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.
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.
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.
Gym membership for many.
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.
I'm starting to learn human history is people getting bored of something and then it takes a generation or two before it's exciting all over again.
Fashion, I suppose.
There's definitely novelty, fashion, and fads. There's no particular reason why rollerblading essentially went away in the US after being a pretty popular activity for a time. In consumer tech, auction sites didn't go away but they certainly declined.
Sometimes, there are reasons--far fewer people shoot pics with dedicated cameras today for obvious reasons. But sometimes, things that were a novelty just get boring for most.
Sounds like my bookshelf
> 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.
What's more discouraging is that completing them may be little more than that as well. Sure, you put in the self-discipline and work to ace all the quizzes and maybe even turn in the practical final assignment, and you have a piece of paper to show for it, but did you really learn all that much? How much sticks with you in a couple of years?
I took Odersky's Scala course on coursera, which was fairly tough (relative to the ~10 other similar courses I've taken as an adult). Certainly felt good completing it. Didn't feel so good about dropping out of the sequel course a couple of weeks in as I realized I just couldn't complete the assignments in time without sacrificing too much of family and social life, but no matter. What do I remember of Scala today? Certainly not enough to program in it... Maybe some vague things about covariance and contravariance and how mutability makes it painful.
I also did a bunch of Andrew Ng's courses. The first covered a bunch of non-NN machine learning methods which are a lot less relevant than they were. I remember their names at least, but I certainly couldn't explain them in a code interview. Then I learned to write vectorized hand-calculated backwards passes in Matlab (well, gnu octave), and some early Tensorflow. Also well out of code interview accessible memory by now. Ng's courses were great at giving you a sense of accomplishment and removing all time-consuming frustration not related to the actual focus of the course... But learning these things a few years before most people didn't make me rich, and these days I'd have to ask a chatbot like everyone else. Skills you don't use atrophy, and I couldn't convince anyone to pay me to implement ML models.
So I guess what I'm getting at is, even at their best these courses may not give most graduates what we really hope for.
> 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.
And another comment:
> I'm sure some people are disciplined enough to learn from it, but there's no way that's the norm.
I'm not understanding the problem. I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through. That a big percentage don't get far is not at all a criticism. It's plain human nature.
Counting what percentage finish a course is a fairly useless metric (and you can always make the course trivially easy to game that metric). One needs to measure (absolute) output. How many succeeded - not what percentage succeeded.
I gained a lot from both Udemy and Coursera. Stuff that has helped me a fair amount in my career. It may well be true that I didn't finish most of the courses I signed up for. Why should I care? Why should Udemy/Coursera? It was a win/win.
> I think it is insane to expect that when you offer something for free (or very cheap), and it requires work and patience, that most people will follow through.
Just look at gym memberships. Apparently over 2/3 of people never use it and only about 20% use it regularly. Are the gyms also to blame for that? I don't think so.
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.
This is also true with other sources of knowledge though. Check any youtube course playlist and compare video views for first vs last lecture, often >80% dropoff. What percentage of library borrowers get past the first chapter of a book?
> 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
I stand corrected! It's 52% that don't even START the first video![0] Other studies report that number at 35%.[1]
One thing that's more consistent are average completion rates hovering around 5%.
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav7958 as cited by [1]
[1] https://openpraxis.org/articles/606/files/66d16716e6c09.pdf
I think the number is probably a bit skewed by the fact a lot of companies offer unlimited access to udemy and such, so people "start" courses without any commitment or cost, and then predictably drop off fast or don't start at all.
Personally I just found none of them really worth doing. They felt almost not genuine in a way, like they cared more about profiting from courses and gaming the system than actually teaching you something. I switched to learning via Youtube videos and found it much more educational than the paid courses.
I never got past the second or third lecture in a "Learning How to Learn" class, which I suppose at least meant I had identified the correct problem.
I'm in this comment and I don't like it.