“Our mission is to help anyone learn anything.”
With the explosion in Edtech over the past few years, millions of people are now learning online, and many of the early adopters are techies. Some are looking to get into new careers while others are just fueling their curious side.
At the SPAUG General Meeting on March 9, 2016 Matthew O’Dell, Technical Category Expert at Udemy, will present an overview of the online edtech world and the skills one can learn.
As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, a recent survey by Udemy, a leading online education company, finds that while 61 percent agree that there’s a “skills gap” in the U.S. workforce, 95 percent think they personally are qualified or overqualified for their own jobs. Fifty-three percent of millennials believe they already know everything they need to know to do their jobs, against only 43 percent of boomers, the survey found. When it comes to the skills gap, Americans clearly believe “it’s not me – it’s you.”
Founded in 2010, Udemy is an online education marketplace with over 10 million students. Their course content and instructor community are constantly growing, with more than 40,000 courses taught by 16,000 instructors. They offer students the ability to learn as they go and succeed on their own terms, while instructors have a way to share their knowledge with the world. Udemy recently received another round of financing worth $65 million,
Online learning is nothing new, but interest in it exploded a few years ago when it became clear that it could be the solution to bringing knowledge and education, even from esteemed Harvard and Stanford professors, to the masses. Udemy and others like Udacity, Pluralsight, Coursera, and Lynda.com have been racing to provide more courses, in more topics, to more people.
But unlike Udacity and others, Udemy isn’t too focused on providing alternatives to traditional degrees. While it does provide certificates for completing certain courses, it’s steering clear from diving into the education degree pool and having to deal with accreditation bodies and other regulations. According to CEO Dennis Yang, “We find that the value of formal degrees is going down.”