Interviewed two top execs at Udemy today about how might we help experts publish online courses.

Here are the questions and some notes:

In your own words, how would you describe Udemy’s role in the educational market?

• Strong focus on continuing education content
• Create high quality content to be able to attend the needs of the learners

What are the biggest challenges it faces in attending to the learner’s needs and goals?

• Create mind set that learning is something you have to do continuosly.
• How do we educate people about continuing with their own education.
• How to install a growth mindset.

What is the relationship between Udemy and the educators who create content?

• Closer relationship with a few high achieving teachers.
• Udemy has private discussion groups on Facebook that are very active.

How does the platform scaffold educators to create better courses, besides the Udemy’s courses on the subject?

• On-boarding
  • Send a test video to see if you’ve got all the settings correct
  • Tips and tricks on the side bars
• Community of co-creation where they help each other out, peer-review and share techniques
• Instructor’s handbook: what is the exact sequence for a course depending on the skill level of the student and the subject matter?

How does the course review process work?

• 1500 reviews a month
• Secret sauce as to how they do it 🙂

What proportion of courses received have enough technical quality to be accepted?

• Most courses are rejected sent back for review, because they did not meet the required technical criteria (a/v quality, frame size, etc).
• Content: no introductory material about what the course is about.

If you had unlimited resources, what features would you implement on Udemy?

• No specific thing but keep on pushing towards the larger goal of takin

Questions we did not ask:

• What are the main problems teachers have in using the tool?
• What are the main problems learners have in using the tool?

• What are the most popular course categories?