Hello, thank you for joining us for Udemy's first instructor panel for investors. For those who don't know me, I'm Dennis Walsh, Udemy's Vice President of Investor Relations. Today's webinar is part of Udemy's newest initiative, IR Access, in which we provide deeper insights into our business through multiple online channels. If you haven't done so already, you can sign up for IR Access email alerts on our investor relations website to keep you notified of new blog posts and events. A quick disclaimer before we get started. The views expressed by our panelists today are their own and not necessarily shared by Udemy. If you have questions, feel free to submit them in the Q&A section on your screen, we'll try to get to as many as possible. With that, I'm excited to introduce three of Udemy's top Instructors as our panelists for today, including Ceci Mansilla, Diego Dávila, and Frank Kane. Thank you all for joining us. I'd like to kick it off with introductions for each of you. Let's start with Ceci. Could you please provide the audience a little bit about your professional background, how you became an instructor, and what are the topics that you cover? Of course. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here. I'm Ceci Mansilla. I'm from Argentina. Actually, right now, I'm living in Uruguay, and I'm a learning and development professional. I spent over 15 years working in the IT consulting firm as a training manager for Latin America. After COVID, I decided to quit my corporate job and start working as an independent professional. I already have my Udemy courses. My Udemy Business was working well, and that helped me transition, and I'm basically teaching soft skills, power skills, and especially leadership. That's great. How did you first discover Udemy? You know, have you ever looked at any other platforms to do put your courses on? It was like almost five years ago. I was kind of bored at my corporate job, I wanted to do different kind of trainings. I was serving Latin America, it was a global company, I wanted to localize the learning solutions for my region, that was not possible because of the policies and everything. I wanted to do my own courses, I started doing my research. I found Udemy, I love that here in Udemy, I can just focus on creating content, I didn't have to focus on how to sell courses and all the online business things. That was entirely new for me. That's what made me decide to try it out, and it worked. Awesome. Just for fun, what's your most popular course on Udemy? [Foreign language] That is Leadership and Team Building. It's a course in Spanish. Awesome. All right, let's turn to Frank. Frank, can you provide a little bit about your background, how you became an instructor, and what are the topics that you cover? Yeah, sure. I'm Frank Kane, coming to you from Central Florida. Got my start back in the nineties as a video game developer, working at Sierra On-Line. That's how old I am, and after that, I went and worked at a dot-com called Worlds.com, where we built a metaverse application that turned out to be ahead of its time. Maybe it still is. We'll see. After the dot-com collapse, spent a little bit of time in the defense industry, making VR training environments. In 2003, I went to Seattle for a little e-commerce startup called Amazon.com and spent the next almost 10 years there. While I was there, I did a lot of R&D on their personalization systems, their machine learning and data science systems, data analytics, distributed computing, cloud computing, and those are all the topics that I'm teaching today on Udemy. By the end of my career there, I had about 17 issued patents, and I was managing teams of about 100 people as a senior manager. I also spent a couple of years managing the tech team at IMDb there, too. Nice. Nice. I was a big King's Quest fan for back in the day, so that's great to hear. My fingers in King's Quest VI, so... Nice! how did you first discover Udemy, and, you know, if you were looking at any other channels at the time? Yeah. You know, after about 10 years at Amazon, my family just kinda had enough of the weather in Seattle, quite honestly. My doctor was telling me that I probably wasn't gonna live much longer if I stayed in that career. We packed up and went to Florida. To make ends meet, at first, I was just doing some freelance work here and there. It wasn't terribly satisfying, to be honest, and Udemy gave me a call out of the blue, and they said, "Hey, we need content on big data and data analytics, and we found you as a expert in that field who might have some time on his hands." I just saw an opportunity and figured, what I got to lose, you know? Put out that first course and put out a second course and just kept building on that and building on that, and here I am today. Excellent. Just for fun, currently, you know, what's your most popular course on Udemy? Right now, it's probably my Amazon Web Services, Machine Learning preparatory course. Excellent. Diego, how about you, just your background and, you know, what are the topics that you cover on Udemy? Sure. Thank you for inviting me. I'm Diego Davila. I have a background in computer science, so I got a degree on that, studied for six years, and I'm passionate about digital marketing. Basically, Back in 2014, I was working for 15 years already as a network admin, you know, looking for opportunities to create an online business, to have more independence, and to increase my revenue. I had several experiences that were not successful until I found Udemy back in 2014, and that was nine years ago. Since then, right now, I have 86 courses and over 800,000 students. Nice. You said about nine years ago, you found Udemy. How did you come across Udemy, and were you looking at any other platforms at the time? Right. I didn't have the idea of teaching online. Honestly, I was just looking for opportunities to leave my regular job and to work with something that I love and I'm passionate about. Suddenly, I got an email from Udemy offering a writing course. I opened that email. That was my first contact with Udemy. I opened the course, I enrolled, I saw that the course was great, the platform was. I liked the platform, I liked the instructor. I started enrolling more courses, I said, "These teachers are great, these instructors, they are sharing something that they are good at. Maybe I can one opportunity that I could have to create a business is to start teaching online. I created my first course then, and the rest, and started growing from there, yes. Excellent. What was, just out of curiosity, what was the first course, and then what's your most popular course today? The first course was actually a hobby that I had about the Camino de Santiago. It's a pilgrimage in Spain that takes 34 days. I make a course on how to prepare for the trip, what is the best way to do it, and all that. My most popular course today are the Digital Marketing Masterclass in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and now the ChatGPT courses are super popular. Yes. Excellent. Let's shift gears. Let's talk a little bit about the platform experience for our instructors. Maybe, Diego, let's just stick with you. Can you talk a little bit