Udemy Online Video Courses

- When you go my courses tab and browse one of your purchased courses in mobile app, there is no link to go to the author profile for looking his/her other courses. You basically need to search instructor name in search section to find his/her other courses. Waste of time. This problem can be solved very easy. In purchased courses, a simple button/link which goes instructor profile can be put in the “more” section. Then I can easily look my instructors other courses and enroll them if I like it. - When you look for a new course, you can see the curriculum in extendable way. Tree structure in other words. When you click the “+” sign, you can see the content of the section. This is perfect. If there is a lot of section, it says after showing some section, “There is 19 more section”. 19 is trivial, this number depends on the course. Anyway, when you click this link to see whole section, there is no tree view any more. No “+” sign to extend section content. Which means there is a very big table of contents page. You have to scroll down and up to see everything. It is waste of time. You can implement a tree view after I click to see whole section. Then If I curious about content of the one section, I can click the “+” sign and see the content. You also can add “extend/collapse all section” option. This is more user friendly. Thanks!

The content on Udemy is first class, so that part is 5 star. So this review is just for the iPhone app. You can easily play content, and download to play off line, that is very good. It has a couple of quirks, though, and one deficiency. Quirk 1: you can’t play/pause using Bluetooth. I’ll qualify that to say that you can play, but not pause. I tested with Apple AirPods and Bose Quiet Comfort and neither could pause. This is inconvenient, because sometimes I’ll have my phone plugged in and will be listening to a lecture and I have to walk over to the phone to pause. Quirk 2: The “my courses” section will sometimes just appear empty. If I close & reopen the app, it refreshes and I see my courses. I think the app doesn’t gracefully handle being connected/disconnected from Internet access and then doesn’t properly display content. Deficiency: You can’t bookmark or see bookmarks in the app. These exist in a full Internet browser, and are very useful. I often use my phone for watching lectures though so I can multitask when the lecture doesn’t require a hands on activity - then I go back to my laptop when needed. I would like for the app to have bookmarks that are synced to Udemy so that they appear for me everywhere.

I doubt I would have purchased products on Udemy if I had known how their set up was. most of their products can only be streamed or downloaded to the mobile app but no desktop downloads! they say due to piracy issues, completely understandable but the streaming software is buggy and needs to be updated. I stream video from the usual places Netflix etc. without issue in HD but Udemy software is constantly buffering and won’t load making it impossible to use their courses. And I have tried to download courses to the mobile app multiple times. on three different devices, Over different Wi-Fi’s and on phone data plan. I’ve tried downloading different courses to mobile device without success, downloads will usually complete around halfway to 3/4 and then stop and never finished downloading the rest of the way. Since streaming capabilities are clearly not up to par, they should make downloading an option to desktop, otherwise they should notify people before purchasing that you’re only allowed to “rent” their courses since if I cannot download it I technically don’t own it. It’s truly unfortunate because they offer many great courses at very reasonable prices. I feel like they just need to be upfront about how their product is distributed.

I think the developers should take advantage of some of the fine IOS development courses offered at Udemy. And perhaps some of the UI/UX courses. App is very buggy. Crashes randomly. Screen would rotate 180 degrees (up side down) when you play the preview videos. Have to rotate device back and forth to “fix” the the issue. Sometimes the next video in the course would play automatically. Other times, not. Need to restart app to restore functionality sometimes. Would also like to see it updated to support newer devices such as the 2018 iPad Pro I am using. Would also like to see some of the functionalities such as the playback speed and captioning options made more easily accessible (e.g. directly on the screen overlay along with the playback buttons). I believe these functions are used often enough given the nature of the contents (i.e. training courses) that they deserve to be in a more accessible location rather than behind another menu. I would even suggest some gesture controls for skipping backwards and forwards instead making the user try to push tiny buttons that are a miss half the time.

If there is an option to turn auto play off on mobile, I can’t find it. Very annoying to open a course and have a random video immediately start playing. I transition between the app and desktop site and progress has a hard time syncing so, no, I don’t want to pick up where you think I left off. Honestly, I’d like to read the title of the lecture before jumping in or even may want to rewatch the last one to get my bearings. I’d like to choose which lecture I want to watch next as nearly all courses I watch have modules that can be watched out of order. This is basic UX. Clicking on a course should take me to a course. If I want to watch a vid, I’ll click on the vid or a play button. I don’t need you to unintuitively skip steps for me. There is no way to check your progress without auto playing a lecture. Have also had issues recently where the majority of my lectures did’t load over WiFi, and numbering was completely off. Couldn’t pick up where I left off. Auto played a random vid. Downloading vids and actually being able to watch them is hit or miss.