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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.
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.
pluralsight and oreilly are really good
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.
I did Andrew Ng's old Machine Learning, Obarsky's Scala course, the Ng's Deep Learning specialization, Nand to Tetris part 1 and a small Data Science course which wasn't very good. I think my very first course was "Model Thinking" course, but I never took the exam there.

I also tried the sequel to the Scala course at one point, and the Cryptography course, but I dropped out from those after finding out they were a bit too hard - I spent way more time on the coursework than I'd intended.

But I can't say I like the direction it's taken in recent years.

+1 for NAND-to-Tetris. I combined it with a visual logic simulator so I could actually see the structures beyond the VHDL. I would love to go back and do Part 2.
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.
Any courses you would particularly recommend? I always found that Udemy's vast catalogue made it hard to actually pick a course.
Lots of hate for coursera and udemy, but what about competitors? Are folks having good results elsewhere?

I enjoyed a course I took last summer on EdX; not a super polished experience, but the content was good and the projects were challenging.

I’ve enjoyed pluralsight in the past, but it is hit or miss whether it will have content you’re interested in.

I’m on mathacademy but that is text only and a very focused niche.

What’s the hip/trendy mooc these days? Who will eat courserudemy’s lunch?

TBH I had no idea most people thought of these platforms as being focused on tech content. I've enjoyed a ton of social science courses. I was a big fan of the MOOC model at the peak of its hype cycle for the possibility of opening up education from world-class universities to the masses

Coursera and EdX were the peak of that for me. Udacity and Udemy were definitely more industry-focused. Some universities had their own platforms like MIT Open Courseware. Class Central was a great attempt to aggregate courses across different platforms.

In the last 3-4 years, I've mostly been using niche platforms: frontendmasters, ui.dev (fireship now?), boot.dev, codecrafters, a couple of others. And books. I always have a Manning subscription running.

I've mostly focused on job-relevant upskilling. If I wanted to learn something outside my immediate area, in a university-course-like experience, I'd probably go back to coursera.

Front End Masters, frontendmasters.com has been my go to for many many years. Granted they're much lower volume than udemy and such sites. They're changing their name soon as they've long since expanded to cover topics outside "front end".
I like Josh Comeau’s frontend courses a lot. Great interactive explanations and lots of relevant exercises to work through.
Coursera has high-quality, curated courses from reputable professors and institutions.

Udemy has almost the opposite.

Hopefully, this is handled well.

Coursera used to have good quality courseware, now I get better stuff via a simple search on youtube. Youtube killed these two companies, well Udemy was garbage from the get go.
> Coursera has high-quality,

Coursera had ...

> Hopefully, this is handled well.

Indeed, Coursera will be fast learning best practices from Udemy.

Coursera HAD good courses. I used to use it, now it's fully enshittified.
I'd go as far as to say Udemy is mostly bad practices and misinformation on nearly all subject matter.

There is the occasional gem but you better be ready to diggy diggy hole to find them.

Hopefully this doesn't change public libraries' access to Udemy.
I hope that the shitty login from Coursera is not in the future used on Udemy. It is the reason, why I am no longer using Coursera, despite in the past having finished 2 MOOCs with certificates there. Recently, I logged in at Udemy without issues and started a course there. Except for the DRM crap for some of the videos, that I need to watch in another browser, since I don't want to enable DRM crap in my main browser, all seems to work well.
Competition is for losers.
Blitzscaling and fast-scaling are hardly new phenomena in online service firms.

It isn't about competition, but rather getting market dominance early. =3

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
> How valid are these certificates in the real world?

Outside of some very rare outlier cases, 0%.

The value is the potential knowledge you gained helping you to jumpstart other things. Employers don't value them at all.

I have not noticed good results from candidates who have these certs.
The Computational Neuroscience one helped me get a PhD place many years ago.

But one of the professors on the admissions board was a friend of the professor who ran the Coursera course so they had a lot more trust in it.

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

Recently I've learned lots of stuff from CHATgpt and Gemini chats. And, of course, Youtube has taught me a lot.
> 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.

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.

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

I'm a paying Udemy customer and they STILL have not acknowledged the recent data leak / hack - and I've asked them twice. Shitty customer service.
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
Well, having less competition is a bad thing.
Does it change their subscription pricing?
What about LinkedInlearning tho?
For context this is sort of where we started:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119959

If you click the link to those original free courses, you get

   403 Forbidden
Don't know what it means, but Coursera made me sad a long time ago when it locked up all its value behind a paywall while getting rid of human interaction.
Blackrock buys more of the world.. cool story.
As a purchaser of many Udemy courses (and yes, there are good ones), I'm waiting for the enshittification to begin.
That was another hype cycle, does everyone remember how they were supposed to replace all universities, and folks no longer needed higher education?

I have access via my employer and mostly they were never that different from other places like Pluralsight.

EDIT: typo, most => that

Oh no ...
The most annoying things for me about Coursera et al is that they aren't about education they are about job training. UC Berkeley (before that terrible law suit made them delete) had the best library of courses. Canvas et all has made it harder to get course materials, since everything is behind a paywall. Sometimes I want to learn some programming, but also I want to learn more math, history, philosophy, theology, literature, etc. and those non-job related subjects are largely missing from MOOCS.