about your course creation process? You know, how do you determine what topics you're gonna cover? About how long does it take to create a course from concept to publish? You know, just some of the key elements of your process. Right. I use to choose a topic, Dennis, I have a three-step process. The first one is a student survey. I send my students a survey to see what they want to learn next, what is the next thing that they are looking for, or if they want to go deeper in one of the topics that we already have. The second one is the current industry trends. If there are new things coming, new tools that we can use to create these courses, and also the Udemy Marketplace Insights, which is a fantastic tool we have here on Udemy, that help us to validate topics, to see the demand and other details that are fantastic. Once I choose the topic, my next step is to do a market research to see other courses that already exist, about that topic, see the competitors, and based on that, I build the course outline, and after that, it's just recording, editing, and publishing. The whole process takes from one-three weeks, depending on the course topic. Excellent. You know, a recent trend has, in the last couple of months, has really blown up is AI and ChatGPT, and I know you have some courses on that. Just kind of curious, you know, when did you decide that that was something that you wanted to start putting courses out, and how's the engagement been on those courses in particular? The engagement is fantastic. We currently have 10 courses about ChatGPT and AI tools in different languages, and people are loving it because this is a way to be more productive, to accomplish more in less time. We are basically teaching people how to use AI and ChatGPT on marketing, on your daily life, on your job, at the office, in several areas, all the areas you can imagine, basically. The engagement is going fantastic. Excellent. Ceci, how about you? Can you talk about your course creation process, how you're determining topics? How long does it take you to create a course from start to finish? It takes longer than Diego. I have to say that. I'm an instructional designer, so I have a very structured process where I have to do my research, I have to talk to my audience, test the course outline with my network, and ask for feedback. One thing that I learned creating content in Udemy is that my audience is people, it's workers, people that it's actually working for companies. As I left the corporate environment, I felt that I was missing that connection to what is going on right now. One thing that I'm doing is I'm still having corporate clients. I'm working as a consultant, I'm working as a trainer, I'm working as an instructional designer. That is helping me to understand which are the new challenges that workers are facing, which are the new topics, which are the new trends. That is one very important source, my clients. My students in Udemy, I check the question and answers section. I check the messages that they send me. They usually will ask for what they want, and that's amazing. That's one of the things that I love about Udemy, that we have that possibility to connect. Once I identify a topic, I, the problem that I will be solving, I will create the learning objectives, I will define the audience. Based on that, I will create the course outline. That is what I will share with my network, ask for feedback, change, update, polish, and once I have that course outline, I will start creating the contents, designing each class, the assets, exercises, everything. Once I have all of that, I will move to production, recording, editing, then configure, and then publishing. It takes me a little bit longer than Diego. I can be an entire month working in just one course. Got it. This is really important. Frank, I'd love to just hear, is there anything, you know, different about your process that you'd wanna add to this? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I kind of approach topic selection from a different angle. I try to. If you can envision like a Venn diagram of three things, one is, what are students demanding right now? That's a combination of data that I get from Udemy, which is super valuable. Also just what I get from talking to my former colleagues at Amazon and elsewhere in the tech industry, and following newsletters and things like that to see what's happening in the tech world. The other circle would be what I'm passionate about, right? If it's a technology that I don't really care about personally, it's gonna be tough to deliver a compelling course that's engaging for students. Finally, you know, the other piece is what do I know? You know, if it's not something that intersects with my past knowledge and experience, I'm not gonna take it on, because that would just be too difficult for me to get up to speed on. That's the first step in creating a new course for me. I just immerse myself into that topic, make sure I'm totally up-to-date on the latest developments in that field before I even start writing an outline. Once I have the outline, you know, I'll flesh through that. I'll usually start by doing the hands-on activities for the course, just to get that out of the way. Go through creating the slides and then start recording. How long that takes? For a short course, it's like one hour or so, maybe a month. For a more comprehensive course, it's closer to three months. Interesting. Yeah, and you mentioned the, you know, the data and insights, and, you know, maybe for, you know, for our audience that may or not have actually seen what that looks like, could you know, maybe talk a little bit what kind of data and insights you're getting from Udemy, and how do you use that? Yeah, it's really an important tool for us as instructors because, you know, our intuition is not always right as to what students are actually searching for and demanding on the platform. Udemy gives us a lot of information. First of all, what are students searching for? What are the top trends in those search terms that they're trying to find content on? Just as importantly, are they finding that content? What existing courses exist for those search terms, and how successful are they being, right? Those two things alone gives a good insight into where the demand is and where the unfilled demand is, which is even more important. We also see information coming directly from Udemy Business, for example, about things that they're hearing from their customers, from those corporations, and what topics they want to deploy to their learners. Sometimes that's ahead of the curve a little bit, right? Students might not be searching for this stuff yet, but the organizations know that they need these skills, so sometimes we'll get a little bit of a leg up that way as well. Excellent. Diego, you mentioned it as well. Anything that you want to add there on the data and insights? The Udemy insights, Dennis, is my favorite tool. I use it every day to validate ideas, to see how I can improve the course, the performance on Udemy. As Frank mentioned, we can see there all the demand for a specific topic. If you have an idea, if you are a Udemy instructor, or if you want to become an