Udemy Online Video Courses

I’ve taken several classes on Udemy. In the past, other than the occasional technical or lesson-specific frustration, the experience has been reasonably rewarding. I’m now trying to run the app on iOS 15.2 on an iPad Pro. Today, the splash screen loaded, and I saw a popover dialog prompt for courses on sale. When I clicked the link, I was taken to the web site, rather than to a location in the app. Since then, the app does not load—just the splash screen, then a blank screen. Did all the usual troubleshooting. Restarted. Successfully passed the system check on the Udemy website. I enjoy the breadth of courses, but the app is (until further resolution) pointless on my iPad. I have to run the courses from a web browser (and I’ve been experiencing frustrations there, too—like audio completely dropping out, especially if I pause the video, etc.). I downloaded the app to my phone, declined the popover, and the app loaded (still having the audio issues, etc.). Giving the whole experience one star, because I would rather have contacted technical support directly to work this out, but on the Udemy site, there are only FAQs, which have never answered my questions anywhere, and I would have preferred to spare Udemy any resulting embarrassment. So I’ve now spent way too much time trying to get things to work, rather than learning new skills, which is what I spent my money on. I hope everyone else has had a better experience. Happy to revise my rating once this gets straightened out.

I absolutely love Udemy. I’m beginning to hate the app. They apparently once had an app for Apple TV but decided to abort it once apple developed the ability to airplay or cast your videos to the Apple TV from the iPhone. However, you can only cast from an iOS device and not a computer. Annoying, but that part isn’t necessarily Udemy’s fault. Udemy has a feature where you can increase the playback speed of the video. It’s great for instructors who talk slowly or for a lesson you might already be pretty familiar with but only want to brush up on. Well, when you increase this playback speed and then cast to your Apple TV, you may or may not have audio. More likely you won’t. I have to continually hit pause, play, pause, play, pause, play until the audio finally kicks in. I have to do this for each lecture. Additionally, if you pause a lecture for more than a few seconds, the Udemy app decides to start playing again on it’s own, but the real fun part is that it doesn’t start playing from where you paused, it jumps to an entirely new lecture. Need to go to the bathroom? Don’t pause it! Unless you want to spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where you actually left off. These issues are quite annoying and really affect the productivity of the learning process.

The offline viewing doesn’t download lectures efficiently. When queueing the videos to download and selecting multiple courses to download, it tries to download everything in parallel and clogs up the internet stream slowing download speed to a stop which would be faster if videos downloaded one by one. Also it says courses are finished downloading in downloaded courses but its really not completely downloaded. It doesn’t even show a percentage of how much of the course is downloaded. I think offline downloading if made efficiently could help udemy’s website from having too many requests at once from people rewatching already streamed videos. It would be helpful if a stream could be downloaded while watching to save time. Other than offline problems the lectures, tests, and videos work really well on the app. I just hope there is an update to fix the download course option.

Edit: I haven’t personally experienced any bugs recently, but there was an additional issue following an update to fix the previous one that required me to delete the app and reinstall it as well as re-download my offline contentment. On the first response I sent a report to the developer via the app and they responded relatively fast to let me know they were working on the issue as well post update to inform me of the initial fixes. I’ve purchased several courses as of now and really enjoy them, but now and then there are major bugs that prevent me from doing my work, though I haven’t experienced any in a couple months. If that remains true I would consider raising my rating to 5 stars as I love the concept and mobility of this app and Udemy as well the developer team seems to respond personally and relatively fast if you submit an issue through the Udemy app. Previous Review: Videos were working fine the day before yesterday for a course I purchased late last year. Today I was trying to pickup where I left off and now they only play the audio. The video no longer works, even though this specific video was working the day before. I’ve force closed the app, restarted and rebooted my phone, cleared cache, signed out, deleted the app and reinstalled, downloaded the offline file and nothing works. I’m on an iPhone 6s with 64GB of storage and 34GB free on a broadband internet speed of 250+Mbps. I’ve tried using cellular data and switching internet. Nothing works. The biggest reason I purchased this course was because of the interactive videos that I could watch on the go on my phone and that’s the biggest feature not working.

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.