there are a lot of students that fall through the cracks of the education system. I think there's some room there for creative teachers to lighten their workloads and free up more time to engage with students that need it. I saw a teacher manually checking a students work on the train a few days ago. Nice red pen. Very old school work. She probably had dozens of such tests to review. I imagine you get quite efficient at it after a few decades. But feeding a pdf to chat GPT probably would generate a very thorough evaluation in seconds given some good criteria. She could probably cut a few hours of her day. There are all sorts of ways to leverage LLMs to help teachers or students here. Also plenty of ways for students to cheat. But there are ways to mitigate that.
  - cultofmetatron 9mo ago
    watching a few good videos is a great way to FEEL like you're learning. just cuz you watch a 15 hour videoo course on c doesn't mean you can write c any more than watching a 2 hour video course on kung foo means you can kick like bruce lee The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill. TLDR: you learn by DOING
- brobdingnagians 9mo ago
  I use Udemy courses all the time; great for compliance, game engine training, and insightful training of soft skills. Good instructors have insight and comprehensive coverage that questioning LLMs do not have.
  - Y_Y 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- HPsquared 9mo ago
  LLMs could be a boost to MOOCs because you can use them as a tutor to help with the material. People tend to have trouble finishing MOOCs, and it can be frustrating to get stuck on a particular aspect without much instructor support. Anything that makes it more interactive could help with both of those. I think LLMs are a great complement to MOOCs.
- throwawaysleep 9mo ago
  One of the challenges is that few people are genuinely interested in a comprehensive view of a topic. Most of the time, I want just enough to get to the next step and get rid of a problem. I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
- ghaff 9mo ago
  I'm not sure how much it has to do with LLMs. It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away. From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
  - XenophileJKO 9mo ago
    I think what killed all MOOC learning was that they ALL saw this giant TAM for corporate training and thought.. we have to get into that market. That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value. Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value to the learner. It becauses now it morphs into can we show value to the clients/decision makers/learning admins?
    - ghaff 9mo ago
      I largely disagree. If you look at the people involved (and what they said at the time), I think there was a legitimate "We can rethink higher education" which obviously didn't happen for a variety of reasons. It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.
      - XenophileJKO 9mo ago
        I'm defining "why" it morphed.
        ghaff 9mo ago
        Because it wasn't making any money.
zigman1 9mo ago
Interesting, can this be an expected outcome of AI adoption? Mergers of big competitors?
- p-e-w 9mo ago
  Seems to be the expected outcome of everything, in every industry, for the past 10 years or so.
  - christophilus 9mo ago
    > 10 years or so Centuries, really, with only periodic exceptions.
  - bossyTeacher 9mo ago
    Makes you wonder what happens when all that is left is a single national company and a couple of ever struggling businesses
- master-lincoln 9mo ago
  just capitalism in the final stage
  - Libidinalecon 9mo ago
    Yes, "Late Stage Capitalism" the idea from the text written in 1902 by Werner Sombart. The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.
- oersted 9mo ago
  Remember Conglomerates? It just keeps changing name. Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
- 9mo ago
dhruv3006 9mo ago
Thats a welcome step really !
broretore 9mo ago
Both Udemy and Coursera are public companies?
- joshdavham 9mo ago
  Was also news to me!
iambateman 9mo ago
It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application. But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn. These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.
- apwheele 9mo ago
  Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar. Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe? Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.) I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
  - iamflimflam1 9mo ago
    Unfortunately the get rich quick/grifter community realised that online courses was a way to make money.
  - elric 9mo ago
    > Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera. Mean while their prices seem to go up every year.
piyushpr134 9mo ago
Universities are not going anywhere MOOC are a dead end
- f6v 9mo ago
  Turns out that an online certificate isn't worth anything when layoffs happen and the market is oversaturated with people who have real degrees. MOOCs have their place, but it's a very narrow set of disciplines.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
    I work at a university and half of the coursework seems worse than the good MOOCs. Esp. the more practical ones. (Might be a problem of that university, still ...)
    - user_7832 9mo ago
      It's probably not a uni specific issue. I went to a top EU uni, and there absolutely were courses that could've just been an ~~email~~ video. Admitedly not everything was bad, but the quality of education isn't as high as it should be.
      - SoftTalker 9mo ago
        We have a lot more students in university, and a lot more professors. Inevitably this means converging on "average."
        GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
        More students _per course_ than a MOOC cohort? -- doubt. If you add up all courses of a while discipline, edu portals still serve way more students. In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers? I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.
config_yml 9mo ago
I could never distinguish them anyway, so this is welcome simplification of the world to me.
synergy20 9mo ago
I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.
- stef25 9mo ago
  For a basic crash course in Python, is there anything better than the top rated Udemy course, can YT offer something better ? I really don't mind paying the 12$ it costs on Udemy.
  - albert_e 9mo ago
    Corey Schafer on YouTube should be in your bookmarks -- Playlists ... Python Programming Beginner Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXhwoFUiLCjGgY7 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXh... Python OOP Tutorials - Working with Classes https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhwlXsIBIdSeYtc https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhw... Python Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTi...
  - ghshephard 9mo ago
    You will never do better than https://www.pythonmorsels.com/ https://www.pythonmorsels.com/ This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.
    - belter 9mo ago
      Terrible audio quality...
- joshdavham 9mo ago
  I get so much decision fatigue when choosing a course series on YouTube. On every technical topic, there are like 15 people making courses anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours.
cheriot 9mo ago
Udemy figured out that selling to enterprise is way more profitable than individuals. Coursera figured out that University/Company brand is more valuable than Joe's Ultimate Course. But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
- XenophileJKO 9mo ago
  I think that window is closing pretty fast. Models can currently construct pretty good learning material by themselves. I setup a project using claude code as the agent that researches and constructs learning material and lessons. The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
  - breadsniffer 9mo ago
    can you expand on your workflow?
qmr 9mo ago
Less competition seems a bad thing.
- random9749832 9mo ago
  They don't do anything. It is like the app store but for courses.
torben-friis 9mo ago
As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching. Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit. If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
- nsagent 9mo ago
  Agreed. That's how I got my start in ML, through Andrew Ng's course a little over a decade ago. I then went on to get my PhD in CS focused on NLP.
- coldcache 9mo ago
  MIT OCW does a great job of this
- azangru 9mo ago
  > Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
  - ibrahima 9mo ago
    Iirc the complaint was that machine generated captions were not good enough :(. Yeah it's pretty sad.
  - 9mo ago
sharadov 9mo ago
Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps. YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
- DougN7 9mo ago
  Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?
  - moralestapia 9mo ago
    The same way you double check with any other method you prefer? Duh. LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
    - contagiousflow 9mo ago
      You double check every university lecture you've been apart of?
      - nkmnz 9mo ago
        That's what is called "studying" or "reading a textbook", isn't it?
        IshKebab 9mo ago
        Uhm no? Reading a textbook is obviously not the same as fact checking a textbook.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        nkmnz 9mo ago
criddell 9mo ago
What are the best online courses you’ve taken? On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO. The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
- joshdavham 9mo ago
  I recently bought a course on the Spring Boot from codewithmosh. Despite spring boot being a dry subject, it was probably the best intro backend course I’d ever taken!
- AntiqueFig 9mo ago
  On Coursera I really liked the Roman Architecture course from Yale: https://www.coursera.org/learn/roman-architecture https://www.coursera.org/learn/roman-architecture The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
- Blackthorn 9mo ago
  There was a set of three "legacy" courses on something called Saylor Academy back in the day by an instructor named Kenneth Manning. Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Materials. They were all basically just filmed classroom lectures, but the filming was done well. Great instructor.
- n8cpdx 9mo ago
  I did a computer graphics course on EdX: https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-graphics/the-university-of-california-san-diego-computer-graphics https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-graphics/the-university-o... Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust. The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for. Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out. I plan to take the follow up soon.
guluarte 9mo ago
Coursera certificates are now officially worthless
- stonogo 9mo ago
  If you were taking Coursera classes for the credentials, I'm not sure the plan was sound to begin with.
- anshumankmr 9mo ago
  BESIDEs the Andrew NG's coursera courses (the OG ones). Got me into ML/DL very early on.
FabHK 9mo ago
The ongoing enshittification of Coursera, Udacity, and EdX is sad to watch.
- Apocryphon 9mo ago
  Wonder how Khan Academy is doing these days.
  - the__alchemist 9mo ago
    Still slaps
coffeecoders 9mo ago
I've realized over time that I personally cannot learn from video at all. Even "great" lectures don't stick. Text does! Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me. What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual. To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".
- MarkLowenstein 9mo ago
  The dream never dies, possibly because people remember when class time was supplanted by a movie. Anyone remember "I Am Joe's Heart"? Those movies showed that you could just sit and watch passively like TV, and you'd learn quite a bit, with professional diagrams and animations to help. Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
random9749832 9mo ago
The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.
- ghaff 9mo ago
  You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)
deknos 9mo ago
will this mean i loose my saved courses o_O?
- anshumankmr 9mo ago
  At least not immediately. No reason to alienate existing customers who would revolt and sue.
chrisweekly 9mo ago
This same week, Egghead (https://egghead.io https://egghead.io) started offering $500 lifetime access to everything they ever made or will make. There's definitely some excellent material in their catalog. But the signals sure seem to point toward the decline of centralized human-created coursework.