instructor, you go there, you search for the specific category, and you will see all the ideas, the demand, the conversion of the current courses we have, how many people are searching for that specific topic, what are the keywords they are using, and we see also the top courses on that category. We can analyze the competitors and, you know, create our version of the course. Excellent. Diego, you know, an important point is you actually create content courses in three different languages. Yes. How do you determine which language you're gonna create your courses in? That's a great question. I use, actually, the Udemy Marketplace Insights, Marketplace Insights. If, let's say, I have a specific topic that I want to create a course about, I search how the topic is going on that tool for the three different languages. Let's assume that English has a higher demand, so I decide to go first with English. I create the course. After that, I go and create the course in other languages, like Spanish and Portuguese, for example. Excellent. Ceci, you actually, purely create content in Spanish, have you considered creating in English? You know, if not, why not? You know, to be totally honest, when I created my first course, the second one was in English. It was an English course, and I think it was published, like, three months, and then I took it off because I was not comfortable. Even though I work my entire life in English, I feel more comfortable in Spanish. I think that I can connect better with the students. There is also a business perspective. I'm looking to be better positioned in Latin America. I'm trying to position my brand, and my consulting business is growing here. Having courses in Spanish, it's actually opening a lot of doors for me. Companies from the Udemy Business catalog are contacting me, asking me for trainings, for sessions. I think that for me, at least now, I will stay focused on Spanish because I'm growing my business here, and it's working fine. Eventually, maybe in the future, I'll start translating in English, but it's not a focus area for me right now. Awesome. That makes sense. Something that's really a nice competitive differentiator for us is really the freshness of the content on our platform. Frank, I'd love to just get a sense from you about how often would you say you're updating your content, and what would be the catalyst that would prompt you to do so? Oh, at least once a week, sometimes more. In fact, just this morning, I published a couple of updates to my courses in response to student feedback. The thing that drives that is this powerful feedback loop that Udemy gives us through Q&A in our courses, right? To a lesser extent, through reviews that we get. If there's anything wrong, anything out of date with our course, students are gonna let us know right away, especially if you're a popular instructor with a scale of, like, 1 million students, like we have. Yeah, just this morning, you know, someone's like: "Hey, one of your videos, wasn't edited right." I'm like: "Oh, I better go fix that," right? Another one was like: "Hey, this lecture is a little bit boring, you know. Maybe you should have more action in the slides." I'm like: "Oh, okay, I'll go fix that." Another one was like: "Hey, AWS just released this new feature. Maybe you should incorporate that into your course." I'm like: "Well, all right. I'll add that to my list for later today." It's almost a daily occurrence. Great. Diego, how about you? Same for me. Same as Frank, we are always updating the course, weekly. Digital marketing, we have new tools. The interface of the tools we use, we teach, changes frequently, so we have to re-record the lessons. Also, when we come with new strategies for the students, so new strategies that can drive better results, for what the course is promising. We replace those lessons with new content. Excellent. Now Ceci, you've been doing this for a while. I'm just kind of curious about what would be some of the key learnings that you've learned over the years that really ensure that you're producing quality content that will resonate with learners? They just mentioned that, but I think checking your feedback. Mm-hmm. key. Like, there is nothing you don't have to invent something new. People will tell you what they are looking for. People will tell you how to improve your courses. They will tell you which are the new topics that they are looking for. If you want to be a Udemy instructor, you need to be active on the platform. That idea that I will upload a course, and I will magically get dollars in my account, that doesn't work like that. You need to be engaged, and I think that that's the additional value that we are offering to our learners. Key learnings, it will be: check your feedback. You have that tool, go and check it, not just the stars, read the comments. The comments are pure gold, so just dedicate some time to that. Listen to your students, pay attention, look for the trends, on the insights and on the students' metrics that we have. We can even see which are the videos that people is not watching, that people is dropping, that they are abandoning. Just start asking questions like: What's going on? Why are they abandoning this video? What can I do better? How can I update this? Then I will say show up. Stay connected. We have a tool that is for educational announcements, which is kind of a newsletter that you have where you can stay connected with your people. I will send at least two announcements a month with educational resources, with articles, with templates, with news, what changed, which are the new tools, which are the new trends, studies. Whatever it's related to the course content, it's like refreshing, whatever it's on the formal course, I will be sending that. That I can see that the reading%s, the opening rates, and all of that keeps increasing, and students are looking for that. If they just want to see a video, they will go to YouTube. Here, they are coming for something else, and I feel like it's kind of our responsibility to listen to them, to pay attention, and to act accordingly. Awesome. I wanna dive into learner engagement next. You know, just before we get there, just, Diego, are there any opportunities that you would like to see Udemy address that you think would really enhance the instructor experience? Honestly, I cannot think on any suggestions right now, Dennis. I think, for my personal experience, at least, everything works perfectly fine. We have the Udemy team that help us and support us in every way. We also have Udemy selling the courses, taking care of the students, just customer service, you know. The only thing we have to do as instructors is record amazing courses that help the students, publish that on Udemy, keep the content fresh, and, you know, and that's it. Keep improving the content every time and launching new and better courses for our students. Frank or Ceci, anything to add there? I was actually asking for as I'm focused on Udemy Business catalog, I was asking on how does it work? What are the learning paths and all those things. We have something called the instructors team. There is a team in Udemy that is helping us succeed, and they are providing us