Udemy: Story of Online Learning Platform

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Udemy,India.

With everything around the globe turning more and more into the online or internet-based platform, Udemy is an online learning platform that provides to its customers courses’ videos on a good vary of topics like coding, videos and photos editing, personal and professional development, software tutorials, programming courses, and the list goes on and on...

Recently, Britannia Tiger Krunch has partnered with Udemy for promoting self defense among kids. They have launched defense classes for kids at a special discounted rate.

India is one of the company’s fastest growing market, with revenue and students doubling year-over-year. A local presence will enable Udemy to continue enhancing and localizing the student and instructor experience.

"Udemy’s rapid growth in India shows us the level of demand from students, instructors, and companies for affordable skills training. We are dedicated to our mission of improving lives through learning and expanding in India enables us to deliver on that promise,” said Gregg Coccari, CEO of Udemy.

Udemy- Company Highlights

Udemy - About
Udemy - Logo
Udemy - How It Works?
Udemy - Founders
Udemy - Mission
Udemy - Business Model
Udemy - Revenue Model
Udemy - Prices
Udemy - Courses
Udemy - For Students
Udemy - For Instructors
Udemy - Expansion in India
Udemy - Funding and Investors
Udemy - Revenue
Udemy - Competitors
Udemy - Awards
Udemy - Future Plans
Udemy - FAQs

Udemy - About

Udemy offers a powerful platform for self-placed, non-degree learning regarding hard and soft skills to its customers. When you explore the content broadly, there are 13 categories: development, business, finance and accounting, IT and software, office productivity, personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, health and fitness, music, and teaching and academics. Each category is further divided into subcategories.

It has a wide range of content and is excellent resources for instructors as well as it provides them with the platform to come forward and sell their designed courses to the people needing the same. Several courses are taught by subject matter experts in languages other than English, including Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and German.

Talking about the best course in Udemy being sold to the customers, a generic question arises, where do the courses come from? To which let me enlighten, Udemy invites instructors and teachers who want to design courses and sell them on the platform. So, Udemy not just benefits the students by providing them with the in-demand best courses at their screens by few taps, but also provides a platform to the teachers to sell them to the students.

One needs a Udemy account for most activities on its platform including purchasing, enrolling in a course or to submit a course for publication.

The platform has more than 35 million students and 57,000 instructors teaching over 65 languages. There have been over 400 million enrollments. Students and instructors come from 180+ countries and 66% of the students are located outside of the U.S.

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Udemy - Logo

The Udemy logo is made up of two elements – a symbol and a wordmark. The symbol is handwritten and organic, to emphasize the personal connections being made between our students and instructors. The wordmark, set in practical sans serif type, is the structure and substance that makes their connections possible.

Udemy - How It Works?

Udemy works on 4 major lines and aims to provide the following to its students:

Convenience :

Udemy provides its students with the freedom to choose what and when to study. If a particular course is made available on the e-learning platform, students can enroll for it whenever they want because Udemy gives lifetime access it. Moreover, there’s no set time limit, so the students get to learn at their own suitable pace.

Variety :

Udemy has linked tutors from all around the world who teach a huge variety of subjects from business to the arts. It allows the students to learn whatever they want.

Affordability :

Some Udemy courses are free, and some are paid start from as little as $9. There are also a variety of udemy coupons and seasonal sale and discounts which help students to register themselves in courses at dirt rates. They also have an option to choose their preferred method of payment.

Certification :

Udemy certification courses adds credibility to your career. Udemy provides various certification courses to add up new skills, upgrade your skill, and enhance your expertise. It issues a certificate of achievement to students, a mark of completion of a particular course. Certificates can be saved as a .pdf or .jpg file so that you can easily share your accomplishment. In addition, certificates can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn directly from Udemy. The certificate of completion looks like this-

Udemy - Founders

Udemy was launched by Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani in early 2010.

In 2007, Udemy founder Eren Bali built a software for a live virtual classroom while living in Turkey. He saw potential in making the product free for everyone, and moved to Silicon Valley to find a company two years later.

"Udemy differentiates in two major ways. First, students can learn on their own time. Many other services provide the ability to host live learning with teachers, but it is critical for students to learn via recorded content (videos and written articles) as well. Second, it develops a community around the course. We provide features so students can easily interact amongst each other and their instructor," said -Gagan Biyani, (Indian-American) Co-Founder of Udemy

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Udemy - Mission

With a mission to improve lives through learning, it is the largest online learning destination that helps students, businesses, and governments gain the skills they need to compete in today’s economy. They enable anyone anywhere to create and share educational courses(instructors) and to enroll in these educational courses to learn(students). More than 35 million students are mastering new skills from expert instructors teaching over 130,000 online courses in topics from programming and data science to leadership and team building.

For companies, Udemy for Business offers an employee training and development platform with subscription access to 7,000+ courses, learning analytics, as well as the ability to host and distribute their own content.

Udemy for Government is designed to upskill workers and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. It is privately owned and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Denver, Brazil, India, Ireland, and Turkey.

