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UB Uncovered Summary - July 2024
Presenters:
Terrin Lawrence - Staff Market Researcher
Atif Ashraf - Senior Market Researcher
- Monitor the overall health of the Udemy brand in the market.
- Conduct primary and secondary multinational research on learners both inside and outside the platform.
- Leverage data to drive product development.
- Evaluates whether and how Udemy should segment learners and prioritize them.
- Investigates what learners look for in the EdTech category.
- Studies learners' goals and motivations.
- Assesses whether marketing efforts resonate with target learners.
- Market Research aims to elevate Udemy and its instructors by understanding learner motivations.
- Motivations include professional and personal growth.
- Insights can help tailor content to meet learner expectations and aspirations.
- Research recognizes learners' global diversity and unique learning barriers.
- Learners are at different stages in their learning journeys.
- Motivations include: curiosity, expertise, career progression, recognition, and teaching others.
- Goals remain personal and unique, adding complexity to the learning experience.
- Aims to meet learners at their current stage, addressing obstacles they face.
- Learners seek personalized and unique learning experiences.
- Demand for the right content, time worthiness, and connection with peers.
- Importance of community building products to foster learner interaction.
- Online courses are seen as tools for positive life changes.
- Motivations vary based on professional and personal lives and socioeconomic factors.
- Personal success and growth are major drivers.
- Importance of confidence and preparation for learners.
- Career growth remains the primary focus, with some pursuing personal development.
- Challenges include finding dedicated time for learning and losing interest due to distractions.
- Udemy works on solutions for re-engaging learners.
- Learners prefer flexible schedules, hands-on practice, and quality production.
- Five learner segments: devoted, emerging, social, confident, and practical learners, each with unique motivations and needs.
Questions & Answers (Q&A)
- What are some of the differences you’ve seen in the motivations of Marketplace and UB learners ? How can instructors better tailor the content we create to align with UB learners' goals?
The good news is that the motivations for Marketplace and UB Learners are identical, both of our learner groups are focused on improving in their careers and are looking to Udemy to upskill themselves to fuel their personal growth and personal success.
- What are some of the primary challenges and barriers for non-English language learners that you have identified in your research?
For non-English learners, finding the same variety of courses as English speakers is a huge challenge, as some of the most valuable content is often in English. Most people prefer to learn online in their native language, and 75% of learners indicated that having access to both course materials and instructors in their native language is important. In the future to succeed internationally, it will be vital for Udemy to provide a platform for emerging instructors who speak regional languages and understand the local cultures.
- What can we do to improve the way we reach learners who say they learn less effectively online?
Learning is a personal journey, with each of our learners having a preference for how they want to learn. While you can’t cater to everyone’s learning style, making sure the course content is designed with engagement in mind is a great way to be at the forefront. Some ways to help with engagement can be breaking up long videos into smaller bite-sized portions, including a mixture of hands-on practice for them to apply their skills, and designing assessments for them to understand their progress along the way can be easy changes to increase engagement and satisfaction.
- What are some of the top topics learners are interested in right now at Udemy?
Tech topics continue to be at the forefront for learners, these include courses on AWS and Generative AI, but also among learners business oriented topics are also popular such as leadership, marketing, or finance. Learners are looking to Udemy to complete their skillset to become a well-rounded professional.
- What are ways we can improve our course engagement for ESL learners in big markets like India?
In markets like India, our users have incredibly high English proficiency — we’ve observed that many ESL learners in India prefer English courses because they believe it will help them improve their language skills. As a former ESL teacher, I recommend designing your course with the needs of ESL learners in mind. This could involve using more visual aids alongside spoken content or incorporating other common ESL teaching methods and tools. There a ton of resources available online for ESL teachers and certification programs to help teachers who have little to no experience teaching ESL learners.
- Have you done research that you can share with us on how the evolution of technology (like AI) has evolved the way learners engage with Udemy?
As you may know, Udemy is gearing up to launch some exciting new products that will heavily feature Gen AI. Our research team is diving into two main areas: figuring out where Gen AI fits best within Udemy products and keeping tabs on how the Gen AI landscape is evolving. Understanding this landscape is more about market research for us.
We're especially eager to see how Udemy learners are already using Gen AI outside our platform. This will help us decide how to best use Gen AI in our own offerings. One big question we're tackling is when users might find that a simple Gen AI prompt isn't enough and they need more structured online learning. This research is currently in development with our team and will launch soon.
- I thought I heard that learners are anxious to contact instructors. Did I hear it correctly? And why are they anxious?
Let me clarify - anxious wasn't the right word. Thinking of a traditional learning environment, people love to be able to communicate with the people that are teaching them. And right now we don't have many clear structures, and we're developing better products that will help instructors and learners to communicate with each other, but also learners to communicate with their peers. So from our research, we've seen that there is a lot of hunger for learners to communicate directly with instructors, whether that would be through one on ones or would be through small learning sessions. There is a lot of opportunity here.
- Does the Sales team at Udemy use your research to inform their approaches? What other teams use your research?
The great thing about research here at Udemy is that it will be leveraged throughout our organization to inform our strategy from sales to product. Not only do we have the Market Research team, but we also have a UX Research team as well. We distribute and present our research in town halls and hold meetings with teams across the company to ensure a learner centric approach.
Q&A that was not answered during the live event:
- Are there recommendations on how to adjust our teaching styles to better accomodate the different learner segments you've identified? Can a course be everything to everyone, or do we need to pick a group to target?
From our learning design team: To get the most return for each learning minute, identifying your target audience is always the ideal approach. It’s automatic to assume more is better, but in this case tailoring your course to a specific, identified audience will ensure that you are tailoring all your content to their learning needs and their current level of knowledge. The goal should be to engage the brain without overdoing it. When you put too much information, or your audience has to sort through what applies to them vs. what does not, the brain has to process that information. This means it uses bandwidth that would otherwise be used for learning something new. If they have to do this too much, many times engagement will drop (you lose your learner) or they leave the course applying less of what they learned.
If a course is a foundational (101) course that has a broader appeal, it is still helpful to identify what this means for your particular topic. In this case, the temptation is often to put too much, too soon. In identifying your audience, you can prioritize what they need to learn now vs. later.
While going through the exercise of listing out the specifics of your target audience may seem basic, it can also be eye opening for the instructor as far as identifying topics or activities they would have otherwise not thought of.
Short answer: Not identifying a target audience risks losing your learner and making your course less effective.
- You talked about the new for more localized courses in various languages. Is there any market research on if learners would embrace AI text-to-speech to fill this void and allow instructors to reach more students?
Our current position is that instructors are allowed to use TTS to translate courses in the marketplace, but that such courses don't qualify to be curated to local language collections in UB. We're continually looking to better understand learner preferences and may adapt our policies as technology and learner preferences evolve.
- Any questions or requests from our students around live webinars?
Yes - this is a high demand request from both our learners and customers. We do offer a number of live webinars, both with external industry experts and featuring Udemy Instructors. We frequently connect Instructor Partners with opportunities to deliver these live webinars and sessions through a pilot program and hope to scale / expand this effort over the next year.