support and tools and everything. Last month, or this month, I think it was, they did a demo for us on Udemy Business. My request is covered now, but that's one of the things that we have as we have direct contact with Udemy. If we have any idea or any request or any recommendation, they will always help us. For me, it was I needed to better understand how the corporate catalog was working because they have learning paths, they have badges, they have peer-to-peer learning. Understanding that for me, as an instructional designer, will help me to create content that better adapt to those learner experiences. That was very, very interesting and useful. Great. Great. let's dive into you've been talking quite a bit about the importance of engaging directly with the learners in Q&A. it sounds like it comes pretty organically, but, you know, I'd love to get a sense of, Frank, are you doing anything to actually encourage that interaction? You know, it sounds like it's pretty regular, daily. do you have a sense of where they're from? maybe just drilling down into what does the feedback actually look like that you're getting from them? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we don't really have to drive it so much. We're getting, you know, 20 to 30 questions every day as it is. A lot of that comes from the hands-on activities that we're providing, though. That's really what's driving that interaction, I think. We teach some pretty complex topics that have complex hands-on exercises, and inevitably, people have trouble with it, right? Because it's complex stuff. They have questions like: "Why didn't this work? What am I doing wrong?" or like, "Can you help guide me?" That's really driving a lot of that interaction, just the hands-on nature of these courses, where it's not just me blathering into a screen like I'm doing now. I'm saying: "Hey, go practice what you learned, and if you have some trouble, use the Q&A, and we'll try to help you out." That's really what's driving that cycle there. You know, the specific feedback we're getting, a lot of it's just that, you know, "I couldn't get this to work. What am I doing wrong?" Some of it's a little bit more high level, too, right? One interesting thing that I just encountered this morning, actually, was some feedback I got in one of my lectures saying, "Hey, you know, this lecture isn't very engaging. It's just a bunch of diagrams and pictures that you're talking over." When you're taught how to be a good presenter in the corporate world, you're taught to not put a lot of text on the slides, right? You know, you're like, you want them to focus on you, not the slide. That doesn't work here on Udemy, right? They want to be able to use those slides as a resource. They wanna go back and read those slides to summarize what they learned, and if you're not giving them that, they're gonna get upset. That's an example of feedback that you get that kind of, you know, changes your approach to how you present things, that I think is good. As for where they're coming from, for me, it's kind of a split between India and the United States, and pretty much the rest of the world after that. Excellent. Diego, how about you? I use educational announcements frequently. As Ceci mentioned, it's a great tool that we have where we can connect with students, we can share new things that comes in the market, new content. The updates that we talk about, Dennis, every time I do a significant update on the course, we send the announcement, saying to the students that we have new lessons here, sending the link, so they can visit and start learning. Basically, that. A good technique that we use also in the educational announcement is to ask questions, and they can comment below the announcement. You know, just to keep the engagement going for the community of students we have in specific courses. That's great. Do you have any examples of a time where you've made maybe a significant change to your content that, you know, based on that feedback? Yes. We, as Frank mentioned, we have the Q&A. The Q&A, for me, is the biggest source of feedback from my students because they always share what they think, and that's fantastic for us, even if it's something, a critique that they are having about specific lesson that we recorded, because with that, we have the tool, we have everything we need to actually go there and update the course, right? One of the students, some time ago, they contact me because one of the platforms we teach to create ads online changed the process. The process was the same path, but the initial part was a little bit different. Most students were lost on that initial part. We had to go there and re-record, like, the whole module of the course to make sure they have the right steps for them. Yeah. Great. I guess for any of you, how do you measure the impact of the changes that you're making? Are there any metrics that you're looking at closely to know that I've made the correction and it's actually, you know, added value here? Frank, how about you? Looks like. I mean, speaking for myself, I do it mostly on faith, just because it's the right thing to do. You know, like, obviously, you wanna keep your courses fresh and up to date. You wanna respond to feedback and make your course continually better, and that's how you stay ahead of the competition on the platform. Efforts to measure that are kind of tough, though, because those small changes to a course are gonna be hard to tease out from sales data when there's so many other variables going on, like what sales are happening today, or what holidays are happening, you know, how many people are on vacation, whatever it might be. If you look at the long run, like over a span of a couple of years of data, you do start to see these trends where the courses that got more attention from you are performing better than the ones that didn't. At a long enough timeframe, you can tease that data out. Okay. I'll say that you have to check the rating and the learning consumption. If I added a new video, I will check if that video is being consumed or if they are abandoning it and how it's working, and the minutes that they are consuming of that content, that will give me a clue if it's working or not. Right. We have great performance tools for Udemy Marketplace and Udemy Business. Yeah. We can do what Ceci mentioned, go there and analyze specific lessons they are consuming, if they are dropping, how is the engagement? These tools are fantastic to evaluate how the content is received by students. Diego, could you maybe drill down for the audience a little bit on that, and kind of how are the insights different between the marketplace and on the Udemy Business side, and how are you leveraging those differently? The insights are. The main difference is that on Udemy Business, we have the minutes consumed by students, so we have all this data for each specific course we have on the platform, the business platform. Let's say we can order also the courses by the most consumed if we want, and that I personally use that, Dennis, frequently to see what is my Udemy Business students' favorite course. I can see that course, I can create content that is similar on the same style