- chrisweekly 9mo ago
  (meta: genuinely curious why my observation was downvoted. I may take a further karma hit for mentioning it but worth it if it elicits a meaningful response. what gives?)
  - philipwhiuk 9mo ago
    At a guess, because it sounds like a product pitch and these 'lifetime payment things' are ALWAYS curtailed if the product actually survives.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    I didn’t downvote you, but lifetime offerings tend to be a red flag.
    - chrisweekly 9mo ago
      Agreed! (That's why I mentioned it in the context of TFA.) Thanks for replying tho
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  Whose lifetime?
- azemetre 9mo ago
  Egghead.io is not worth it, the courses there have a shelf life even shorter than frontendmasters. Authors mostly use it to dump their wares then never update the course afterwards while breaking API changes litter their backlog making most content, unless it was released in the last 3 months, worthless. Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO. Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
kirykl 9mo ago
For JavaScript I’ve found Scrimba to be worlds better than anything on Udemy or Coursera
tootyskooty 9mo ago
both have had questionable content for a while, it's a wonder people are still paying for them. especially given that LLMs exist (and youtube for that matter).
- ghaff 9mo ago
  If I were a professor at a decent school, I'd probably look at the landscape of MOOCs and go "Why am I spending any time on this?" It seemed like something new and potentially exciting at one point. I certainly wouldn't today.
Rakshath_1 9mo ago
[flagged]
languagehacker 9mo ago
Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth. Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer. But what do I know.
karel-3d 9mo ago
Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad! it's all "AI this" "AI that" who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
- SamDc73 9mo ago
  Honestly, I feel like it's easy to filter out good/bad courses on Coursera by stuff like University name (although gotta admit last time did a course there were 3 years ago)
- levocardia 9mo ago
  Ironically the very first coursera course was (IIRC) Andrew Ng's machine learning course, which was fantastic, and the deep learning specialization, which was also phenomenal. I can unironically say that Andrew Ng was the best instructor I ever had in grad school (and I didn't go to Stanford...).
  - karel-3d 9mo ago
    Doesn't he own Coursera?
tmaly 9mo ago
As a Udemy course instructor, I am not sure what to think. I was not able to opt-out of the new AI features.
crimsoneer 9mo ago
This feels like another nail in the coffin of the open, optimistic internet we all dreamed of in 2012, and it makes me sad.
softwaredoug 9mo ago
IMO the market is getting distupted by more live audience and curated platforms like Maven.
Apocryphon 9mo ago
Previously I asked how did MOOCs, which were such an early 2010s hyped tech trend, fall so far from its promise. Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710
nickpsecurity 9mo ago
The best courses I wanted to take are split between Coursera, Udemy, and EdX. The first two can give certificates cheaply. A merger could be really helpful if they do it in a month or two. ;)
nickjj 9mo ago
I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years. I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well. Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
- iris-digital 9mo ago
  Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.
  - nickjj 9mo ago
    > Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor. It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.
- gustavopezzi 9mo ago
  I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.
SilverElfin 9mo ago
Are the contents of these websites current enough to keep up with new technologies? I know universities have been slow to evolve with AI generally …
motbus3 9mo ago
I honest dislike the idea of having yet another niche going with less competitors. Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time. Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
ee64a4a 9mo ago
Excellent, another sector tending towards monopoly. As we all know, markets work best when everyone is allowed to merge with/buy out one another!
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
belter 9mo ago
Udemy course ratings have always felt absurd to me. The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing. The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
nkmnz 9mo ago
Udemy never sold knowledge. They are selling that feeling of a new beginning, of a better future, of FINALLY doing (buying!!!) that course you always wanted to finish. 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.
- echelon 9mo ago
  This. E-learning can be like Steam to some people. You buy the course and then it sits there. You get a dopamine hit when you buy, and you can finish the course later. Sometime. Some people need structure. But mostly structure is a way of dragging along those who aren't soaking up learning already, who aren't naturally seeking the next problem and breaking it apart. Not everyone does this, and so structure helps as a forcing function. There are some subjects where you need academic and theoretical grounding. Or expensive equipment. For everything else, it's best to get hands on and just throw yourself at the subject. There's nothing really stopping a motivated person.
- ziml77 9mo ago
  It's so true. Buying them is an easy way to feel good in the moment and it's easy to tell yourself that you'll do the courses later. I bought a handful before realizing what was happening. I haven't done it since then and I definitely need to consciously override any temptations. I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
  - johnwheeler 9mo ago
    Sounds like my bookshelf
  - ghaff 9mo ago
    Gym membership for many.
    - ivape 9mo ago
      I think Fitness definitely caught on though. You could say it was a constant recurring self-promise some prior generations made, but our current generations are not lacking on a focus on fitness. Education is not too different. We’re not exactly a society that goes “Going to dig into an interesting course this weekend with the wife”, no, nowhere near that. Takes time, generations.
zhyder 9mo ago
End of an era: video (with broadband Internet penetration) was the best tool we had for 15+ years. But LLMs are now good enough, including in image+infographic generation and factuality (especially when grounding resources are provided... which is where human experts still matter). I think video is now better only for learning physical hands-on skills... and those videos tend to be on YouTube rather than on Udemy or Coursera. Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic-shift-americans-no-longer-see-four-year-college-degrees-rcna243672 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic... A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  LLMs are not remotely good enough to use as a learning tool. They still make shit up a ton of the time, and you can only catch it if you already know the material (so, not useful for learning). They probably never will be useful for learning, since even after all this time hallucinations are still just as bad as they ever were.
  - zhyder 9mo ago
    Have you tried them with providing a grounding resource, e.g. attaching a file to ChatGPT or NotebookLM? Yes need some human expert to create (or curate) that grounding resource in the first place, but LLMs handle the rest well: presenting info in different ways and paces, interacting with the learner like a tutor, etc.
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sp4cec0wb0y 9mo ago
Good thing Youtube is free because this consolidation is only going to raise their prices. Thank you to all the hard working educational Youtubers out there.
zkmon 9mo ago
Trying the merger as a survival option, not a "let's take over world" option. MOOCs need to reinvent themselves again, for the hybrid workforce that is AI+human.
zelphirkalt 9mo ago
I once did 2 moocs on coursera about machine learning, and I learned a lot, but some time afterwards, they f'ed up their login so much, that they required Google stuff to be loaded, which made me reconsider even logging in there. The platform seemed to get ever more bloated. Maybe I should check what their status is now, whether one can use their site without implicitly agreeing to being tracked by Google. No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.
- zelphirkalt 9mo ago
  Addendum: Oh OK, they f'ed it up even more now, so that the login page doesn't even appear, when you click login and don't enable JS. How silly. I guess they have also fallen to the "everything must be an SPA" fad.
seattle_spring 9mo ago
I interviewed for an eng role at Coursera back in 2012, not too long after they were founded. Their claimed goal at the time was a re-imagining of education, insisting that current educational institutions were stuck in the past. Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system. I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
TonyAlicea10 9mo ago
I've been an instructor on Udemy for a decade. Lots of web devs tell me they got their career started on my courses there, which is something that is very dear to me. Udemy got me started in online dev education. I'm very sorry to see it go.
andrewrn 9mo ago
As a counterpoint to the negativity in here. I purchased one of Angela Yu's basic webdev courses a couple years back and it springboarded my coding ability. I left it rather quickly to just build random stuff I wanted, but still, it was the spark.
- SamDc73 9mo ago
  Angela Yu course is good, told my brother about it and he had hard time figuring some stuff out cause some pieces were outdated (he has zero experience)
- michaelcampbell 9mo ago
  Same here; I've gotten a lot of utility from Udemy. Actually kind of got me a job (tbf, the manager I'd known for years and he'd've hired me regardless, but I was able to actually DO the job he wanted me to do basically day 0, even when he was willing to hire me and let me learn as I went). There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.
chrismsimpson 9mo ago
Feels like this is AI replacing whole categories before said category can adapt to the new landscape
KnuthIsGod 9mo ago
This is part of the enshittification of everything. Udemy was generally crap. Coursera was decent. Crap eats decent.
fuzztester 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani
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alexpadula 9mo ago
Bound to happen!
wagslane 9mo ago
I _think_ this is good for Boot.dev... (I'm the founder, which is why I care)
astrostl 9mo ago
It's such an amazing business model: - create a platform to host content others create - get employees to ask for company-provided access - almost none of these employees really use it - collect subscription revenue indefinitely
qwertytyyuu 9mo ago
Oh no, something always irked me about udemy, especially those fomo sales
chirau 9mo ago
How do both of these compare the FreeCodeCamp?
chrisgd 9mo ago
It’s funny because everyone under the sun has been telling these two companies to come together since 2018 when online learning courses started to fade away. They are finally doing it after both went public and lost 80% of their value. At least the management team is going to make some money.
OhioMan2943 9mo ago
I love market consolidation
SilverSlash 9mo ago
"Coursera to Combine with Udemy to Empower the Global Workforce with Skills for the AI Era" Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better. I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
elAhmo 9mo ago
Udemy always had that scammy vibe with courses "90% off" (from to $200 to $20 and things like that), plagiarism, as well as anti-patterns and very questionable quality control on the courses themselves. They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad. I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things. I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.
braza 9mo ago
The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses. I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background. I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
beeboop0 9mo ago
[dead]
everdev 9mo ago
This after I see a video about how online tutorials are losing popularity to AI LLMs.
ninahenderson 9mo ago
[dead]

