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Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
https://dap.berkeley.edu/documents-forms/pdfs
https://dap.berkeley.edu/ada-title-ii-updates/title-ii-ada-w...
No. They chose to take them down, instead of providing reasonable accommodations to those with disabilities.
Choosing to see everything in the most cynical light doesn't make that version of events true.
There is no malicious intent here. Why arent these documents grandfathered in? It simply makes no sense.
You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
Don't blame the litigant. If you don't like it, change federal law.
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
Bullshit.
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).
What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.
My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.
I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.
The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).
I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
I asked “what’s I.T.T?”
He said “it stands for Blood Sucking Leeches.”
And we drove home.
It was expensive. $6,000, for a 2-year, full-time curriculum. I took a loan, and spent 10 years, paying it back.
Best investment I ever made.
It's by Shel Silverstein; Johnny Cash just performed it.
I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.
Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.
Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
I mean I remember what undergrad (and grad school) was like and I'm pretty sure doing that independently and optionally would be tough.
- you need a plan of what you're going to do with the information you're going to learn, after you learn it
- you need measurable improvement and feedback validating your improvement
- you need a community supporting you to keep you accountable
I guess at school, until your final year anyway, you get all three. Item 1 is lost once you realize your academics don't really help you at work.
There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents/interest.
But most adults won't have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
How is that a viable model?
Anyway, in this case, the cost to the university is quite low and there's no real loss of income, as the real value the vast majority of people pay for is clearly in the status that comes from being there in person and getting the diploma.
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.
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.
Fashion, I suppose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case
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
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.
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.
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
I think of that when asking questions about areas I don’t know.
That was about 18mo ago, so maybe this kind of hallucination is under control these days.
If Udemy's pitch were “Learn X as Taught by Notable People in the Field,” I would have signed up in a heartbeat.
- 3D Graphics taught by Michael Abrash
- Card Manipulation taught by Jeff McBride
- Pianistic Ergonomics taught by Edna Golandsky
MasterClass already is like this, but the content doesn't go as deep as it could to really teach learners.
Udemy functions as open market with the associated pros and cons.
That is an excellent way to trick yourself into thinking that you learned, when really you got fed bad information. LLMs are nowhere near reliable enough to use for this topic and probably never will be.
LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
You should have a mental model about how the world works and the fundamental rules of the context where you're operating. Even though you might not know something, you eventually develop an intuition of what makes sense and what doesn't. And yes, that applies even to "university lectures" since a lot of professors make mistakes/are wrong plenty of times.
Taking an LLM's output at face value would be dumb, yes. But it would be equally dumb to take only what's written on a book at face value, or a YouTube video, or anyone you listen to. You have to dig in, you have to do the homework.
LLMs make it much easier for you to do this homework. Sure, they still make mistakes, but they get you 90% of the way in minutes(!) and almost for free.
Also, hallucinations are still a thing, and there's a reason why LLMs do not outperform subject matter experts in nearly every field.
LLMs level the playing field for the other 8 billion people.
Reminds of this article[1] that was featured yesterday and which I think was great!
https://onlineeducation.caltech.edu/courses/certificate-gran...
I don't think anyone has found any new techniques to prevent them. But maybe we don't need that anyway if models just get so good that they naturally don't hallucinate much.
For instance, I was hoping that I could use GPT to help me learn to fly a B737-800. This is actually less challenging than people think... if you just want to get in the air and skip all proper procedure and safety checks! If you want to fly a commercial plane like a real pilot, there is a ton of procedure and instruments to understand. There is actually quite a bit of material on this available online via flight crew operations manuals, as well as an old (but still relevant) manual straight from Boeing. So why rely on GPT? It's a bit hard to explain without rambling, but those manuals are designed for pilots with a lot of prior knowledge, not some goofball with X-Plane and a joystick. It would be nice to distill that information down for someone who just wants an idiot's guide to preflight procedure, setting the flight computer, taxiing, taking off, and performing an ILS landing.
Sadly, it turned out I really had to hold the LLM's hand along the way, even when I provided it two PDFs of everything it needed to know, because it would skip many steps and get them out of order, or not be able to correctly specify where a particular instrument or switch was located. It was almost a waste of time, and I actually still have more to do because it's that inefficient.
That said, I still think LLMs can be unreasonably good for learning about very specific subjects so long as you don't blindly believe it. I kinda hate how I have to say that, but I see people all the time believing anything Grok says. :facepalm: GPT has been a big help in learning things about finance, chemistry, and electronics. Not sure I would assume it could create a full blown course, but who knows. I bet it'd be pretty solid at coming up with exam questions.
