Notes after hearing the Blab Between Dinesh Thiru, Mark Timberlake and Scott Duffy

I prepared following notes while I was hearing the blab online and then later when its recording was released. Some variations in my impressions could be there as I am still trying to get adjusted to American accent and the emotion and feel with which certain words are said. Still I feel some reader may find these notes helpful. My purpose for taking these notes was to keep myself encouraged and keep making courses for udemy.

DT - Dinesh Thiru, VP Marketing, MT - Mark Timberlake, SD - Scott Duffy

• DT says that he is the first Business hire of Udemy and has been there with Udemy for a duration close to 5 years now.
• DT says that pricing changes were inspired by confusion in the market related to students waiting for coupons and discounts to make a purchase. Also the prices were simultaneously different on email and on website.
• DT clearly says that Instructor revenues could be slow for initial few months. 
• Since major revenues come from new joinees so it should start settling soon.
• Average sales and average number of students enrollment is almost flat after new pricing policy has been introduced. This DT considers as very positive.
• Only 1% Instructors have unpublished them after new pricing release.
• Raise of 50$ upper cap may not be experimented very soon. However open to suggestions.
• Learner/Instructor calls were done to take feedback about new pricing. DT was encouraged and surprised to see positive outcome.
• DT talks more about quality of course and value based differentiation in future.
• DT wants let price be the secondary headline for making a course selection.
• MT talks about review based quality and availability of data related to that. DT says that hard data of that might become available in future.
• DT talks about course title policy update, which doesn't allow misleading titles that make false promises of making somebody earn an X amount of money.
• Affiliate system problem was raised by SD. The discussion related to Instructors loosing revenue because of not having different set of affiliate and instructor coupons did not result in any solution. DT agrees that there is no immediate solution in his mind.
• MT tried to raise issues related to good course/bad course and related perceptions. DT gave his own explanations.
• DT also discussed the advantages of spelling out clearly that the course should be taken by whom and should not be taken by whom.
• DT also tried to point out that more than production quality the content matter and relevance for learners is important.
• DT focussed much of his argument in connection with pricing policy changes, around development of trust among its current learners and  prospective buyers.

My Own Comments

• By qualification I am an Electronics Engineer, Medical Professional in Indian System and also a Management Postgraduate in Marketing. I run courses on Aromatherapy as an Individual Instructor and courses related to computers as a contributor for my Company. Overall I am related to 5 courses at the moment. As a udemy learner I have an association of 17 months and as an Instructor of 10 months. 
• I have also seen drastic drop of about 80% in my revenue and registrations.
• I strongly feel that this pricing decision is US centric and students from India will be the most affected by this. Indians as user base  of udemy were very high due of very low price bargains offers from many Instructors. 
• Udemy need to create a country specific pricing model even for countries like India, which may be revenue wise less at the moment, but will show highest growth in near future.
• In fact if Udemy opens a office in India, it can emerge as a sustainable and leading player in this most promising market of online education. By 2030 this market may become larger than many other commodities. This is due to the fact that a typical Indian middle class is spending on education is a major expense in his monthly budget. On an average an Indian family spends 20% of his lifetime earnings on education of his children from primary to graduate/post graduate level. 
• With new pricing policy and DTs comments I feel that udemy is trying to target market of quality education rather than of open education. This may be okay from the perspective of Individual company and its long term survival point of view. 
• With initial concept udemy actual became an open marketplace in online education the way youtube is there in any kind of videos. On youtube any quality is available. Choice is fully left to the user to decide. Now udemy seems to be moving towards a selective and regulated content and controlled pricing.
• Udemy feels responsible as it is giving lot of paid content. It is okay with the vision of a single organisation. 
• The way Internet allows anyone to create any content and do whatever with it. The need for creating a open sub-channel with completely open content or the regulated content is debatable.
• Udemy now wants to choose the regulated content and regulated pricing path in order to create its brand credibility. The other path of open content is actually now wide open for other players to adopt and experiment with it. 
• In my personal opinion I feel that need for both types of systems is there. Absolutely open market place for education will also have its advantages. People will be able to put documents, slides, videos, podcasts and aggregate them as courses or academies. People may be able to aggregate creative commons content from others and use it as a part of their course. I actually dream a world with such openness in the MOOC world also. The way it is there on internet in general.
• Since Udemy has chosen a regulated path, it may be good from organisational point of view and as an Instructor it is worthwhile keep continuing with the trust building experiment and learn all the rules of game of learning on Internet
• As a dreamer, the fully open MOOC system with an open and fully categorized marketplace.is still a sure shot need of our generation and growth is expected in both regulated as well as unregulated models. 
• With all that said, I feel that something like  technology consortium is needed in this domain too. It is high time that an organised International consortium or working group is setup at ISO level where standards for open system of education take a better shape. It has a scope of working both at the technology level and at the level of reaching of such a technology to the masses. For e.g. in the absence of such standards a market place for content aggregators is completely missing.
• The digital marketing contents what is currently taught in MBAs doesn't touch marketing of online education. The reason as I understand is that, enough recorded data related to forming marketing principles is not available. I am sure udemy is collecting some such data, so that it can then be used by researcher to form new principles in this domain of marketing.
• Personally I fully standby Udemy's decision, provided it is sufficiently dynamic and it cares for user's feedback in long run.
• I do have a different person inside me who is committed to the cause of creating a system of education where original authors and instructors get the due rewards they were not getting in the print media till date. Udemy is one such hope to get authors their dues. Some thing much more needs to be done, not by just one organisation but more people and organisations to make it much more informed, trained and happy world.

Dr. SUNIL JI GARG

Lucknow, India