apparently they've been selling pirated courses Udemy faces criticism for profiting from pirated online courses | The Verge
Pluralsight is another subscription based learning platform (and referenced in the article). Some of our employees used Pluralsight for some license prep and general IT learning. When we checked them out it looked like they curate their offerings pretty well. If Udacity is just paying people to provide videos that is nearly impossible to "police" as they claim. Anyone who participated in a webinar can grab the presentation, crop out watermarks, remove name references and sell it at a profit. It's nearly impossible to guarantee that you have original content with a model like this. Coupled with the fact that it isn't sufficient for Udacity to just offer a good product and make a profit they have to run with this whole faux-social entrepreneurship "we want to change the world" crap, I have plenty of reasons to dislike the company and those reasons seem to multiply each day.
Udemy and Udacity are totally separate entities. The thread is about Udemy. You are expressing your "dislike" of Udacity which is fine but #relevance?
Are you saying that because you don't think there are any entrepreneurs motivated by a desire to solve large scale societal problems, or just that you don't think Udacity is an example of that?
The latter. Sure, I believe that social entrepreneurship is a "thing." And there are plenty of companies who are doing exactly what they say and some of them do it pretty well. But it's also pretty trendy to say you're a social entrepreneur and your business is out to "change the world." Udacity fails to actually deliver on this promise. They're a for-profit education provider who chose to essentially crowdsource their coursework. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with any of that. But they want to package all of that as if it is some world changing experiment that we are in desperate need of. I support any business marketing itself as it sees fit (as long as it doesn't break the law). I'm just not buying that load from Udacity.
Well noted. And that is my error. I think both of them are total crap but you're right, I shouldn't conflate the two.
This reminds me that I purchased lot of IT training courses from CBT Nuggets on Ebay when I left the Marine Corps to sharp up my IT skills. After two weeks, I received the materials from Sweden...and I realized they were pirate materials. I thought they were from CBT Nuggets itself. Nowadays, people can easily steal intellectual property to sell online.
I posted on DI my dislike for udemy awhile ago. I guess I can call myself a thought leader. My resume is overdue for an update.