Most drawing/painting courses are taught from people who are juniors at best. The quality is laughable compared to what you can get for free from Marco Bucci/Sinix/Proko channels. And honestly, even those high-quality videos won't teach you how to draw anyway.
That being said, I didn't realize how bad Udemy art courses were when I got started. I think that's a life lesson for me especially in the era of LLM.
But this press release makes me sad. At one point both of these companies had big visions for how online learning should happen. To read the announcement, it sounds like they’re being held hostage by a management consultant. There is so much gobbledigook and so little clarity about how to help people learn.
These platforms lost because of YouTube…not AI.
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera.
Mean while their prices seem to go up every year.
As another comment here said:
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
The moment they stopped doing that, everything went to shit and this is the natural end result.
I think it would be hard to make it work, without devolving into 50% slop. As in, it would still require very substantial continuous effort by dedicated experts, to provide a high-quality offering.
On Coursera, I did Andrew Ng’s machine learning course and Dan Boneh’s cryptography course and both were excellent. Time well spent IMHO.
The next thing I want to take is a WinDbg course. Udemy has one that looks pretty good. I should probably also find a modern assembly language course…
To give an idea of how cutting-edge it was at the time, the well-known RMSProp optimizer was unpublished work that Hinton presented in the course, and people had to cite the presentation slides when they used it in papers published later.
Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.
The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.
Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.
I plan to take the follow up soon.
The instructor is really passionnate about what she's talking about, which really makes the subject more interesting than I thought it would be.
Perry Mehrling’s course on Money and Banking is good too.
edit: omg I just looked at coursera and it's so bad!
it's all "AI this" "AI that"
who uses all that stuff? who wants that? the whole site looks so sad now. the OGs are still there but there is so much crap around it
They, unfortunately for some good sources like edX, managed to brute-force themselves into the mainstream, which is quite sad.
I remember some of the early days of "Into to AI" and courses like that, Udacity in early days (with courses from Steve Huffman, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thurn) and how they managed to help me learn so many things.
I would be very surprised if people can say the same for today's array of options.
But in the last couple years both have been horribly run. Hopefully the AI threat lights a fire. I suspect a well designed course with some context engineering can become far better than ChatGPT by itself.
The primary limitation right now is "time".. it takes time to do all the research, so it kind of has to be an async process.
Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.
I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
There's some crap there; I've returned a couple courses not to my liking, but by and large I've been happy with them.
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
Playlists ...
Python Programming Beginner Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTskrapNbzXh...
Python OOP Tutorials - Working with Classes https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTsqhIuOqKhw...
Python Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTi...
This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.
Being able to skim, jump around, re-read a paragraph or pause on a single sentence is how understanding actually forms for me.
What’s interesting is that LLMs lean hard into this strength of text, they make it interactive, searchable, and contextual.
To me, most of these platforms have optimized video for engagement. Its essentially "press play and hope it sticks".
Yet your comment is true. Perhaps the difference is that science is inherently interesting because nature is confined to things that are consistent and make sense, while the latest security model for version 3.0 of this-or-that web service protocol, vs. version 2.0, is basically arbitrary and resists effective visual diagramming. Learning software (not computer science) is an exercise in memorizing things that aren't inherently interesting.
Something tells me the outcome will likely be the same -- years of trying to get competing systems to get aligned or absorbed, attrition of all the most important people who are ready to move on and do more interesting work, and ultimately a poorer experience for the customer.
But what do I know.
I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.
I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.
Centuries, really, with only periodic exceptions.
The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.
- create a platform to host content others create
- get employees to ask for company-provided access
- almost none of these employees really use it
- collect subscription revenue indefinitely
No idea about whether the courses on there are still any good.
Absolutely not worth it since the courses are on par with random youtube tutorials IMO.
Also really dislike the pattern of some popular frontend frameworks selling basic documentation in the form of "courses."
(Might be a problem of that university, still ...)
In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers?
I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.
But MOOCs and other purely online options just didn't result in any meaningful certification especially outside of a connection to established universities. And, given that, people/companies weren't interested in paying significant bucks for them.
It was probably a useful experiment. Just not a very successful one. And once the experiment faltered, schools/professors became less interested in putting money and energy into it.
All the evidence is that most of the students/potential students who weren't already motivated to pursuing independent learning didn't really connect to all this online material.
