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Updates to Reviews and Search on Udemy

Highlights:

Free Courses:

Starting July 13, all free courses rated under a 4.1 and flagged with a ‘high degree of confidence’ by Udemy's data algorithm will be hidden from Udemy search
That means that students searching for the course on the website will not be able to find it, and the course will not be featured in any Udemy promotions.

If a free course has a Recent Review Rating less than 4.1, an “At Risk” signal will pop-up in your instructor dashboard:

This standard currently only applies to free courses because of the high levels of enrollments of new students into those courses. It’s important for a new student to have an amazing experience with Udemy, otherwise they won’t come back and purchase more of your courses. While currently this standard only applies to free courses, ""we are exploring extending the standard to paid courses in the future.""

If you have a free course that has been hidden from Udemy’s search and you switch it to paid, the course will be reinstated to search. However, because the course’s ranking is below the marketplace average, it may not be easily visible
Reviews

I might not have understood this very well, but I get that Ratings/Reviews are gonna be a matter of survival now for the course to stay featured.

All courses, both free and paid, are measured on a Recent Review Rating – the average score of all of your reviews over the past 90 days (or the last 10 ratings).


Reviews:
Released attribute-level feedback so that students can now select a reason for their review.

releasing a new Recent Review Metric – the average rating of your course over the past 90 days (or last 10 data points). This new metric will now be factored into how your courses are ranked in our search algorithm (pending tests within our search variants), and will be shown on your instructor dashboard. We are also working on getting this metric shown to students, which will replace the current review rating on your course landing page and course card.

4.1 seems to be the threshold..

Links:

https://teach.udemy.com/announcing-updates-reviews-and-search/

https://teach.udemy.com/new-standard-free-courses/

I don't know, just thought of sharing this...
We students need to do our part, to keep the courses discoverable in Udemy..

Open to discussion

Udemy team members are CRAZY!!!!

Udemy is essentially telling instructors, if your course is rated 4 or less by our recent review algorithm, whatever ..We are not proud to have you associated with us and will not showcase you to any of our users..

We need the Free courses to be as good as the paid ones, coz those are like Free Samples..if they aren't very good , no one will want to buy the Paid courses, which make us money and pay for the infrastructure.

We won't just dump you, but we won't tell anyone that we have you.
We are kindda ashamed of any free course rated 4 or below.

So take your time, do your own promotion , make us proud by getting a 4.1+ rating and then we can tell users about what a good course we have on Udemy/our platform.

And for the paid course, that's the only thing that makes us money..so we will continue to show your availability here, but we'll kindda put you at the very last in the queue if you are rated 4 or less .. We want to show our top rated courses first and foremost...

and someday, we'll hide you too...
Udemy brand should only be associated with courses rated 4.1 or higher.
Period. ( Atleast that's what we are gonna show our visitors)


So from Udemy's Perspective, what's wrong??
They are running a business and they want the best instructors/courses..


Its now entirely the responsibility of the Instructors to promote their courses, maintain the quality of the courses and ensure great ratings..


Question: I created a paid course, gave out 500 Free coupons.. in 3 months ie 90 days only 10 users rated the course, say 4.5 (worst case)

VS a competing similar paid course gave away only 50 free coupons and got rated 4.5 by 10 users..in the same 90 days



So how does Udemy's algorithm decide which to highlight and which to hide?



Sorry for wasting everybody's time..

It seems, some folks in Turkey are going nuts with inventing new "improvements". The best is the enemy of good.

if you find any good courses , while searching within Udemy..
rated 3 to 4 Stars,or no ratings.. this might be the time to Enroll yourself, before those courses become invisible next month...

Also there is now a good possibility that most instructors will make their Free Courses Paid... just so that the courses stay discoverable...( Did Udemy somehow want this to happen?)

Lets see an example:
I just did a search within Udemy on the word "dating"
It gave me one Free course and 53 paid..
This is the Free course : https://www.udemy.com/the-manual-to-attracting-someone-that-you-like-and-date/
Now though it has 1397 enrollments only 23 people somehow completed/rated the course and the average rating by these 23 people is 2.9 Stars.

Now if I happen to do the same search next month post 13th July .. going by the new Rules , I may not find this course..
Udemy will not show me that a Free course for 'Dating' exists. This course will still be on Udemy but there will be no way to find/discover it.

So what could the instructor do? Expect people to search on Google for a Free Udemy Dating course and hope google shows it ... Na
He will probably make it paid. ( and may/may not give out coupons..)

but who already enrolled these courses they can watch or not ?

@moeen: there won't be any change for the courses you are already enrolled in.

You should be able to find your enrolled courses within "My courses" the same way as today..


Your reviews/ratings are gonna decide the fate of courses.
Enroll and Review responsibly or one day soon, there won't be any bulk free coupons.
[hr]
I haven't really searched inside Udemy for Free Courses since maybe I first created a Udemy account, so if any of you guys find something good let me know/ PM me..

We aren't allowed to share Free courses here.. so..

hey, thanks fr sharing this important point.