From chemical engineering to Thai cooking

WEB WATCH

“Five years from now, the web will be able to provide the best lectures on any given topic, for free. The world of online education is about to blow wide open,” Bill Gates once said. The process could happen a lot faster, if there are more initiatives like Udemy, at http://www.udemy.com.

Udemy is a website that provides a platform for individuals to start their own course and enable a knowledge-sharing model with viewers. Scores of people have done so and quite a number of these courses are worth making a note of. The categories under which these online courses are offered are:

*Academics

*Business and Professional

*Creative and Performing Arts

*Health and Fitness

*Language

*Lifestyle

*Music

*Technology and Internet

*Test Prep

*Hobbies and Crafts

*Games

Under the Academics course category, Udemy features close to 600 courses from 18 institutions, including UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Yale, Columbia and the Indian Institute of Technology. In total, there are nearly 12,000 free video lectures on Udemy, organised into courses — Sequential and On-Demand Content collections that allow anyone to take a university-level course online.

Udemy makes it easy to teach and learn online. Within a matter of minutes, you can create your own online course on Udemy. Teachers can upload presentations and videos, host live classroom sessions, and post articles through a host of features. The features include a content platform to upload presentations and videos, and write blogs for asynchronous learning.

Instructors and their courses are accessible through interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter,  blogs and discussion boards. Through the Live Virtual Classroom feature, Udemy’s proprietary Live tool, instructors can hold live video conferences with students. Presentations can be made through a virtual whiteboard or presentation viewers/ chatrooms. Over 20 live webcams can stream on Udemy Live simultaneously and more than a thousand users can watch a session at the same time. More than 10,000 assets have been uploaded on Udemy since its inception on May 11, 2010. Close to 1,000 instructors have created over 2,000 courses on topics from Chemical Engineering to Thai cooking lessons. The site has 10,000 registered users.

Udemy, founded by Gagan Biyani, Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar, has received USD 1 million from a syndicate of angel investors. Some of the awards that Udemy has won include Best In Class award for Best Social Learning Application at ASU’s Education Innovation Summit, Winner of Best Startup at VatorSplash, Top 10 ranking at Silicon Alley Insider’s Startup 2010, Top 25 Online Learning Startups that Could Change the World according to Edu-Tastic.

Udemy is fast and easy, and it is the ideal platform for those who wish to share and learn be it multivariable calculus, Photoshop, basic car maintenance guidelines, yoga, healthy cooking, children’s education, music, dieting or any other subject.