Udemy - Business Model

Udemy business model maintains a vigorous platform between instructors and students. Instructor create online courses as per their expertise and these are bought by students. It charges instructors a fee for every course sale made on its platform. The fee depends on how the user was acquired. It ranges from 3 to 75%.  Additionally, it charges students annual subscription that gives its businesses (and their employees) access to the platform’s content.

Udemy - Revenue Model

Instructor Fees

There is no fee to create or host courses in Udemy. The firm makes money whenever a student purchases a course.

Consequently, revenue is shared with instructors. Depending on how the student was acquired, a different instructor fee applies.

This edtech Company has three revenue share tiers that it applies to its instructors:

• Instructor Promotion: The student discovers the course through a coupon or referral link issued by the instructor. In this case, the instructor receives 97 percent of the revenue. An additional administration fee of 3 percent is applied by Udemy.
• Udemy Organic: Organic sales occur whenever a student browses the e-learning platform and finds a course he/she is interested in. Furthermore, no instructor coupon is used when purchasing the course. In this scenario, Udemy and the instructor share 50 percent of the sales. Udemy charges a 30 percent fee for any sale made through the company’s Android or iOS app.
• Paid Acquisition: In some instances, Udemy buys advertising slots on other platforms like Google, Facebook, or YouTube. Whenever students buy courses through paid marketing channels, Udemy takes a 75 percent cut of each course sale. Instructors can limit the amount of times and types of channels in which their courses are promoted.

For Business

Udemy For Business, as the name indicates, is tailored towards companies and their employees. Udemy for Business host courses including development, design, IT and software, data science, office productivity, management, marketing, personal development, project management, sales, among others.

Leading companies in India, including Wipro, Tech Mahindra, and Tetrasoft are using Udemy for Business so their employees can learn the latest skills and deliver the most innovative solutions for their customers. “We use Udemy for Business because we want to provide a learning platform for our employees across the globe where they can learn anytime, anywhere. With short bite-sized lectures and some of the best professors globally, our employees like learning on the platform because it’s easy to pick up new skills,” says Anurag Seth, VP & Head of Talent Transformation at Wipro, a leading global information technology, consulting, and business process services company.

It offers two subscription plans, depending on the size of the team. The team plan is aimed at learning groups of 5 to 20 users. The company will have to pay $360 per year and user. Consequently, the Enterprise plan is suitable for all teams above 21 or more users. Hereby, pricing is available upon request by contacting it’s sales team. Furthermore, the Enterprise plan offers a few additional features. These include custom categories and learning paths, no language limitation (the Team plan is limited to English only), custom user groups, tracking user activity, Slack integration, and many more.

Udemy - Prices

With so many perks attached to its name, this is another generic question. There are both paid and free courses on Udemy. But to describe it in layman terms, nothing worth comes for free. So, yes the free courses aren’t as up to the mark as the paid ones. One needs to pay for Udemy courses one by one or can get access to more than 4,000 any time with a Business subscription. Unfortunately, the price is a little high, and you need a minimum of five people for a Business account. Some popular online learning platforms feature a membership system, but Udemy is a pay-per-course service. Udemy Courses ranges from $9 to $300, and the company frequently hosts sales.

It accepts international debit and credit cards, e-payments and bank transfers. The company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Udemy - Courses

The expert turn of events and programming courses are strikingly like the ones you can discover on LinkedIn Learning with proficient teachers. From the student's viewpoint, you're generally watching a talking head and incidentally perusing list items or synopses that show up on the screen.

You can discover the frail substance and self-serving educators if you burrow. One can even let the instructor know the doubts while studying the course which the instructor/teacher answers accordingly. The doubts and questions of other users which have been already answered by the instructor also appear to the student which helps in solving their doubt at earliest.

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Udemy - For Students

Every learner or student has to have a Udemy account to enroll or purchase a course. As the student purchases a course, it gets saved under ‘my learning’. The student can study them accordingly. The progress made while studying them is also displayed to the user including the number of sections completed. Just like any other shopping website, here we can wishlist a course if we’re not prepared to buy the same at that very moment.

When you discover a course, you can examine an in-depth description of that course, requirements to start it, what to expect at the end of the course, whether or not the course includes a certificate on completion and so forth.

The flesh and bone of each course are videos. Videos generally are grouped into sections. So, a course might be 3 hours long, however, each video might not be greater than 10 minutes. This is how a course is divided into sections.

The format enables teachers to ensure their courses are genuinely structured. By having sections and brief videos, instructors have to break their content material into specific, digestible pieces. this setup facilitates students to see the overall scope of the course beforehand. It additionally makes it smooth for students to pause and take a break from their course once they want to. Having brief videos additionally, lets newbies effortlessly repeat something they failed to apprehend or need to refresh. And it is beneficial in case you have a few revels in with the subject count already because you could skip any videos that include what you already know. Students can even rate the courses accordingly.