Tangent: Does anyone know what happened to EdX and MitX in particular? It seems they stopped adding content ~10 years ago. Those were [are still] a fantastic resource!

mathattack 9mo ago

This seemed inevitable, no? I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.

Xenoamorphous 9mo ago
LLMs typically still require some interactivity, no? Much easier to watch some videos in many cases.
- mathattack 9mo ago
  Do you retain the info? I guess it’s ok for compliance videos but I’m not sure about retention. I write this as someone who wants online education succeed.
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    Retention is an issue with education more generally (including the meatspace variety) but spaced-repetition systems (SRS) address it quite well. With online video, you can even prompt an LLM to provide a suggested distillation of the content into Q&A flashcards.
- HPsquared 9mo ago
  Interacting with the material is how you learn.
- jillesvangurp 9mo ago
  All forms of education boil down to people putting in the time to engage their brain with the subject matter. Most organized education is based on coercing, peer pressure, or social pressure to get students in situations where they kind of have to engage e.g. in order to pass exams, or other exercises, or by being forced to listen to a teacher for a few hours in a class room. Online education is not that different. You basically put in the time watching the videos and doing the homework and tests. The test and certificate become the goal. Self study whether powered by LLMs or by good old books or whatever source of information, basically relies more on things like curiosity and discipline. Some people do this naturally. The nice thing about LLMs is that they adapt to your curiosity and that it is easy to dumb down stuff to the point where you can understand things. Lots of people engage with LLMs this way. Some do that to feed their confirmation bias, some do it to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the net result is that you learn. I think LLMs are still severely underused in education. We romanticize the engaged, wise, teacher that works their ass off to get students to see the light. But the reality is that a lot of teachers have to juggle a lot of not so interested students. Some of them aren't that great at the job to begin with. Burnouts are quite common among teachers. And there are a lot of students that fall through the cracks of the education system. I think there's some room there for creative teachers to lighten their workloads and free up more time to engage with students that need it. I saw a teacher manually checking a students work on the train a few days ago. Nice red pen. Very old school work. She probably had dozens of such tests to review. I imagine you get quite efficient at it after a few decades. But feeding a pdf to chat GPT probably would generate a very thorough evaluation in seconds given some good criteria. She could probably cut a few hours of her day. There are all sorts of ways to leverage LLMs to help teachers or students here. Also plenty of ways for students to cheat. But there are ways to mitigate that.
- cultofmetatron 9mo ago
  watching a few good videos is a great way to FEEL like you're learning. just cuz you watch a 15 hour videoo course on c doesn't mean you can write c any more than watching a 2 hour video course on kung foo means you can kick like bruce lee The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill. TLDR: you learn by DOING
brobdingnagians 9mo ago
I use Udemy courses all the time; great for compliance, game engine training, and insightful training of soft skills. Good instructors have insight and comprehensive coverage that questioning LLMs do not have.
- Y_Y 9mo ago
  [flagged]
HPsquared 9mo ago
LLMs could be a boost to MOOCs because you can use them as a tutor to help with the material. People tend to have trouble finishing MOOCs, and it can be frustrating to get stuck on a particular aspect without much instructor support. Anything that makes it more interactive could help with both of those. I think LLMs are a great complement to MOOCs.
throwawaysleep 9mo ago
One of the challenges is that few people are genuinely interested in a comprehensive view of a topic. Most of the time, I want just enough to get to the next step and get rid of a problem. I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
ghaff 9mo ago
I'm not sure how much it has to do with LLMs. It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away. From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
- XenophileJKO 9mo ago
  I think what killed all MOOC learning was that they ALL saw this giant TAM for corporate training and thought.. we have to get into that market. That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value. Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value to the learner. It becauses now it morphs into can we show value to the clients/decision makers/learning admins?
  - ghaff 9mo ago
    I largely disagree. If you look at the people involved (and what they said at the time), I think there was a legitimate "We can rethink higher education" which obviously didn't happen for a variety of reasons. It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.
    - XenophileJKO 9mo ago
      I'm defining "why" it morphed.
      - ghaff 9mo ago
        Because it wasn't making any money.

zigman1 9mo ago

Interesting, can this be an expected outcome of AI adoption? Mergers of big competitors?

p-e-w 9mo ago
Seems to be the expected outcome of everything, in every industry, for the past 10 years or so.
- christophilus 9mo ago
  > 10 years or so Centuries, really, with only periodic exceptions.
- bossyTeacher 9mo ago
  Makes you wonder what happens when all that is left is a single national company and a couple of ever struggling businesses
master-lincoln 9mo ago
just capitalism in the final stage
- Libidinalecon 9mo ago
  Yes, "Late Stage Capitalism" the idea from the text written in 1902 by Werner Sombart. The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.
oersted 9mo ago
Remember Conglomerates? It just keeps changing name. Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
9mo ago

dhruv3006 9mo ago

Thats a welcome step really !

broretore 9mo ago

Both Udemy and Coursera are public companies?

joshdavham 9mo ago
Was also news to me!

iambateman 9mo ago

It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application. But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn. These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.

apwheele 9mo ago
Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar. Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe? Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.) I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
- iamflimflam1 9mo ago
  Unfortunately the get rich quick/grifter community realised that online courses was a way to make money.
- elric 9mo ago
  > Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort. Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera. Mean while their prices seem to go up every year.

piyushpr134 9mo ago

Universities are not going anywhere MOOC are a dead end

f6v 9mo ago
Turns out that an online certificate isn't worth anything when layoffs happen and the market is oversaturated with people who have real degrees. MOOCs have their place, but it's a very narrow set of disciplines.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
  I work at a university and half of the coursework seems worse than the good MOOCs. Esp. the more practical ones. (Might be a problem of that university, still ...)
  - user_7832 9mo ago
    It's probably not a uni specific issue. I went to a top EU uni, and there absolutely were courses that could've just been an ~~email~~ video. Admitedly not everything was bad, but the quality of education isn't as high as it should be.
    - SoftTalker 9mo ago
      We have a lot more students in university, and a lot more professors. Inevitably this means converging on "average."
      - GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
        More students _per course_ than a MOOC cohort? -- doubt. If you add up all courses of a while discipline, edu portals still serve way more students. In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers? I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.

config_yml 9mo ago

I could never distinguish them anyway, so this is welcome simplification of the world to me.

synergy20 9mo ago

I bought quite a few courses at udemy, none at coursera though, but I ended up not taking them, instead I used youtube to get some video, and LLM to get the text context these days. Youtube is the true gem, if it spins out of google it could take on netflix at least. In short, google might be undervalued a lot just because of youtube, for entertainment and education purposes.

stef25 9mo ago
For a basic crash course in Python, is there anything better than the top rated Udemy course, can YT offer something better ? I really don't mind paying the 12$ it costs on Udemy.
- albert_e 9mo ago
  Corey Schafer on YouTube should be in your bookmarks -- Playlists ... Python Programming Beginner Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXhwoFUiLCjGgY7 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXh... Python OOP Tutorials - Working with Classes https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhwlXsIBIdSeYtc https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhw... Python Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTi...
- ghshephard 9mo ago
  You will never do better than https://www.pythonmorsels.com/ https://www.pythonmorsels.com/ This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.
  - belter 9mo ago
    Terrible audio quality...
joshdavham 9mo ago
I get so much decision fatigue when choosing a course series on YouTube. On every technical topic, there are like 15 people making courses anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours.

cheriot 9mo ago

Udemy figured out that selling to enterprise is way more profitable than individuals. Coursera figured out that University/Company brand is more valuable than Joe's Ultimate Course. But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.