that course has, and also explore topics that are similar to them, because most of the time, the business student is different from the marketplace student. They have different goals, on my case, right? I agree on that, especially on my courses, on soft skills courses. The corporate student will look for short, very actionable courses, and the marketplace student will go for the eight hours, six hours training, which for example, for leadership skills, is a very long course. You have to also pay attention. It's not just the number, it's where is it coming from? Which is the audience? From where is this student from? I agree. We have a lot of tools to analyze that. Right. I guess, Ceci, do you get a sense of, you know, that learners are coming back regularly and kind of just? How do you think about learner retention? Yes. They are coming back, thank God. They will tell you. They tell you. They send you a message or even in the rating, when they leave a comments, they have that option of leaving comments. It's five stars, they have to select that, and they can leave a comment. They will say, like: "This is the third course that I'm taking. This is the fourth program that I'm taking." Also, something new that it's happening is that they are sharing their certificates in LinkedIn and in different platforms, and they are tagging me. Like, there are different ways and more sources now to understand what's going on with your students. It's usually, what will happen if they bought a course or if they enroll to a course and they like it, they will keep coming. They will stay with you. I think that's amazing, and it's a way of growing your business without even noticing. Like, you're not promoting the course, but it keeps growing because it's the same people that keeps enrolling to the programs. Excellent. Diego, do you have anything to add there? I use a lot of promotional announcements, too. With the promotional announcement, every time we have a new course, we can send to our existing students, and they can choose to enroll in the course if they want to learn about that or not. We see a lot of students coming back for new courses. I don't specifically see the data of how many students are coming back, but I see a great engagement. Some of the names we recognize on the Q&A, on different courses. The people engaging are always not always the same, but the people that engage the most, they engage in most of the courses we have. That's fantastic. Means that they are happy and they are learning, right? Right. Frank, I'm just curious, have you seen... kind of just building on that, have you seen a noticeable change in learner engagement since the pandemic? Not really, you know, I'm not really sure that's tied to the pandemic so much as just a continual effort to address the underlying things that people are asking about, right? If you're always listening to student feedback and they're saying, "Hey, something's wrong with this course," and you fix it, eventually those questions start to go down, right? You know, in terms of Q&A engagement, no, I'm not seeing that go up. You know, we are seeing more and more students come back for more. You know, like Diego said, our most effective promotions are the ones where we're going to our past students and saying, "Hey, here's a new course and one maybe you didn't know about, right? Go check it out." Those do really, really well. On the whole, you know, I think we have over 1 million enrollments and about 700,000 individual students, so statistically, a lot of them are coming back for more, so that's great to see. Awesome. I'd love to just kinda shift gears now and talk about, you know, instructors building a business on Udemy. Frank, can you help us understand, you know, when you're coming on and creating your first course, you know, how does an instructor think about setting the price on the marketplace side of the business? I mean, as a new instructor, it's probably the most confusing part of it, really, because, you know, you go into this saying: "I have this lifetime of experience and knowledge. That's worth thousands of dollars," right? You know, the marketplace has other ideas. I mean, a better benchmark would be, how much would you get from selling a book, right? Or, ads on a YouTube video or something like that. It turns out Udemy actually provides a better return than either of those. You have to first internalize that, no matter how much you think you're worth, the marketplace is gonna put, you know, $10-$15 on it or something like that. I tend to err on the lower side when it comes to pricing, just because Udemy has a lot of research as to where that sweet spot is between price and quantity. You know, they have better data than I do. If their data says lower prices, sell more in the long run, then who am I to argue, right? That's just how I approach it. I err on the side of just lower prices. If it's a more comprehensive course, I'll charge a little bit more, as opposed to a less comprehensive one, but that's pretty much the only criteria I have. Great. Then, I guess, building on that, Diego, you have, you've got some free courses. Could you maybe help our audience understand, you know, why would you put a course out there for free, and, you know, what's the value of having a free course on the Udemy Marketplace? That's a good question. Well, my personal experience, Dennis, is the free course help you to build your brand. You are having more students, you are helping more people, and I personally believe that if we, the more people we help with their content, with our content, if they like what they see, they will come out, come back and buy a paid course, let's say, and become a regular student so far. I have two main reasons. One is building the brand as instructor on Udemy, and the second one is just sharing what we have with the world, let's say, through Udemy. Excellent. You know, our marketplace currently has about a little more than 200,000 courses on the marketplace. The best of the best gets ported into our Udemy Business catalog. We've got more than 20,000 courses there. All of you have content on both sides of the business, and, you know, once you do have content on the Udemy Business, it is exclusive to Udemy. Love to kinda hear from all of you. This is something that, you know, we get questions quite a bit about is, you know, why would an instructor want their content to be exclusive with Udemy? Frank, could you just kinda help us understand your thinking and, you know, why would you agree to that? I mean, it's really a no-brainer, you know. I mean, both from a financial standpoint and just, you know, what feels right standpoint, right? The revenue that I get from Udemy Business is many, many times more than what I got from all the other platforms combined. It's just, you know, a much bigger reach than anything else that's out there. I've been on pretty much all the other platforms without naming them. It's the driving, dominating force in that, in that marketplace, so it's worth it. You know, personally, it's kinda nice not to have to deal with all those platforms. You know, I don't have to deal with keeping content updated on all these other competing platforms where I'm just