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Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

I used to think these online educational companies wouldn't be very profitable in the long run. Then I discovered Udemy. In the last two months I've bought three courses on Udemy (at about $10-$20 each). The courses aren't your conventional CS classes. I bought a course on Photoshop mastery. Another on Android programming, and another on Adobe Illustrator skills. I've enjoyed the material so far.

I have undergrad and grad degrees from respected US schools, so I don't really need certification, but I still find myself taking these online courses.

In the case of Photoshop and Illustrator, its not even for the sake of employment (although it might be useful in the long run). There's something satisfying about acquiring skills in an area you are really deficient in.

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I've bought several courses on Udemy (which hosts some awesome content), and am part way through my second Udacity nanodegree. These sites seem to serve slightly different purposes:

- Udacity: help you get a job in a new field

- Udemy: help you learn a new set of techniques, that can help with what you're currently trying to do (e.g. in your current job)

I'm in a similar boat. I've been a software engineer for 15 years, but I'm able to learn new languages and tools by watching videos on 2X speed on Udemy. It's much harder to find good quality videos on Youtube. I'm happy to pay the $10-20

I like a good deal of what's on Udemy, but it feels like for reasons totally different from the marketing. For me it's more like the online version of those video lecture series you used to buy on VHS or DVD through a "distance learning" mailorder catalog, and not so much like an online classroom. There's some course-like content in it beyond the lectures (quizzes and such), but imo the main value is really just the lectures, and the quality of the lectures is what differentiates good courses on there from bad ones.

Which is fine, video lectures are a model that's worked for a few decades, but now online and more convenient to shop for. And a good video-lecture course is certainly worth at least $10. I guess I can see why they don't brand it that way (the "disrupting education" hype train has money/press, while "mail-order video lectures, but on the internet" is a harder sell). But for me, their courses made a lot more sense to me once I started thinking of it as a place to buy a video lecture course, like the way you might order DVDs of the Feynman physics lectures.

Agreed, in my experience (primarily with Coursera and edX, which are admittedly different from Udemy/Udacity in their focus), the recent wave of online courses or "MOOCs" mostly boils down to video lectures being made readily available online. For my purposes, this is just great! The content is often very high quality, and I have yet to pay for a course since so much is available for free.

I'm really glad for these comments on Udemy, I'll have to give them another look. I must have given them my email address at some point but their constant discount emails are so close to spam I'd written their content off as a scam ages ago. Appreciate the positive comments :)

Same here, I've bought close to 13 courses on Udemy. For learning React, Unity, and for brushing up my Nodejs, a few for game design and drawing etc. Also bought a Cocktail making course just for kicks.

I usually buy courses for 10$, which are good. But there are some awesome courses which costed a lot more, from 99$ to 199$. I used to add them to my wishlist so that I can buy them later when I save enough money, but sooner or later, all those wishlisted courses would be on sale for 10$. No idea if this is intentional, or if I picked the most popular courses and hence were on sale.

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