Coursera to Combine with Udemy
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The news that Coursera is combining with Udemy has sparked a lively debate about the effectiveness of online education, particularly MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Some commenters, like mathattack, expressed skepticism about the long-term impact of MOOCs, while others, like brobdingnagians, swore by Udemy courses for compliance training and skill development. A key point of contention is whether watching videos alone leads to retention, with some arguing that interactivity is essential for learning, while others suggest that spaced-repetition systems and LLMs can enhance retention. Amidst the debate, a surprising consensus emerged: true learning requires engagement and effort, regardless of the format.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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--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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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...
This is what you get when you have an educator completely dedicated to a single topic and surpasses all expectations of education.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Give your head a wobble, mate.
Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.
That would be an unreasonably high standard and would set an incentive to withhold. Which is exactly the outcome we got here?
Wouldn't it be better to cheer the improved accessiblity? Then acknowledge shortcomings and ask for community contributions to improve things?
Why must perfect be the enemy of good?
Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.
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.
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.
And that's why I made the argument that it wasn't slightly more expensive. It's possible it would have cost more to add subtitles than the entire rest of the project combined.
I think it's fair to mandate subtitles when there's a certain level of budget. I don't think it's a good idea to unconditionally mandate subtitles.
> UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules
In their normal course of action. I don't think this side project was plugged in to the core tasks of the university.
Shutting it down counts as lazy but what do you want a project with minimal budget to do?
We're not shaming other universities for not putting courses online. We're only shaming one that did it "badly" and then gave up. That's unfair. Every other university that doesn't fund similar subtitles and uploads should get the same reaction.
And by "badly" I mean it still had okay subtitles, just not particularly good ones.
There is no malicious intent here. Why arent these documents grandfathered in? It simply makes no sense.
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.
Tell us - how much money did they make?
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
And you should not expect all disabled people in the country to waive their rights just because you do.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
First: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.
I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.
Entirely irrelevant.
If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.
But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. Should they also be forced to take down the website if the speaker didn’t speak perfect English?
This is a falsehood. The complaint was that some videos had no transcription at all.
There were other complaints, BTW - it wasn't just subtitles. There were complaints about blind people not being able to read the docs.
But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?
By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.
This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.
No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."
There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.
I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.
> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist. On top of that,
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.
As I said - if this is such an obvious wrong, fix the damn law. As it is written, Berkeley didn't have a leg to stand on.
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.
https://dap.berkeley.edu/documents-forms/pdfs
https://dap.berkeley.edu/ada-title-ii-updates/title-ii-ada-w...
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.
There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents.
But most adults won't have the time or inclination to send hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.
- 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.
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.
It's by Shel Silverstein; Johnny Cash just performed it.
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.
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.
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)
YT has tons of quality instruction - hell nowadays I just ask an LLM to make me a course for whatever I wanna learn.
LLMs are vastly superior to compile and spread knowledge than any other thing preceding them.
But in any case, I didn't read a single textbook at uni; it was all lecture notes provided by the lecturers (fill-in-the-gaps actually which worked waaaay better than you'd think). So the answer is still no - I didn't fact check them and I didn't need to because they didn't wildly hallucinate like AI does.
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", a lot of professors might be wrong from time to time.
Taking an LLMs output at face value is stupid. But it is equally stupid to take only what a book says at face value, or a YouTube video, or a professor. You have to dig in, you have to do the homework.
What I like about LLMs is that they make it make much easier to do this homework. Sure, they still make mistakes, but they get you 90% of the way in minutes(!) and almost for free. That is truly revolutionary.
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