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Online Tutoring and virtual learning has drastically changed our views of how traditional learning used to be (Always restricted in space and time).
I am not denying the equal share of a classroom role in the learning industry, but digitalization has given more wings to choose learning from different online platforms.
You maybe a corporate guy looking to learn a niche course, a college student stuck up with a degree with zero interest or learning new things is your kind of way; a top-notch large virtual learning platform comes handy at such situations.
The online learning industry has seen some good resurgence with millions of students and instructors benefiting in the recent years through Udemy online courses and its competitors like treehouse, coursera, skillshare, and Chegg to name a few.
The Udemy Review 2018 will explore the whole methodology and benefits of Udemy learning platform and how it managed to emerged as a popular and successful online platform in the recent years.
Udemy Review 2018
Quick Glance about Udemy:
Udemy is currently the biggest online marketplace medium started in 2010 with a aim of breaking traditional barriers and to connect students and instructors through a single learning medium.
Through Udemy, Instructors (Subject matter experts) are looking to sell courses self designed by them to potential students who are looking to learn them.
If you look at their stats, their enormous number of courses and student enrolment, what could have probably made Udemy popular for students is the course quality and for instructors in hosting courses freely at Udemy with a good profit margin.
Get Up to 50% OFF on Udemy Courses:
What Udemy has for the Instructors?
Anybody who has an interest area in teaching a niche skill can get their hands on at Udemy as their Instructor.
You need to self design your own course and submit to Udemy Quality Review team.
Udemy has preset guidelines called Course quality checklist to ensure that the course you have created has met their quality guidelines.
They do this Quality Review process, as Udemy’s Business model works on the ideology that ‘anyone can teach anybody’. (No mandate teaching certification is required to become a Udemy Instructor!)
You can read their article “how to submit your course for review” in their support page if you are unsure of how to submit one.
Once you have successfully understood their protocol and submitted your course for review, it will take 2 business days for Udemy to finally approve your work and make it visible for students in their portal.
All Udemy courses have a separate instructor support team to assist them and a teach Hub page, a tutorial for instructors on how to get started at Udemy.
Udemy has the largest community of students under its cap so Instructors tend to earn an income anyway better than their counterparts.
Instructors can increase their brand values by tracking their course stats /analytics provided by Udemy.
How much you can earn at Udemy as an Instructor?
As of lately from April 2016, Udemy has made some changes to their Instructors pricing structure.
All Instructors who submit new courses can fix a starting price between $20 to $ 50 ranges.
Once the courses started getting popular, they make increase the price with an addition of $5. (Earlier, it used to be a case of instructor setting their own price with no preset range).
This is a welcome move from Udemy as all courses will have a price structure distributed equally for all students.
This new pricing strategy is not blindfolded as they provide the instructors with price metrics like what can be the average price against the course weightage.
There was a recent uproar from the instructor’s community that their course has no face value as students tend to wait for the fixed price promotion from Udemy as part of weekend promotions (a 90% off on courses, ending them to buy any course literally for $10 value). Udemy has recently removed the fixed price promotion strategy.
Also,you need to share a 50% profit sharing with Udemy as it provides you the student base in exchange for making students enrolling in your course.
So, if you keep a price value of $50 for teaching an Advanced Java Module to students, you will earn a profit of $25.50 for every student. So even if your single course get somewhat popular and you managed to get 100 students enrolled in a month, you income for one course should be around $2550 which is decent enough to start off!
Though the ratings the students generally give to a course is to be gambled off and doesn’t actually reflect the course quality (major factor in making a course popular though), yet considering 11 million students under its database, you as an instructor can make a pretty rough calculation of how many students would be willing to buy your course in your defined niche and ultimately your profit margin.
So being an instructor is not such a doomed thing in Udemy considering the student number and one being smart enough can make a decent income out of it.
What Udemy has for the students?
Udemy basically works as a massive open online courses model (In short called MOOCs) for all students interested in learning any course any time.
It breaks the barrier of students simply completing classroom course just for certificates and it encourages them to actually learn a particular skill and use it as necessary or create a profession out of it.
Students have the facility to start a discussion forum within the course and all video lectures have a box exclusively for students to take notes while learning.
All the courses purchased by them are available for lifetime and for any reasons they didn’t like the course, Udemy will return their money within 30 days.
Another unique feature is Udemy’s tailor made courses where students have ample options to sub filter their courses based on price, course features, language etc.
The Udemy Advantage
- You get access a large ocean of courses ranging from IT programming to personal development.
- My choice my time study model in a complete virtual environment.
- Very budget friendly price tags for each course with the recent price revision.
- Udemy mobile app with rich features (works with iPhone, iPad and Android) helps you to study and learn on the go.
- Subject expert teachers to teach the students with self designing their courses and verified by Udemy Quality review team as to ensure they get quality courses.
- Perfect for anybody who is looking to improve their personal and professional skills in any field as Udemy makes online learning easy and accessible from the comfort of your space. You name your favourite area and Udemy has one for you.
- Great for developing job related skills and business courses.
The Udemy Disadvantage
- It is an obvious downside when you look from the other side of the coin. You don’t have a direct personal interaction with your instructor or student. So there is a slight risk of a student disliking a particular course instructor for whatever reasons and regret it for the same.
- Even before a course is completed and understood by students, the review tab pops out making students to rate it namesake with minimal feedback justifying the rating.
- A lot of up sells by Udemy and Instructors to students in between the course lectures to increase profit margin.
Overall Benefits of Online Tutoring at Udemy
- Currently Udemy serves 11 million students with 40,000 plus courses and has 20000 plus instructors offering 9 million video lectures in some 80 plus languages.
- All these figure achieved in a quick 6 years span of time by Udemy makes more teaching opportunity and profit margin for instructors.
- Some courses of Udemy are even free and all courses have a preview video about what the course is all about in a glimpse.
- You don’t like a course; there is a 30 days money back guarantee for the students.
- All Udemy courses have a format of divided sections and lectures. The lectures include video lectures from the instructor, audio, slide presentation or a plain text.
- All Udemy online courses has user rating of the particular course in terms of content and quality, short video introduction of what the course is all about and a course description for students before enrolling into any.
Conclusion
To sum it up, Udemy works best for anybody who shows some serious interests in self learning and expert teaching.
The scalability factor of Udemy platform should not be under judged with their ever growing learning community and a wide range of course categories.
Overall it is an affordable platform to make learning a lifelong behavior. Remember anybody can learn anything online!
