A Udemy course may have more than one instructor who plays a role in creating and managing the course. This article is intended to guide instructors considering this option toward positive use cases (e.g., co-developing a course can be a great way to add expertise and a fresh perspective), while avoiding problematic use cases (e.g., using the co-instructor feature purely as a way to game Udemy's revenue share from instructor coupons or referral links.
Udemy’s policy on co-instructors
Co-instructor rules:
If you are planning to add a co-instructor to your course, we recommend that it be someone whom you know and trust. Please take extra care and consideration if you are splitting revenue with or giving editing rights to a co-instructor. Keep in mind that Udemy’s contractual relationship is strictly between Udemy and each of the instructors. Any co-instructor business agreements related to a course remains exclusively between the co-instructors.
In addition, please consider the following:
- DO add the co-instructor if the individual is bringing in unique expertise in the form of course creation, development, production, teaching or managing the course.
- DO make co-instructors visible on the course if they’re appearing in the course videos and/or engaging with students. At least one of the visible instructors on the course, should be the person students are learning from and interacting with.
Don’t do the following:
- DON’T be co-instructors with the primary goal of exploiting Udemy’s marketing tools or sharing each other’s student base.
- For example, if an instructor wants to pair up with you after you’ve published your course just to market to one another’s students, this is against Udemy policies. Remember, if you’re actually interested in marketing each other’s courses, you can do so by becoming an Affiliate.
- If on the other hand, you want to co-develop or co-manage a course together right from the beginning, that’s exactly why we enable courses to have multiple instructors, and is totally fine.
Escalation process for violations
Remember, abuse of co-instructor relationships impacts everyone. When instructors try to augment their marketing capabilities in this way, we've seen a negative impact on students and higher unsubscribe rates for instructor announcements and Udemy emails. This hurts all instructors in the marketplace, because these students unsubscribe not just from one instructor’s announcements, but from all Udemy emails.
When we see cases where 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 due to co-instructor behavior) it will be considered a violation of our policies.
Everyone makes mistakes, so most first violations will result in a warning. Subsequent violations may result in loss of access to product features (e.g., Course Announcements), account suspension, or in rare cases, account termination.