getting this trickle of revenue in the first place, right? It frees me up to spend more time on what I want to do, and that's making my courses better, right? You know, Udemy's just. They value their instructors more than some of these other platforms. With Udemy, I really feel like a partner. You know, I feel like I'm kind of a, I'm kind of behind the scenes, like I am right now. You know, I kind of feel like I'm a trusted part of the team, whereas a lot of these other platforms kinda treat you as a liability sometimes. That dynamic is much more rewarding, I think. ... Awesome. Diego, how about you? Maybe if you can build on it as well, about if you remember back at-- before you were in the Udemy Business catalog, you know, the difference in earnings that you saw as you became a Udemy Business instructor. Right. Yeah, I agree 100% with Frank Kane. I mean, 100%. I save more time just putting all my content on Udemy Business. It's fine, exclusivity. I love that because they are taking care of the business part. I mentioned in the beginning that my main goal is to create more courses and more content for my students. I don't want to worry about. I teach marketing, but I don't want to worry about my marketing, selling my courses, you know, all this part, because I want to create the best content for my students, and Udemy takes care of the whole business. My only work is to put the content in. I tried several other platforms in the past, and as Frank Kane mentioned, I end up losing more time. Most of the platforms, they didn't produce any revenue for me personally. It was. I learned over the nine years that the best strategy is just to exclusivity with Udemy, for sure. What was your other question, Dennis? I was just asking if you can remember back before your courses were part of the Udemy Business catalog, you know? Mm-hmm. You know, did you notice the growth in your earnings over time? Yes. On Udemy, we have a revenue report, and we have a way to see both of the revenues, the marketplace only and the Udemy Business only. My Udemy Business revenue is from the, from the start, is just going up and up every month. I think I didn't have any month where I when I earn less than the prior month. It's just going up, and that's fantastic. That's another reason for the exclusivity of the content. Awesome. Thank you. Ceci, anything to add on this? I agree with everything they say. It's amazing, the business, it exploded. It's growing and growing, for me, that I'm still working as a consultant, I'm getting amazing clients that I wasn't able to get before. I don't have to do anything. As Diego was saying, I don't have to worry on how to sell my courses, how to create a page, how to... I'm from HR, I don't like doing all of that. That's not for me. Here in Udemy, I just can create an amazing course, they will contact me like, "Hey, Ceci, my team took this course. Are you running live workshops, or can you consult with our company?" I don't even have to do my pitch or create my presentation. That's it. That's a client. My business in Udemy is growing like crazy. It's amazing. All my private deals on all the other contracts that I'm getting are coming from Udemy. They are contacting me because I'm in Udemy Business catalog, so it's a win-win. It works. Excellent. Let's talk about some of the other platforms now that you've tried out. Diego, you mentioned that you have tried some of the others. In your opinion, you know, really, what do you believe separates Udemy from the other platforms that you've tried? Several things. I think the Udemy, the strategy that the team have to grow the business, I love that. Also, the way it's super easy for us instructors to publish the course there. The step-by-step process for new instructors, too, is all organized. It guides you step by step from the beginning until you have the course published. There are courses also by Udemy, teaching new instructors how to do the process. Also, I think the Udemy Business platform is fantastic. I love it also to have the chance as an expert to share my knowledge with huge companies all over the world, right? Basically. That can consume what we create for them. Several things. It's hard to just to mention a few. I probably, I'm forgetting a lot of things that I can tell, but, it... I love it. Yes. Frank, you had listed a couple before, but any others to add? Yeah. I think the main thing is just how quickly and easily you can publish new content on Udemy. That's in stark contrast to another platform that shall not be named. You know, with another platform, the process of getting a new course published was a months-long process of approvals and going back and forth and getting everything in just the right format. They had the same process for issuing updates to that course. Even if something was out of date, you know, something changed in the technology world that meant what I was teaching was no longer correct, I couldn't fix that. You know, I had to go through this months-long process to do that. Udemy, in contrast, has very little barriers to entry, right? That means that if I want to put out a new course on a new technology, I can just do it. No one's gonna stop me. If I wanna put out an update because something changed, I can just do it. No one's gonna stop me. I think the students and learners on Udemy really value that as well, because they know that Udemy is gonna be very responsive to new technologies and changes in technology, much more so than their competitors. Excellent. A question that's come in from the audience, just asking: "Were there any tools or, you know, that specifically helped with video creation, that you couldn't get anywhere else on these other platforms that you were able to get from Udemy? I mean, for video creation, most of us are using our own suites at home. I use Camtasia, some people use Adobe tools. I will say that the UI that Udemy provides to instructors for uploading that content is very intuitive and very efficient. Right. When we do have those videos rendered and ready to go, they have these tools that let us do that in bulk and very quickly get it online. We do value that. They've also offered a lot of instruction to instructors on how to create compelling videos, and I think that's even more valuable than the technical side of it, you know? For example, how to get that cool depth of field effect that Diego has going on there. You know, they actually gave us some presentations in past instructor conferences on how to make your videos look a bit more fancy and professional, and I've internalized as much of that as possible. Udemy's definitely been a good resource for making videos better and getting them out quicker. Right. It's also faster to upload to the platform than it's because, in other platforms, sometimes you create the outline of the course in their website, and it's really difficult to organize the lessons, to save, upload a video. Takes forever. You need to go inside each lesson. It's complicated, but in Udemy, it's, like, super easy. You can just, in the same page, upload all your videos. You can rename, you can relocate the lessons, create new modules, create assignments. Fantastic! I think the experience is different from