While these Udemy is fine for building up CV bullet point skills, I have never felt that these tutorial based job training courses, designed to teach you framework N+1 were as useful as more fundamentaly and in depth courses that lead you to understand how things really work.
That's what Udemy was from the start. If you want depth, it was always Coursera.
https://www.coursera.org/browse/physical-science-and-enginee...
I'm very sorry to see it go.
Coursera's model will still survive for a while, given people's desire for branded credentials (university degree credits or company-branded certificates)... until the university bubble bursts too in a 10+ years. Start of trend: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic...
A bit of a plug: we tried building a consumer business, with a learning experience built atop these LLMs: https://uphop.ai/learn . Still offered for free to consumers, but we're now succeeding much better on B2B ("you either die a consumer business or live long enough to become B2B" was v true for us).
Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.
I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
I’d love to see long term usage data on MOOCs. They had so much promise though I don’t know anyone who uses them post-LLM though it could be I live in a bubble.
It feels more like it was sort of a fad thing and, especially once any certification value essentially fell off the back of the truck (and therefore no one really willing to pay)--much less any real value delivered to people who weren't already autodidacts--it sort of faded away.
From where I was at the time Linkedin Learning (or whatever it was called) was a sometimes vaguely useful company benefit for random stuff but I'm not sure to what degree anyone even tracked who used it.
That is what hollowed out the value.. all the incentives are inverse to building long term value.
Everything becomes check box driven product development to close the next "big deal" and then no development is done to really enhance the core of the system or the core value to the learner. It becauses now it morphs into can we show value to the clients/decision makers/learning admins?
It mostly morphed to corporate training and courses for people who already had Masters degrees.
Online education is not that different. You basically put in the time watching the videos and doing the homework and tests. The test and certificate become the goal.
Self study whether powered by LLMs or by good old books or whatever source of information, basically relies more on things like curiosity and discipline. Some people do this naturally.
The nice thing about LLMs is that they adapt to your curiosity and that it is easy to dumb down stuff to the point where you can understand things. Lots of people engage with LLMs this way. Some do that to feed their confirmation bias, some do it to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the net result is that you learn.
I think LLMs are still severely underused in education. We romanticize the engaged, wise, teacher that works their ass off to get students to see the light. But the reality is that a lot of teachers have to juggle a lot of not so interested students. Some of them aren't that great at the job to begin with. Burnouts are quite common among teachers. And there are a lot of students that fall through the cracks of the education system. I think there's some room there for creative teachers to lighten their workloads and free up more time to engage with students that need it.
I saw a teacher manually checking a students work on the train a few days ago. Nice red pen. Very old school work. She probably had dozens of such tests to review. I imagine you get quite efficient at it after a few decades. But feeding a pdf to chat GPT probably would generate a very thorough evaluation in seconds given some good criteria. She could probably cut a few hours of her day. There are all sorts of ways to leverage LLMs to help teachers or students here. Also plenty of ways for students to cheat. But there are ways to mitigate that.
I guess it’s ok for compliance videos but I’m not sure about retention.
I write this as someone who wants online education succeed.
The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill.
TLDR: you learn by DOING
I never wish to learn about Docker. I want to know enough to get my containers running. In a pre-LLM world, I did take a course on Docker. I have learned my last bit of Docker in an LLM world.
Coursera somehow got to be not good. I subscribed to the premium thing and it is not worth for me. I'd rather pay for the courses and do that on my time.
Udemy does that "promotion" nonsense to "encourage" to "buy it now" which I think is lame. It is not like they are steam. They are just cycling through the list and add 1000 bucks to whatever is not there. Also they store your cookies and track your device for that. That's despicable
I wish Coursera to rethink this decision and to rethink on the platform itself.
Udemy was generally crap.
Coursera was decent.
Crap eats decent.
The few times I spent a few bucks, out of curiosity, on some technical courses with near perfect scores, was horrified to find the instructor could barely speak English, audio seemed to have been recorded out an internet cafe in some 3rd world country, and explanations were shallow or confusing.
The surprise was not that a $5 to $25 course was bad. The surprise was the mismatch with the numeric rating, reviews and student testimonies, compared to actual course content. I can only imagine, most reviews are fake and the rating system has issues.
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category.
Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate.
> If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard
Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.
There is a difference between being dead and not actively maintained. If a popular FLOSS package isn't touched for many moons, do you think it just means it's done?
That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.
Very few projects update dependencies that often, and only very big ones are found with security issues that often.