XenophileJKO 9mo ago
I think that window is closing pretty fast. Models can currently construct pretty good learning material by themselves. I setup a project using claude code as the agent that researches and constructs learning material and lessons. The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
- breadsniffer 9mo ago
  can you expand on your workflow?

qmr 9mo ago

Less competition seems a bad thing.

random9749832 9mo ago
They don't do anything. It is like the app store but for courses.

torben-friis 9mo ago

As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching. Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit. If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.

nsagent 9mo ago
Agreed. That's how I got my start in ML, through Andrew Ng's course a little over a decade ago. I then went on to get my PhD in CS focused on NLP.
coldcache 9mo ago
MIT OCW does a great job of this
azangru 9mo ago
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
- ibrahima 9mo ago
  Iirc the complaint was that machine generated captions were not good enough :(. Yeah it's pretty sad.
- 9mo ago

sharadov 9mo ago

Both have garbage content at this point - Coursera was great when they launched, top quality material and university-level instruction. Now it's just bottom of the barrel scraps. YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

DougN7 9mo ago
Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?
- moralestapia 9mo ago
  The same way you double check with any other method you prefer? Duh. LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
  - contagiousflow 9mo ago
    You double check every university lecture you've been apart of?
    - nkmnz 9mo ago
      That's what is called "studying" or "reading a textbook", isn't it?
      - IshKebab 9mo ago
        Uhm no? Reading a textbook is obviously not the same as fact checking a textbook.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        nkmnz 9mo ago

criddell 9mo ago

What are the best online courses you’ve taken? On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO. The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…

joshdavham 9mo ago
I recently bought a course on the Spring Boot from codewithmosh. Despite spring boot being a dry subject, it was probably the best intro backend course I’d ever taken!
AntiqueFig 9mo ago
On Coursera I really liked the Roman Architecture course from Yale: https://www.coursera.org/learn/roman-architecture https://www.coursera.org/learn/roman-architecture The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
Blackthorn 9mo ago
There was a set of three "legacy" courses on something called Saylor Academy back in the day by an instructor named Kenneth Manning. Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Materials. They were all basically just filmed classroom lectures, but the filming was done well. Great instructor.
n8cpdx 9mo ago
I did a computer graphics course on EdX: https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-graphics/the-university-of-california-san-diego-computer-graphics https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-graphics/the-university-o... Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust. The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for. Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out. I plan to take the follow up soon.

guluarte 9mo ago

Coursera certificates are now officially worthless

stonogo 9mo ago
If you were taking Coursera classes for the credentials, I'm not sure the plan was sound to begin with.
anshumankmr 9mo ago
BESIDEs the Andrew NG's coursera courses (the OG ones). Got me into ML/DL very early on.

FabHK 9mo ago

The ongoing enshittification of Coursera, Udacity, and EdX is sad to watch.

Apocryphon 9mo ago
Wonder how Khan Academy is doing these days.
- the__alchemist 9mo ago
  Still slaps

coffeecoders 9mo ago

I've realized over time that I personally cannot learn from video at all. Even "great" lectures don't stick. Text does! Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me. What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual. To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".

MarkLowenstein 9mo ago
The dream never dies, possibly because people remember when class time was supplanted by a movie. Anyone remember "I Am Joe's Heart"? Those movies showed that you could just sit and watch passively like TV, and you'd learn quite a bit, with professional diagrams and animations to help. Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.

random9749832 9mo ago

The reality is that most of these courses exist for the certificate not the course material. People still job hunting for entry level roles just want to pad out their LinkedIn.

ghaff 9mo ago
You and I may not like it, but the reality is that so much of "education" is about certifications. And MOOC certifications were never worth much. I have taken unrequired training courses over the years and did other self-guided training, but a LOT of online training was never worth much as a formal certification thing and that's where a lot of the money goes. (Look at executive MBA programs vs. online courses.)

deknos 9mo ago

will this mean i loose my saved courses o_O?

anshumankmr 9mo ago
At least not immediately. No reason to alienate existing customers who would revolt and sue.

chrisweekly 9mo ago

This same week, Egghead (https://egghead.io https://egghead.io) started offering $500 lifetime access to everything they ever made or will make. There's definitely some excellent material in their catalog. But the signals sure seem to point toward the decline of centralized human-created coursework.