Udemy - For Instructors

Anybody proficient and confident in a field can turn into a teacher on Udemy. In beginning as an educator, Udemy offers tools and understanding to assist you with making a decent course. There is no fee to be an instructor on Udemy. Instructors are paid according to a revenue share model of the company. When a student buys a course on the marketplace, revenue is shared between instructor and the company, according to revenue share model. It offers tips, outlines and information concerning what sorts of courses students are searching for. The site likewise reveals to you whether the quantity of courses presently offered is per the interest, in addition to the normal and top-procuring month to month wages in this subject zone. Courses must have at least 30 minutes of video content and at least 5 lectures or learning modules.

In order to ensure that students have great learning experiences, Udemy also have a Quality Review Process that every course goes through.

In order to create paid courses, you'll need an active PayPal or Payoneer account. Instructors can connect a PayPal or Payoneer account to their Udemy account. They are paid on a monthly basis.

In addition to the Udemy's standard lecture uploader, they offer the ability to upload materials in bulk or import them via Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and other file storage tools.

Udemy's Marketplace Insights they offer robust reporting on student demand, search volume, and revenue for a particular topic to help you decide what to teach. If no data exists for a topic the want-to-be-instructor-person is searching, it likely means that there’s an opportunity to fill this gap in the Udemy marketplace and he/she should get started right away. While success as an instructor on the e-learning platform is not guaranteed, this tool offers some powerful data to help you make your decision.

As an instructor, you have the option to enroll in the Udemy Deals Program, which is made up of two marketing channels that spotlight your course(s) in different ways. Enrolling in the Udemy Deals Program gives company the option to promote your course, at a discount. Selection for promotion is not guaranteed. In addition, they provide instructors with extensive articles, resources and features at online platform to help you effectively market your course(s).

Udemy - Expansion in India

For Udemy, after the US, India is the second largest market catering to the requirement of professionals wanting to learn new skills or upgrade their skills.

"It has started talks with both the Center and various State governments for using its platform to train their staff," said Irwin Anand, Managing Director, Udemy India.

"With over 20 million employees, the Government is one of the biggest sectors to be tapped. Udemy works with the Governments of Japan and Singapore.In India, we have millions of students as customers and thousands of instructors teaching students from around the world. Every year, nearly 7 million graduates pass out of colleges, but not many are employable. The traditional way of education in India is not sufficient for people to be productive at work. Udemy with its practice-oriented courses help people to learn the right skills and get into the job market," Anand said.

Udemy - Funding and Investors

Udemy has raised a total of $223M in funding over 9 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Feb 19, 2020 from a Series E round.

Winter Capital Joins Series F Funding Round in 4th Quarter of 2020 to expand its edtech portfolio. The capital raised will enable Udemy to continue growing its consumer and business product offerings to serve the world’s students, organizations, and instructors.

Udemy - Revenue

Udemy's estimated annual revenue is currently $653.9M. It's estimated revenue per employee is $165,000. Like any startup in growth mode, it does not share any revenue metrics with the public. Due to ongoing expansions into new markets as well as spending on product development and new hires, it can be assumed that the company remains unprofitable for now.

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Udemy - Competitors

The cost of online learning is all over the map. Some companies charge a membership fee while others sell access to specific classes only. As mentioned, Teachable lets instructors sell courses at prices they set, rather than offer a membership. The Great Courses is similar. Every course is priced individually.

Top competitors of Udemy are Coursera and Khan Academy. Other competitors include Linkedin learning, Udacity, Skillshare and Master Class.

Udemy - Awards

Udemy has won awards at major competitions such as VatorSplash and the ASU Education Innovation Summit. Also, blogs such as TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb.

Udemy - Future Plans

Udemy is an interesting and evolving concept that focuses on the transfer of knowledge, rather than fetching a diploma. The wide variety of content and instructors available at affordable rates and the exceptionally personal pace of learning make it a very convenient method of attaining skills. With the world becoming more advanced and technophile, their businesses have huge horizons unlocked for themselves. For the time, it remains non-profitable.

Udemy - FAQs

Who are the founders of Udemy?

Udemy was founded by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar.

What is Udemy?

Udemy is an online-based learning platform that provides its customers numerous courses on a variety of topics like development, business, finance and accounting, IT and software, office productivity, personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, health and fitness, music, teaching, and academics.

Is Udemy accredited?

Udemy is not an accredited institution. Each completed Udemy course includes a certificate, but the certificate can’t be used to seek formal accreditation.

How long are Udemy courses?

Every course has a specific duration associated with it. Once the course is purchased, the consumer has lifetime access to their selected courses.

What Platform is Udemy built on?

Python is the base language on which the Udemy platform is built on. For Database, Udemy uses MySQL.

Is Udemy cheap?

Udemy courses are priced based on the market, though the company does host sales(Udemy sale), and sometimes an instructor offers discounts to increase sale volume.

Is Udemy recognised?

Certificates of completion help demonstrate your accomplishments, but please note Udemy is not an accredited institution, and as a result, the certificates cannot be used for formal accreditation.

Is Udemy an Indian comapany?

No, Udemy is an American company, privately owned and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Denver, Brazil, India, Ireland, and Turkey.