To deliver a consistent student experience, Udemy courses must meet minimum standards for approval. The Quality Review Team will help you get your course approved when you submit your course for review. We reserve the right to re-review courses if instructors violate these standards at any point.
What is valuable educational content?
Since Udemy is a marketplace for educational content, your course material should be designed with student learning in mind, not personal promotion.
The course material is the actual content of the course and includes:
- Section/lecture titles
- Videos or other lecture types
- Resources
- Quizzes
The course needs to meet our detailed list of quality review guidelines in order to be available in the marketplace. If we find that a course in the marketplace does not meet our quality review guidelines, we reserve the right to re-review the course.
You may add multiple instructors to a course when they help create, develop, teach or manage the course. It is not an option that should be used simply to augment marketing capabilities and reach more students.
- Review guidelines on when to add other instructors to your course.
Detailed course material guidelines
The course material is meant to help students learn within a safe environment. It is not meant to be used for instructors to market or sell to students in any way or form. If this happens, it results in students feeling distrustful because they’re being sold to when they want to learn.
- The course material needs to meet our quality review guidelines and may only include information relevant to your course topic.
- Courses should not contain content that is duplicated in other courses published on the marketplace. Any overlap in content across your courses must remain minimal.
- You may include your website, social media profiles, or contact information as a small watermark on your video throughout the lecture or briefly at the beginning or end of a lecture. Learn more.
- You may not include links to paid content off Udemy. The only exception is you’re providing access to a tool/product that is part of the Course Requirements, which is stated in the Course Landing Page.
- You may not post personal information about students.
- You may not include affiliate links.
- You may not include coupon codes, links or promotional references to any Udemy courses.
- When adding an external link to your course that requests students to pay or provide personal information, please use the following guidelines to decide where you can include the link.
- If you are providing any promotional content in audiovisual format, you must disclose in your Course Description that your content includes a promotion. Learn more.
| Example: | A link to your book on Amazon for $10. | A link to a free tool that students can use throughout the course to try out what they've learned. | A link to your newsletter | A link to Wikipedia |
| Case 1 | Case 2 | Case 3 | Case 4 | |
| Does the link encourage students to buy something? | Yes, and it's not part of the Course Requirements | No | No | No |
| Does the link require students to provide personal information? | Doesn't matter | Yes | Yes | No |
| Is the content within the link relevant to the course, and does it help students get more out of the course? | Doesn't matter | Yes, I refer to it in other parts of the course, and it helps students get more out of the course, even thought it isn't required for students | No, but it helps students continue their learning | No, but it helps students continue their learning |
| Can you include it in the course? | This link is only allowed in the bonus lecture | This link is allowed within the course, but you need to go make it clear in the course landing page that this tool is closely related to the course material, and students will need to sign up to access it. | This link is only allowed in the bonus lecture | This link is allowed within the course |
When it comes to deciding whether the link is relevant to the course or not, we will take context into account. This is where the spirit of the policy matters, so unless you can prove to our team that this material provides value to your students within the course, please don’t include it!
When an instructor is clearly going against the spirit of Udemy policies in an attempt to game the system or if we see a severe negative impact on the student experience (high unsubscribe rates or refund rates) it will be considered a violation of our policies.
Course price guidelines
Review information and guidelines for pricing your course.
Escalation policy
Learn what happens when there is a violation of our policies.