> lack integrations with new platforms
You don't need a new intration _every 2 days_, not to mention that many projects don't need such integrations at all. Moreover some popular and updated projects lack such integrations despite having lot of commits.
> lack support for new HW architectures
This is something that many projects get for free. But also, you don't get a new HW architecture every 2 days.
> lack newer privacy guarantees
What more privacy guarantees do I need from projects that don't communicate with external services or store data at all?
If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.
Also, if the project is actively maintained then there is always a multitude of low-priority issues and features to address.
Being FLOSS also means anyone in the whole world is able to contribute anything. If no one bothers to do so, that is aligned with the fact the project is indeed dead.
As they stated, tons of 'renewed' stuff are snake oil today. They add nothing new.
One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much!
I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies.
https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire
Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast.
If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.
It wasn’t a big deal but I would have still appreciated it if the author inserted some new recorded segments or re-recorded some content to make up for it.
I think you are confusing interiorizing some fundamentals with things moving fast. There are languages and frameworks rolling out higher level support for features covering concurrency and parallelism. While you focus on thread-safety, a framework you already use can and often does roll out features that outright eliminate those concerns with idiomatic approaches that are far easier to maintain. Wouldn't you classify that as moving fast?
Some areas do, some areas not so much.
I have a colleague that's incredibly strong with databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant.
I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living. Once you get past the "cloud native" abstractions (and other BS) it's penguins all the way down, and I get to reuse most of my core Linux competencies I learned 10+ years ago (eg: I do tcpdump in prod, and it's quicker and more effective than many of the modern shiny tools).
That is why there isn't much else to go but the heuristic of the most new class with the most ratings.
It still does change and you have to adapt.
E.g.
> databases (we use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL) and he's living off the learning he did 20 years ago when he was a junior Oracle consultant
And there's lots of changes here, e.g. vector stores, all the different query engine improvements, PostgreSQL IO improvements, etc and they all may impact your job. Your optimal query back then might not be the same. Living off the old learnings is like taking a 50% discount on the max potential.
> I live off the learning I did in Linux now that I administer Kubernetes clusters for a living.
And these have had changes consistently too e.g. io-uring and gateway api. You can only be in legacy for so long.
I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining.
My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described.
It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.
I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible.
When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
you could've used docker for 12 years and never hit it if you used it on Linux, and followed sensible practices (mount the data dir from outside so it can be reattached to upgraded version of the container)
Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.
It's as if computer science, in terms of data structures and algorithms, isn't taught. Or, perhaps, isn't taught as being relevant.
As for lack of knowledge about filesystems: it might be contributed by mobile devices hiding real filesystems from users.
> the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
Basics do make me feel productive. However, it seems bosses and businesses don't agree.
I fear the day basics can be automated away.
Yes and no. The world has also changed all these years. Why something is slow 10+ years ago might not be today or at least for the same reason. E.g. Docker on Mac especially with Apple silicon has undergone major changes the last few years.
Maybe we have too many layers of abstraction. Or there's just too much work to do now that businesses combine many roles into one?
The person at the root of this comment thread might not like it but they can’t just sit back and collect revenue forever without putting out updates.
When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".
Thanks for not jumping to self promotion, but I'm actually curious to see how you did it - would you mind sharing a link?
Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked!
(the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)
I've kept the Flask one up to date for almost 10 years, all free updates.
I have so many course ideas but starting a new one is tough because I've lost all search traction to my site and courses in general. I don't want it to end but I also have to be real.
I've put a decade into writing blog posts, hundreds of free YouTube videos (without ads or sponsors), 100+ episode podcast related to programming and none of it has grown an audience in 5-10 years. I mean sure I have 21k subs on YouTube but most videos get like 200 views. I do it because I enjoy it but that doesn't mean it's wrong to also want to be able to sustain myself again doing it like I did between 2015 and 2021.
Yep on my site there's around 30 hours of content for the same course. Basically a bunch of updates and refactors along with building a 2nd app.
I was trying to differentiate my site vs Udemy by adding extra perks.
Whether this is a problem obviously depends heavily on the subject. Classical CompSci problems won't suffer from this, depth first search is still depth first search ten years later. But the framework-du-jour is often a different beast entirely 10 years down the road.
Perhaps they simply have too much content to be able to curate things properly.
It's a fair point. I have over time, such as updating libraries which produced new zip files and also modified lessons. It didn't move the needle for rankings, but it did update the timestamp.
Sites like Udemy and Coursera have many upsides but they are still anchored in earning in the past, while that world is finally changing rapidly.