Coursera and Udemy are now one company (blog.coursera.org)

I’ve purchased many Udemy courses over the years. The subscription plan they’ve been pushing makes no sense financially. I hope I’m wrong but I worry that eventually being a subscriber will be the only thing they offer.

Blackrock buys more of the world.. cool story.

It's been a while since I took a Coursera course but I LOVED it at the beginning. Between Machine Learning, the (numerical) optimisation courses and NAND-To-Tetris (even for the platform alone) it had so many great courses to pick from.

Meh. I would've been more bothered back in the day when Coursera was a treasure trove of high quality courses, but it went downhill.

So to add Udemy's infinite catalogue of poorly structured courses, it only adds to the decline

Hopefully this doesn't change public libraries' access to Udemy.

We have free coursera at work. But I really hate it because it enforces random deadlines on you. Even though the courses are completely prerecorded and absolutely don't need any kind of deadlines. I just want to study at my own pace.

I also hate all the gamification.

Competition is for losers.

Does it change their subscription pricing?

What about LinkedInlearning tho?

Oh no ...

Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.

As a purchaser of many Udemy courses (and yes, there are good ones), I'm waiting for the enshittification to begin.

Hope this changes the state of things like API access at Udemy

I've used both platforms regularly over the years, and I have mixed feelings about both. I mean they both have some truly excellent content, but so much utter trash. There should be some kind of quality control.

They make it reaaaaally hard to find the good stuff. Many courses are time sensitive (e.g. there's no point in learning a 20 year old version of PHP), but they frequently lie about when a course was created which makes it impossible to filter out old stuff.

There are so many courses that could benefit from more interactive tests/quizzes, but it's usually limited to solving a few ridiculously simple multiple choice questions. I'm not sure if that's a platform limitation or a course creator limitation.

Coursera used to be great, the value was unparalleled. Great specializations too; I learned Python and data science techniques through the platform during the COVID pandemic. Lately though they've been pushing for courses to have AI dialogue modules, where an AI agent asks you questions about the content. These modules are absolute slop garbage, often asking repetitive questions that have no grounding in actual course content. I got sick of this and dropped my subscription about a month ago.

Coursera put NAND to tetris behind a paywal after being free for like a decade. Just puke.

Coursera is a money losing company with a 10% y/y growth that IPOed at the top of the 2021 hype cycle. Now that the infinite money glitch is over they are in trouble, so they buy a marginally profitable company and slap Synergy and AI on it and pray to the gods of the market for more bountiful harvests of stocks issued.

How valid are these certificates in the real world? Does anyone get benefitted by having them? I have always used these sites as a quick one off concept check. That was before llms, and I don’t have a use for these sites for my use case. So I don’t have any understanding of how valid they are in general

> This is also Day 1. We’re being thoughtful and deliberate in how we bring our platforms together to deliver a unified, seamless experience.

So on day 1 they can deliver humongous amount of garbage, imagine what they can do on next day.

Coursera has high-quality, curated courses from reputable professors and institutions.

Udemy has almost the opposite.

Hopefully, this is handled well.

I hope that the shitty login from Coursera is not in the future used on Udemy. It is the reason, why I am no longer using Coursera, despite in the past having finished 2 MOOCs with certificates there. Recently, I logged in at Udemy without issues and started a course there. Except for the DRM crap for some of the videos, that I need to watch in another browser, since I don't want to enable DRM crap in my main browser, all seems to work well.

That was another hype cycle, does everyone remember how they were supposed to replace all universities, and folks no longer needed higher education?

I have access via my employer and mostly they were never that different from other places like Pluralsight.

EDIT: typo, most => that

For context this is sort of where we started:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119959

If you click the link to those original free courses, you get

   403 Forbidden

Don't know what it means, but Coursera made me sad a long time ago when it locked up all its value behind a paywall while getting rid of human interaction.

Lots of hate for coursera and udemy, but what about competitors? Are folks having good results elsewhere?

I enjoyed a course I took last summer on EdX; not a super polished experience, but the content was good and the projects were challenging.

I’ve enjoyed pluralsight in the past, but it is hit or miss whether it will have content you’re interested in.

I’m on mathacademy but that is text only and a very focused niche.

What’s the hip/trendy mooc these days? Who will eat courserudemy’s lunch?

The most annoying things for me about Coursera et al is that they aren't about education they are about job training. UC Berkeley (before that terrible law suit made them delete) had the best library of courses. Canvas et all has made it harder to get course materials, since everything is behind a paywall. Sometimes I want to learn some programming, but also I want to learn more math, history, philosophy, theology, literature, etc. and those non-job related subjects are largely missing from MOOCS.