alt Hacker NewsCoursera to combine with Udemy
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
Big move. This feels less like a typical merger and more like a bet that AI-driven skills platforms need real scale to matter. Curious to see whether this actually improves learning quality and outcomes—or just creates a larger marketplace with the same challenges.
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.
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.
Excellent, another sector tending towards monopoly. As we all know, markets work best when everyone is allowed to merge with/buy out one another!
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.
Interesting, can this be an expected outcome of AI adoption? Mergers of big competitors?
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".
This same week, Egghead (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.
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...
A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: 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).
As a Udemy course instructor, I am not sure what to think. I was not able to opt-out of the new AI features.
IMO the market is getting distupted by more live audience and curated platforms like Maven.
For JavaScript I’ve found Scrimba to be worlds better than anything on Udemy or Coursera
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.
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).
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.
Less competition seems a bad thing.
I could never distinguish them anyway, so this is welcome simplification of the world to me.
This feels like another nail in the coffin of the open, optimistic internet we all dreamed of in 2012, and it makes me sad.
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.
will this mean i loose my saved courses o_O?
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.
Both Udemy and Coursera are public companies?
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 …
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. ;)
Previously I asked how did MOOCs, which were such an early 2010s hyped tech trend, fall so far from its promise. Thread:
The ongoing enshittification of Coursera, Udacity, and EdX is sad to watch.
Coursera certificates are now officially worthless
Thats a welcome step really !
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.