chrisweekly 9mo ago
(meta: genuinely curious why my observation was downvoted. I may take a further karma hit for mentioning it but worth it if it elicits a meaningful response. what gives?)
- philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  At a guess, because it sounds like a product pitch and these 'lifetime payment things' are ALWAYS curtailed if the product actually survives.
- layer8 9mo ago
  I didn’t downvote you, but lifetime offerings tend to be a red flag.
  - chrisweekly 9mo ago
    Agreed! (That's why I mentioned it in the context of TFA.) Thanks for replying tho
SoftTalker 9mo ago
Whose lifetime?
azemetre 9mo ago
Egghead.io is not worth it, the courses there have a shelf life even shorter than frontendmasters. Authors mostly use it to dump their wares then never update the course afterwards while breaking API changes litter their backlog making most content, unless it was released in the last 3 months, worthless. Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO. Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."

kirykl 9mo ago

For JavaScript I’ve found Scrimba to be worlds better than anything on Udemy or Coursera

tootyskooty 9mo ago

both have had questionable content for a while, it's a wonder people are still paying for them. especially given that LLMs exist (and youtube for that matter).

ghaff 9mo ago
If I were a professor at a decent school, I'd probably look at the landscape of MOOCs and go "Why am I spending any time on this?" It seemed like something new and potentially exciting at one point. I certainly wouldn't today.

Rakshath_1 9mo ago

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languagehacker 9mo ago

Interesting development. I had assumed a private equity company was behind this, but it seems like a deal brokered between two public companies, maybe struggling to show growth. Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer. But what do I know.

karel-3d 9mo ago

Coursera courses used to be good when I still had time to do courses, while udemy was very trashy low effort for my tastes. I am surprised Coursera became as bad as everyone says, I kind of refuse to believe it. But I don't have any spare time right now to study stuff edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad! it's all "AI this" "AI that" who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it

SamDc73 9mo ago
Honestly, I feel like it's easy to filter out good/bad courses on Coursera by stuff like University name (although gotta admit last time did a course there were 3 years ago)
levocardia 9mo ago
Ironically the very first coursera course was (IIRC) Andrew Ng's machine learning course, which was fantastic, and the deep learning specialization, which was also phenomenal. I can unironically say that Andrew Ng was the best instructor I ever had in grad school (and I didn't go to Stanford...).
- karel-3d 9mo ago
  Doesn't he own Coursera?

tmaly 9mo ago

As a Udemy course instructor, I am not sure what to think. I was not able to opt-out of the new AI features.

crimsoneer 9mo ago

This feels like another nail in the coffin of the open, optimistic internet we all dreamed of in 2012, and it makes me sad.

softwaredoug 9mo ago

IMO the market is getting distupted by more live audience and curated platforms like Maven.

Apocryphon 9mo ago

Previously I asked how did MOOCs, which were such an early 2010s hyped tech trend, fall so far from its promise. Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612710

nickpsecurity 9mo ago

The best courses I wanted to take are split between Coursera, Udemy, and EdX. The first two can give certificates cheaply. A merger could be really helpful if they do it in a month or two. ;)

nickjj 9mo ago

I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years. Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years. I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well. Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.

iris-digital 9mo ago
Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.
- nickjj 9mo ago
  > Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor. It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.
gustavopezzi 9mo ago
I also started teaching on Udemy in 2019 and even though the number of students was high, I quickly noticed that income was low and most enrolled students did not even start the courses they purchased (let alone complete them). I also decided to invest time and money in my own website/school and that was probably the best decision I've ever made. Also, I'm not sure most people know that Udemy was never profitable up until 2025. Before going public, Udemy had never been profitable despite good revenue growth. As of mid-2021 (around its IPO filing), the company had accumulated significant losses (hundreds of millions of dollars) and explicitly noted it had not generated a profit in its SEC filing. After its October 2021 IPO, Udemy continued to report net losses most quarters and years, even as revenue grew. Losses persisted through 2023 and into 2024. Finally, in 2025 they saw profits for the first time since its IPO.

SilverElfin 9mo ago

Are the contents of these websites current enough to keep up with new technologies? I know universities have been slow to evolve with AI generally …

motbus3 9mo ago

I honest dislike the idea of having yet another niche going with less competitors. Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time. Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.

ee64a4a 9mo ago

Excellent, another sector tending towards monopoly. As we all know, markets work best when everyone is allowed to merge with/buy out one another!

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belter 9mo ago

Udemy course ratings have always felt absurd to me. The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing. The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.

nkmnz 9mo ago

Udemy never sold knowledge. They are selling that feeling of a new beginning, of a better future, of FINALLY doing (buying!!!) that course you always wanted to finish. 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.

echelon 9mo ago
This. E-learning can be like Steam to some people. You buy the course and then it sits there. You get a dopamine hit when you buy, and you can finish the course later. Sometime. Some people need structure. But mostly structure is a way of dragging along those who aren't soaking up learning already, who aren't naturally seeking the next problem and breaking it apart. Not everyone does this, and so structure helps as a forcing function. There are some subjects where you need academic and theoretical grounding. Or expensive equipment. For everything else, it's best to get hands on and just throw yourself at the subject. There's nothing really stopping a motivated person.
ziml77 9mo ago
It's so true. Buying them is an easy way to feel good in the moment and it's easy to tell yourself that you'll do the courses later. I bought a handful before realizing what was happening. I haven't done it since then and I definitely need to consciously override any temptations. I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
- johnwheeler 9mo ago
  Sounds like my bookshelf
- ghaff 9mo ago
  Gym membership for many.
  - ivape 9mo ago
    I think Fitness definitely caught on though. You could say it was a constant recurring self-promise some prior generations made, but our current generations are not lacking on a focus on fitness. Education is not too different. We’re not exactly a society that goes “Going to dig into an interesting course this weekend with the wife”, no, nowhere near that. Takes time, generations.