both points of view. The learner experience, it's amazing because it's a easy system that you can use in a very simple way from any device. The learner experience, it's amazing. You can connect. It has peer-to-peer learning. You can ask questions to your instructor. You can share your comments. You can do your homework. You will receive your certificate. It has it all. It's the full package. For us, that means it's very easy, it's very flexible. It has a lot of tips and tricks that will help you, for example, to create your landing page, that I'm not an expert on that, but in Udemy, you just have to fill in the blanks a form. In other platforms, you have to do that from scratch, and that for me, it's very difficult because I'm not from marketing. Udemy, I think that it's an amazing experience from learners' and from instructors' perspective. Awesome. Ceci, if I wanted to start, I want to become an instructor today, you've been doing this for a while, so what are some of the strategies or tips that you would suggest to me to be successful on the platform? Do your research. Do your research. I loved what Frank said at the beginning when he shared his strategy, like analyzing the demand, and what are you passionate about, and also, what do you actually know? Like, talk about something that you're an expert. Well, I fully agree with everything that he said, and I think that that's. Like, you need to create a course on that, Frank. How to do that. He's right. He nailed it. It's not just about the demand. It's something that learners are looking for, which is the problem that you are going to solve, and why are you solving that problem? Like, are you the right person? Do you have experience besides the knowledge that you need also to create the course, but do you have experience? Because that's I think we learn through experience. 80% of what we learn is by doing, not just watching videos. Do your research, try to understand what people is looking for, identify your audience, define your audience. You need to know who are you talking to, and then try to look for that topic and identify one problem that you will be solving. It's not just leadership, it's how to effectively communicate in hybrid environments. Do your research, narrow it down, and you have to try it out. It's a flexible platform. You can update and change and do whatever you need to, but just do it, and it will work out. That's good advice. Frank, what advice would you offer? Yeah, pretty much the same thing. It really boils down to topic selection, and that's, you know, the thing that I think new instructors struggle with the most. They'll come in and say, "I'm gonna make the 6,001st course on ChatGPT, and I'm gonna get rich off of it," right? You know, you gotta do your research, you know. Are you really gonna outdo Diego on his courses? That's a pretty tough accomplishment to meet, right? A lot of people are teaching stuff that they aren't really experts on. People need to be a little bit more thoughtful about their topic selection process, and that's the main advice I have for new instructors. Again, go back to that Venn diagram I talked about. What do you know? What are you passionate about? What is there an unfilled demand for? If you can find something in the middle there that, fits all 3 of those things, teach that, and you'll probably be successful. Diego, how about you? Anything to add? Yeah, I 100% agree with it, with you guys. I remember when I was starting teaching online, I never teach before. I never did a speak or anything like that before, I was passionate about a specific topic. I think my main advice for you guys that want to start teaching on Udemy is to just do it, you know? Don't look for perfection. If your content is good, if you are bringing results with your content, if you are passionate about what you are teaching, that's all you need. Of course, we need a better camera, we need a better audio, we need to improve everything. I also think that, the main thing is to take the first step. That's the most important thing for you. Don't overthink it. I spent years overthinking, I'm not perfect, I don't have the right equipment, all these excuses, but it's important just to take the first step and do it. Create a course, publish on Udemy. You, as Ceci mentioned, you can update that frequently. You can create new courses later. The platform is open for you. Excellent. Right now, it's, you know, ChatGPT, AI is a huge topic and, you know, how it's gonna impact this space over time. You know, Diego, I know you've got some courses on it, so how do you think advancements in AI are going to impact online education for investors specifically? In a big way for instructors. I meant to say for instructors, in. For instructors, yeah. In a big way, because you can use these tools right now to accelerate the process. You still need to go in front of the camera and teach the course. You need to prepare the content and make sure it's well prepared and make sure the content is valuable. ChatGPT, especially, specifically, can help you to expedite the process. You can build your outline, you can do a brainstorm ideas, you can build. On my case, for example, one of the things I use it, is to create the script for the promo video. I create the script for the promotional video for the course, like the trailer of the course, with ChatGPT, for example, and I edit, I create several versions. I get parts of that. I do like a Frankenstein, but before that, it will take me like, I don't know, four days to write the script because I need to use all these techniques to, you know, to create a desire on my students' heart for the course. With ChatGPT and this AI tool, I can do the whole process way faster. Frank, how about you? Are you testing out AI at all today? You know, I guess just in general, is there a fear that, you know, instructors like yourself would be displaced over time by AI? Knowing how it works under the hood pretty well, I'm not too concerned about that. I mean, AI in its current form is, you know, basically predicting the next word in a sentence in a very fancy word, way, right? It doesn't really have a concept of what's right and wrong. It can't approach problems from a logical standpoint, per se. It's good at producing things that sound authoritative, but they're often wrong. You know, we call those hallucinations in the world of AI. There's really not a clear path forward on how to make that better. Right now, they're solving that by just throwing a lot of humans at it and sort of like adding this layer of human knowledge on top of it to try to make that better, but that doesn't really scale that well, right? No, I don't think AI is gonna be able to replace a knowledgeable instructor who can tell stories from their past experience and engage students, you know, in that way. I just don't see it happening. However, it does have its place. You know, like Diego said, I'm using it for idea generation. If I'm making an outline for a new course, I might go to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, what would your outline look like for this?" Maybe sometimes it'll come up with things I didn't think about. Sometimes it'll come up with things that are just