Coursera is a money losing company with a 10% y/y growth that IPOed at the top of the 2021 hype cycle. Now that the infinite money glitch is over they are in trouble, so they buy a marginally profitable company and slap Synergy and AI on it and pray to the gods of the market for more bountiful harvests of stocks issued.

> This is also Day 1. We’re being thoughtful and deliberate in how we bring our platforms together to deliver a unified, seamless experience.

So on day 1 they can deliver humongous amount of garbage, imagine what they can do on next day.

Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.

How valid are these certificates in the real world? Does anyone get benefitted by having them? I have always used these sites as a quick one off concept check. That was before llms, and I don’t have a use for these sites for my use case. So I don’t have any understanding of how valid they are in general

I’ve purchased many Udemy courses over the years. The subscription plan they’ve been pushing makes no sense financially. I hope I’m wrong but I worry that eventually being a subscriber will be the only thing they offer.

It's been a while since I took a Coursera course but I LOVED it at the beginning. Between Machine Learning, the (numerical) optimisation courses and NAND-To-Tetris (even for the platform alone) it had so many great courses to pick from.

Coursera put NAND to tetris behind a paywal after being free for like a decade. Just puke.

Hopefully this doesn't change public libraries' access to Udemy.

Competition is for losers.

Meh. I would've been more bothered back in the day when Coursera was a treasure trove of high quality courses, but it went downhill.

So to add Udemy's infinite catalogue of poorly structured courses, it only adds to the decline

Coursera used to be great, the value was unparalleled. Great specializations too; I learned Python and data science techniques through the platform during the COVID pandemic. Lately though they've been pushing for courses to have AI dialogue modules, where an AI agent asks you questions about the content. These modules are absolute slop garbage, often asking repetitive questions that have no grounding in actual course content. I got sick of this and dropped my subscription about a month ago.

Hope this changes the state of things like API access at Udemy

I've used both platforms regularly over the years, and I have mixed feelings about both. I mean they both have some truly excellent content, but so much utter trash. There should be some kind of quality control.

They make it reaaaaally hard to find the good stuff. Many courses are time sensitive (e.g. there's no point in learning a 20 year old version of PHP), but they frequently lie about when a course was created which makes it impossible to filter out old stuff.

There are so many courses that could benefit from more interactive tests/quizzes, but it's usually limited to solving a few ridiculously simple multiple choice questions. I'm not sure if that's a platform limitation or a course creator limitation.

We have free coursera at work. But I really hate it because it enforces random deadlines on you. Even though the courses are completely prerecorded and absolutely don't need any kind of deadlines. I just want to study at my own pace.

I also hate all the gamification.

Does it change their subscription pricing?

What about LinkedInlearning tho?

As a purchaser of many Udemy courses (and yes, there are good ones), I'm waiting for the enshittification to begin.

Oh no ...

Blackrock buys more of the world.. cool story.