Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever.

But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.

The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.

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.

I dropped Udemy years ago when they started to promote outdated versions of courses.

Try reloading new course with same videos, (or modified or updated version but honestly probably 90% is just new year label) saying 2026

Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.

Good for you for building your own garden.

Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.

Speculating, but perhaps it needs to be updated once in a while? Last modified might be a (dumb) factor.

> 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.

Almost my entire education has been OJT (On the Job Training). I'm a high school dropout, with a G.E.D. I've spent my entire life, looking up the noses of folks that just assume they are better than me. Gets a bit grating, but the plus side is, is that I have to prove myself, over, and over.

Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).

What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.

My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.

I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.

The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).

I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.

> 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.

I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.

Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.

Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.

MIT OCW does a great job of this

> 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.

How is that a viable model?

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.

> 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.

Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case

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.

I tried that out in my field of expertise, to calibrate my expectations. ChatGPT invented multiple references to non-existent but plausibly-titled papers written by me.

I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.

That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.

My biggest issue with Udemy courses is that it's not easy to vet the instructor. User ratings are unreliable since beginners aren't really in a position to evaluate a teacher's expertise.

If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.

- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash

- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride

- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky

> nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.

That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.

I guess it depends on what you ask an LLM to teach you. For certain subjects, I've found them to be a pain in the ass to get right.

For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.

Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.

That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.

Considering hallucinations, that seems risky. How do you double check what you were taught?

I don't know much about Coursera, but Udemy has always been quite bad since I remember.

Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.

That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.

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?

The meaningful competitor wrt. raw educational content is freely available OpenCourseware made available under CC licenses, which prevent any after-the-fact rugpull. Of course online learning also has a big service-provision and perhaps certification component, which is where specialty platforms like Coursera and Udemy may have a real advantage.

The platforms lost because they enshittified and everyone left because of it, not because YouTube existed (it already did when they started). Compare the ancient "legacy" stuff that Coursera had to the stuff it has today. Little wonder nobody actually wants what they're selling.

As another comment here said:

> 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.

The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.

> It’s remarkable to me that a major new competitor in online distributed learning hasn’t already happened, considering the obvious LLM application.

I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.

Geoff Hinton's 2012 Coursera course "Neural Networks for Machine Learning" was incredible. Anyone who took that course got in on the ground floor of deep learning just when it was about to take off. It certainly changed the course of my career.

To give an idea of how cutting-edge it was at the time, the well-known RMSProp optimizer was unpublished work that Hinton presented in the course, and people had to cite the presentation slides when they used it in papers published later.

On Coursera I really liked the Roman Architecture course from Yale: 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.

I did a computer graphics course on EdX: 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.

Discrete Optimization by Pascal Van Hentenryck was a real gem.

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.

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!

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.

After Coursera/Udacity/EdX discontinued courses that I wanted to take, or removed access to ones I only partially completed, I switched to buying classes on Udemy. I completed only a handful of many purchases, and the quality level was okay-to-mediocre but better than nothing, so I got more value out of Udemy than Coursera.

I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.

The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.

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.

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.

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.

Seems to be the expected outcome of everything, in every industry, for the past 10 years or so.

It’s the expected outcome of capitalism in the absence of effective market regulation.

just capitalism in the final stage

Dead end for what? Quality recordings of real lectures have been amazing for self improvement. I've never gone into it expecting a meaningful certificate, just meaning for me living my life.

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.

My alma mater (University of Nottingham UK) has just stopped all music and modern language teaching, which (for a very popular, respected, large campus institution) seems a bad sign for universities generally.

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."

Whose lifetime?

(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?)

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

LLMs typically still require some interactivity, no? Much easier to watch some videos in many cases.

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.

Was also news to me!

Wonder how Khan Academy is doing these days.