plain wrong, though. You know, based on my experience and knowledge in that field, I can weed that out, right? That's an important piece of it. Yeah, it's a useful tool for improving your productivity, just like any tool. Do I see the tool replacing humans? Not anytime soon. Excellent. Ceci, how about you? Are you testing it out at all today? How do you? Yeah. How do you expect to use it in the future? Yes, I agree with what they are saying. For me, it's boosting my productivity because I can work faster, I can do my research faster, I can correct scripts. It's helping me a lot. I don't think that ChatGPT will be able to create courses, like it will replace me. For example, in Udemy, if you create technical courses, your revenue will be much higher than if you create soft skills courses like mine. The other day, someone asked me like, "Why aren't you using AI to create technical courses and boost your earnings?" I'm like, "You know, I would be able to create a Java programming course with ChatGPT. I know that I will get the scripts, I will be able to record that. Maybe I can create a couple of exercises." Will I create the course? Yes. Will that course be effective, and will that course work in Udemy? No way, because I'm not an expert. I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know if the outline that the system is giving me is right or wrong, if the exercise makes sense. The first technical student that I have in that course, they will destroy my rating, and that course will never work. Are we going to be able or is people able to create courses, the entire process? Yes. Will that work? I don't think so. At least not now. There is still this part of storytelling and sharing what you learn from the field, sharing your experience, connecting with the students, that it requires a person. It requires a person with experience and with knowledge. I think I'm fascinated with AI. I think it's helping me a lot, but I don't think that it will replace us, at least not now. Great. I guess, you know, just if you could have kind of just a wish for one feature in the future, that we could add to our platform, does anything come to mind? Let's start with Frank. Well, you know, one potential application of AI would be sort of a first line of defense for a Q&A, you know? You know, we do spend a lot of time kinda answering the same question over and over again, and that might be something AI is pretty good at. You know, that'd be number one on my wish list. How about you, Diego? Same. Yeah, Q&A. AI with Q&A will be great. Also, for instructors, in the instructor part, maybe integrating that insights that we have about lessons, how much students are watching of the specific lessons, how to improve the course. Maybe link that with AI in some ways to show the instructors, in an easier way, how to take the course to the next level, updating and optimizing. Ceci? Yes. The recommendations on how to update the course, if there is something specific that people is looking for, related to my topic. Like, I think the system can tell me, like, "Hey, you need to focus on effective meetings," or, "People is looking for this, and maybe you can add it." More specific recommendations on classes or topics or exercises, whatever, to improve and update your course. I think that will be good. Awesome. I wanna end on a fun question for each of you. If we were to fast-forward, you know, 10, 15 years into the future, in your opinion, what does the future of online learning look like, and how do you see Udemy fitting into that vision? Let's start with Diego. When I was a teenager, Dennis, I remember, we received at home the newspaper, you know, the paper version. There was a section there where they offer courses, you know, correspondence courses, where for writing, for marketing, for stuff like that. I was really passionate about that. I always went directly to that part to see what courses are coming on the paper, right? Now we have Udemy. This is the future, that's why I am here with Udemy for nine years. I think the future for education is where anyone can go to Udemy, search for any topic that they can imagine. They have hundreds of courses on that topic. The student can choose what is the preferred version of the course. Maybe they prefer a instructor that is more formal, that have more technical explanation about the topic, or maybe they want to just go quickly in a 1/2-an-hour course and learn quickly about specific subjects. We have on Udemy, the courses for all the tastes, and I think that's the future, you know? The possibility for the student to choose, and we also have affordable price, which is key. I mean, we reach people all over the world, because the prices are affordable and the content collection is huge. Excellent. Ceci? Yeah, I think that we are moving to very actionable learning, role-based learning. Maybe shorter courses, very, very specific, full of templates, exercises. People, we don't have time, we don't have time to do anything, so they want to learn how to do something very specific in a very short time, but in an effective way. I think that before we had this way of learning, role-based, then we move, we transition to, I want to know about everything. I want to learn everything. Now we are going back to get specific, get to become an expert on what you're doing. I think it will be role-based learning, microlearning, short learning capsules, multiple formats, not just video, not just articles, a little t of everything, and a lot of practice. I think that we are also going to a social learning. Maybe we will have more ways on connecting peer-to-peer learning, maybe mentoring within the same platform. Between learners, there's no need for instructors to be involved, yes, but I think that microlearning, social learning, learn, those are the things that are coming stronger and stronger. That's great. Frank, you wanna close us out? Yeah, same sentiments. You know, I mean, I think the days of going to school for four or five years for some, you know, career that you're gonna spend the rest of your life in, is already behind us, quite honestly. You know, you look at kids these days, the new generation, that's not happening. You know, they're just taking advantage of whatever opportunities and connections come their way, and the ones that can capitalize on those new opportunities are the ones that become successful. The way to do that is to have a way to quickly learn about the skills you need to take advantage of those new opportunities, and platforms like Udemy provide that, right? You know, they provide a very cost-efficient, effective, efficient way to learn new skills in response to what life's throwing your way right now, right? It's much more responsive to your life and the opportunities you're given, and that's where I think the future is. Awesome. We've reached the end of this session. Thank you, Ceci, Frank, Diego, for agreeing to be our panelists today. Really shared a lot of great insights. Thank you, audience, for tuning in. As a reminder, if you wanna sign up for email alerts to be notified of Udemy IR Access events or blogs, you can do that on our IR website. We look forward to hosting you at our next event. Thank you all.