We know how important it is that your courses are considered for inclusion in the Udemy Business collection. The IPP team works closely with the Curation team to ensure that Instructor Partner courses are prioritized for consideration for UB. Please review the video below for a review of the Curation benefits available to Instructor Partners.
Three benefits available to Instructor Partners to get your courses into Udemy Business:
- Historical Course Review - for NEW IPs only
Within six months of being accepted to the Instructor Partner Program, we perform a historical analysis of all Instructor Partner content. Courses in all UB-supported languages will be reviewed. Please note that this will only include courses published prior to program acceptance. If your course is added to UB, you will receive an email. For any new courses published after your acceptance into the Instructor Partner Program, they will be reviewed through the process described below.
2. Ongoing Instructor Partner Curation Review - for ALL IPs
As an ongoing benefit to Instructor Partners, the Curation team uses an internal tool to perform weekly checks of courses published by Instructor Partners in the last 90 days that are not currently in UB. (For non-IPs this process only happens monthly in the first 90 days after publication). After the first 90 days, all Instructor Partner courses are reviewed monthly for potential inclusion into Udemy Business. You will receive an email if your course has been added to the UB collection.
In general, the Curation team looks to add courses to UB that:
- have a course rating of at least 4.4
- have a minimum of 25 ratings
- and that are relevant to the professional learner.
If your course contains content that encourages a learner to leave their current role, pursue other money earning endeavors, or is not relevant to the day to day work of an enterprise learner, then it will likely not be added to the UB collection.
At this point in time, we are not able to provide custom feedback on every course not added.
Ultimately, the Curation team makes the final call on all courses added to UB and there may be instances where a course meets the requirements above and is not added to UB. Particularly if there are concerns about quality or escalations from our UB customers, our Curation team can make exceptions to any of these Instructor Partner benefits.
3. Temporary Process to Identify Courses Missed in Curation Tool
In January 2024, we launched a temporary process to quality test our curation tool as it seemed to be missing some Instructor Partner courses through the process outlined in #2 above. We identified multiple bugs in the tool, and most have been fixed. Until we have 100% confidence in the tool, we will keep the following temporary process in place to assist Instructor Partners with flagging courses that were published more than 90 days ago and that they believe have met the requirements to be added to Udemy Business.
This temporary process/form should not be used for newly onboarded Instructor Partners.
If you have a course that meets ALL of the following requirements, please complete the form linked here. This form is to be used by Instructor Partners only and should not be shared. Please do not complete this form unless ALL of the requirements below have been met.
- Your course was published more than 90 days ago
- Your course has more than 25 ratings (and it has been at least four weeks since you reached 25 ratings)
- Your course has consistently had an average rating of 4.4 for at least four weeks (if a course wavers below this threshold, that can delay it being flagged in our internal tool)
- Your course topic is appropriate for professional learners and does not contain content that supports/encourages someone to leave their current job.
- You are the primary instructor for the account. If the primary instructor for the course is not a member of the Instructor Partner Program, then the course might not get flagged correctly in our tool.
Courses submitted to this form will be reviewed as quickly as possible, and flagged to our Curation team if they have met the requirements above.
Please note that our team has limited bandwidth and we cannot guarantee a response to any submissions to this form.
This temporary process should not be used for newly onboarded Instructor Partners.
📣 Content Quality in Udemy Business: Keeping Your Courses in UB
Remember your audience
- Framing content for learners and customers in the professional business space
- We ask that instructors avoid using the following in their courses:
- Gender or racial stereotypes
- Sexual language, including sexual suggestiveness/flirtiness
- Nudity
- Violence of any kind
- Weapons
- Profanity/cursing
- Charged historical examples (e.g. references to Hitler, slaves) when not necessary for the topic
- Unethical activities
- Consider learner empathy
- When creating content, especially on more sensitive topic areas, step into someone else’s shoes. Consider how what you are saying may impact different genders, races, locations, etc. Would someone different than you see this topic or example differently? Does this enhance the learner experience or hurt the content / learner?
- Relevancy
- Relevancy can demonstrate that material in a course should reflect and relate directly to the informational material, purpose, and desired outcomes of the course
- We do not encourage you to include content in your courses that you do not feel inherently qualified to teach - e.g. medical content if you do not hold a medical credential; DEI content if you have not taken sufficient sensitivity training specific to DEI, etc.
Proactive and reactive approaches we take in regards to content quality
- Proactive
- Presentations/ conversations with instructors
- Content quality criteria for curation (e.g. social proof, standing with Udemy Trust & Safety policies)
- Transcript scans
- We have partnered with a 3rd party partner in collaboration with T&S and Marketplace Teams, and implemented regular transcript scans
- These scans search through course transcripts and flag problematic words and phrases that we want to exclude from UB.
- Our partner uses three different machine learning models that we continuously tailor to our needs to search for profanity, sexual content, and hate speech.
- Reactive
- Emails from the Curation Team requesting changes to your course based on a content quality escalation
- This is based heavily in customer feedback
- Customers excluding courses from their account
- Courses being removed from UB
- Ultimately, the Curation team makes the final decision on all courses added to UB. Particularly if there are concerns about quality or escalations from our UB customers, our Curation team can make exceptions to any Instructor Partner benefits.
Recommendations for creating quality content for Udemy Business
- Scan reviews on your courses
- Audit your content and remove anything mentioned in the list of topics to avoid
- ***If you are contacted about a content escalation, in addition to removing/changing that content presented to you, please also audit your content to ensure that issue does not exist anywhere else in your course(s)
- Maintain the use of inclusive language to ensure your content is accessible to a global audience
Keep courses and lectures effective and to the point
- Provide learners with plenty of resources, inclusive examples, and opportunities for practice
- Create detailed and descriptive section and lecture titles
Check out this brief 20 minute recording from Rachel Zanfardino: