A little while ago I remember having a telephone conversation with one of my YouTube subscribers. She had made contact to talk through her GCSE course and, as a mature student, wanted some advice about how to ‘get her ‘mojo’ back and study more.’
Two things came out of the discussion:
– It was a little more encouragement to write ‘How to get an A in maths‘
and
– We had a very interesting chat about a website “Udemy.com”
At the time I was quite focussed on building my YouTube channel but, after a brief look at the Udemy offering, the idea of creating an online course stayed in my mind.
Here we are, about a year later, and I’m delighted that my course ‘How to be good at maths – and great at fractions‘ has been accepted onto the platform. The support is excellent and I’m working through the next course ‘How to improve your written English for fun, profit and enjoyment,” you’ll notice that there isn’t a link yet … although there will be soon. I’m quite excited about this course, as it’s a complete departure from my usual talking head style videos; they’ll still be some, but it’s amazing what you can do with Powerpoint. Either way, armed with the latest Blue Snowball mic, I’m having fun.
Start learning on Udemy today!
Udemy.com has been in the press recently after raising $65 million “to continue pioneering a global marketplace and disrupt the future of education.” I can well believe that it’s possible, in the short time I’ve been involved there’s been a huge increase in course offers – from yoga to programming to building an Amazon business to … well, you’ll need to see for yourself.
Just a quick snapshot of my course dashboard shows titles as diverse as ‘Learn to sketch curves using calculus,’ ‘Become a Superlearner’ and ‘Write Now! Become a Confident & Effective Writer in One Hour’ among the 24 courses I’ve bought so far. They’re quite straightforward to purchase, good quality and I’m constantly thinking ‘that’ll be great!’ Education has never been so much fun, so easy and so relevant.
I’m very aware that this is sounding like sales copy for Udemy’s 30,000+ courses. Really sorry about that, it’s very easy to get carried away. Here’s a couple of comments:
– Some of the courses are a little dated and show this through poorer video / sound quality. To be fair the new Udemy guidelines are quite strict and quality control is a big issue.
– Some of the courses are a little boring and I’m not entirely convinced that the instructor has actually succeeded to ‘make £10 million per day out of YouTube / Amazon / Fiverr.’ Delete as appropriate. There is some good stuff in that genre but you’ll need to choose wisely – perhaps an additional Google search to check credentials?
– Don’t ever pay the full price without checking elsewhere for discount coupons. There’s a whole range of forums, facebook groups and websites that will promote discounted courses. It’s certainly worth checking out.
Discover math & science courses on Udemy!
Finally it’s worthwhile to only buy Udemy courses through Udemy. With massive growth to over 7,000,000 students there’s bound to be a number of pseudo sites. They tend to be populated by rip off downloaded, older and poor quality look alikes. For the few extra pennies it’s worthwhile to get the real deal.
Happy learning!