zhyder 9mo ago

End of an era: video (with broadband Internet penetration) was the best tool we had for 15+ years. But LLMs are now good enough, including in image+infographic generation and factuality (especially when grounding resources are provided... which is where human experts still matter). I think video is now better only for learning physical hands-on skills... and those videos tend to be on YouTube rather than on Udemy or Coursera. Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic-shift-americans-no-longer-see-four-year-college-degrees-rcna243672 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic... A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).

bigstrat2003 9mo ago
LLMs are not remotely good enough to use as a learning tool. They still make shit up a ton of the time, and you can only catch it if you already know the material (so, not useful for learning). They probably never will be useful for learning, since even after all this time hallucinations are still just as bad as they ever were.
- zhyder 9mo ago
  Have you tried them with providing a grounding resource, e.g. attaching a file to ChatGPT or NotebookLM? Yes need some human expert to create (or curate) that grounding resource in the first place, but LLMs handle the rest well: presenting info in different ways and paces, interacting with the learner like a tutor, etc.

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sp4cec0wb0y 9mo ago

Good thing Youtube is free because this consolidation is only going to raise their prices. Thank you to all the hard working educational Youtubers out there.

zkmon 9mo ago

Trying the merger as a survival option, not a "let's take over world" option. MOOCs need to reinvent themselves again, for the hybrid workforce that is AI+human.

zelphirkalt 9mo ago

I once did 2 moocs on coursera about machine learning, and I learned a lot, but some time afterwards, they f'ed up their login so much, that they required Google stuff to be loaded, which made me reconsider even logging in there. The platform seemed to get ever more bloated. Maybe I should check what their status is now, whether one can use their site without implicitly agreeing to being tracked by Google. No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.

zelphirkalt 9mo ago
Addendum: Oh OK, they f'ed it up even more now, so that the login page doesn't even appear, when you click login and don't enable JS. How silly. I guess they have also fallen to the "everything must be an SPA" fad.

seattle_spring 9mo ago

I interviewed for an eng role at Coursera back in 2012, not too long after they were founded. Their claimed goal at the time was a re-imagining of education, insisting that current educational institutions were stuck in the past. Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system. I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.

TonyAlicea10 9mo ago

I've been an instructor on Udemy for a decade. Lots of web devs tell me they got their career started on my courses there, which is something that is very dear to me. Udemy got me started in online dev education. I'm very sorry to see it go.

andrewrn 9mo ago

As a counterpoint to the negativity in here. I purchased one of Angela Yu's basic webdev courses a couple years back and it springboarded my coding ability. I left it rather quickly to just build random stuff I wanted, but still, it was the spark.

SamDc73 9mo ago
Angela Yu course is good, told my brother about it and he had hard time figuring some stuff out cause some pieces were outdated (he has zero experience)
michaelcampbell 9mo ago
Same here; I've gotten a lot of utility from Udemy. Actually kind of got me a job (tbf, the manager I'd known for years and he'd've hired me regardless, but I was able to actually DO the job he wanted me to do basically day 0, even when he was willing to hire me and let me learn as I went). There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.

chrismsimpson 9mo ago

Feels like this is AI replacing whole categories before said category can adapt to the new landscape

KnuthIsGod 9mo ago

This is part of the enshittification of everything. Udemy was generally crap. Coursera was decent. Crap eats decent.

fuzztester 9mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagan_Biyani

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alexpadula 9mo ago

Bound to happen!

wagslane 9mo ago

I _think_ this is good for Boot.dev... (I'm the founder, which is why I care)

astrostl 9mo ago

It's such an amazing business model: - create a platform to host content others create - get employees to ask for company-provided access - almost none of these employees really use it - collect subscription revenue indefinitely

qwertytyyuu 9mo ago

Oh no, something always irked me about udemy, especially those fomo sales

chirau 9mo ago

How do both of these compare the FreeCodeCamp?

chrisgd 9mo ago

It’s funny because everyone under the sun has been telling these two companies to come together since 2018 when online learning courses started to fade away. They are finally doing it after both went public and lost 80% of their value. At least the management team is going to make some money.

OhioMan2943 9mo ago

I love market consolidation

SilverSlash 9mo ago

"Coursera to Combine with Udemy to Empower the Global Workforce with Skills for the AI Era" Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better. I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.

elAhmo 9mo ago

Udemy always had that scammy vibe with courses "90% off" (from to $200 to $20 and things like that), plagiarism, as well as anti-patterns and very questionable quality control on the courses themselves. They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad. I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things. I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.

braza 9mo ago

The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses. I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background. I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.

beeboop0 9mo ago

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everdev 9mo ago

This after I see a video about how online tutorials are losing popularity to AI LLMs.

ninahenderson 9mo ago

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