Udemy is an online marketplace where you can sign up for online courses at a low price and/or create your own courses and sell them to the public. All the courses are web-based and you can attend the course at your own pace, when you are free or when you feel like it.
Go over to Udemy.com and sign up for an account.
After you have created an account, you can start to browse the various courses and sign up for those that you have interests in. The courses are sorted into different categories, including Business, Technology and Internet, Academics, Hobbies & Crafts, Games, Music, LIfestyles and many more.
When you found a course that you are interested in, click on it to go to its description page. Here is where you can find the detail info about the price, course content and the course requirement. If you are happy with what you seen, click on the “Buy Now” to purchase the course.
For Free courses, it will direct you to the course page where you can take the course immediately. The course material varies from courses to coursers. Most come with videos, but there are PowerPoint, PDFs, audio, zip files and live classes as well.
At your profile page, you can edit your info and include your interests so that Udemy can match the courses that you are most interested in. Your profile page also shows the courses that you have taken and the instructors that you are following. (by default, when you sign up for a course, you will automatically follow the instructor. This is one part of Udemy that I don’t like. I would prefer to decide who I want to follow.)
Creating your own course
Other than taking courses, you can also create your own courses and distribute them in Udemy.
Click the “Create a Course” button.
Enter the course details and click “Save”.
In the next page, you can change the course image and select the material you are going to use for your course. You can upload a video, presentation, article, audio files or even hold a live session.
Under the “More” tab, you can change the pricing of the course. One thing to note is that the paid course is only available to a limited number of instructors. You can, however, send the Udemy team a message to include you in the instructor pool.
Once you are done with your course setup, click “Publish Now”.
Course Recommendation
For those who are interested in starting a business, here is one course – “Raising Capital for Startups.” that is getting very popular in Udemy.
The course is taught by Dave McClure, Adeo Ressi, and Naval Ravikant. These guys are investors in Twitter, Foursquare, Mint, SlideShare (list goes on… way on), and they’ve run dozens of companies themselves (i.e. they know both sides of the table), so they are probably the best mentors that you want to learn from. The usual course fee is $99, but if you sign up with the above link, you get a 60% off, making it only $39. You also get the first lecture free so you can check them out before you purchase. For those interested in iPhone, iPad, iOS development, here is another course for you – “Learn to Develop iPhone & iPad Apps in 4 Weeks.”
The course is taught by Bess Ho, who is quickly becoming something of a silicon valley legend given her ability to take business folks (with zero programming skills) and have them build real functional apps in less than 6 hours. She teaches at places like Hacker Dojo, but if you can’t make it to a class she’s put together an awesome version of her course online at Udemy.com. The usual course fee is $250. Similarly, if you sign up with the above link, you get a 60% off, making it $99 for this week only. Grab them while they’re hot.
