Since December 16th, ChatGPT Search traffic to @classcentral.com has grown threefold, becoming one of the site’s top 5 traffic sources

www.classcentral.com/report/chatg...

Remember when edX and Coursera were neck and neck in attracting students to their courses. Those days are long gone.

The gap is staggering. To put this in perspective: a single popular course on Coursera attracted 5x more learners than ALL new courses launched on edX in 2024.

2U is walking away from its bootcamps, which its own data showed had no effect on students' careers.

Of course, those students will not be able to walk away from the massive loans they took on to attend 2U's bootcamps.

The cycle of layoffs, reorganizations, and strategic pivots continues at 2U/edX: The company is axing its bootcamp business, which came from its $750 million Trilogy acquisition, in favor of "innovative technical microcredentials."

www.classcentral.com/report/2u-ax...

Language breakdown: English still dominates (58.5%), followed by Portuguese (8.3%) and Spanish (7.9%). Interesting to see Turkish and Japanese in top 5, showing Udemy's global reach

Tech & Business courses make up 50% of catalog but drive 76% of all enrollments. Tech leads the pack with nearly 5K students per course.

The length effect is real: Courses under 1 hour average 1.7K students, while 20+ hour courses pull in 11.9K students. Learners seem to prefer comprehensive content.

Interesting shift in course length: Average dropped from 7.7 to 4.7 hours in 2024. But here's the twist - longer courses (20+ hours) are booming, jumping from 6K to 9K courses.

Despite having 262K courses, half of Udemy's courses have fewer than 208 students. The top 20% drive 91% of enrollments. Tech courses dominate with 4.8K students per course vs 3.2K platform average.

More analysis: www.classcentral.com/report/udemy...

🎯 Black Friday alert! We've compiled 50+ online learning deals at Class Central. From Coursera and Udemy to specialized platforms like DataCamp and BBC Maestro, we're tracking ALL the discounts.

www.classcentral.com/report/onlin...

I don’t think this has been promoted on Bluesky so far: The Elements of AI has been rated as the best English-language online course on AI (@classcentral.bsky.social). Over 1.4 million users and counting. Best bit: it’s completely FREE! #ElementsofAI #AIsky #AI #AIedu #AIliteracy elementsofai.com

And as for challenges, I will keep it short and save my rant for another day: it's Google's algorithms.

But we have faced that before and have emerged from it again.

What's interesting is Class Central's "Human Taxonomist" Bobby Brady was the one who did the prompt engineering for us. He was able to incorporate his decade of experience—thousands of hours of manual course aggregation and curation—into the prompts.

I have spent 11 of those years building Class Central full time. Every year brings new opportunities and challenges.

This year's biggest opportunity was GenAI. We built our own "AI Taxonomist" to help curate and grow our catalog to 330,000+ courses and videos.

@classcentral.bsky.social is finally going to be a teenager. Class Central was a side project that I launched back in 2011 over a Thanksgiving weekend just to keep track of a few Stanford courses.

This was before MOOCs were even called MOOCs. I had no idea what I was getting into.

Duolingo has gained more in market value this year than Udemy and Coursera combined. I was trying to figure out why this is so and took a peek at Duolingo’s financial reports.

Here is what I found.

I wanted to understand how prices its Personal Plan across different geographies, so I reached out to the Class Central team (we’re spread across the world!) and gathered data from a few other regions using a VPN.