The Questions & Answers (Q&A) dashboard is designed to help instructors monitor and respond to student questions with ease and efficiency, as well as identify insights for course enhancements.
Please note: Q&A is not available in free courses.
Table of Contents
- Accessing the instructor Q&A dashboard
- Managing the Q&A dashboard
- Using AI assistance in Q&A (beta)
- Accessing Q&A Insights
Accessing the instructor Q&A dashboard
To access the instructor Q&A Dashboard, follow the steps below:
1. Navigate to the Course Page (Learn how).
2. Click Communications on the left-hand side and select Q&A.
Here are some highlights:
- Review and respond to questions across all courses using either the single or double pane view.
- Filter for unanswered or unread questions. This allows instructors to get back to students faster, keeping students more engaged in the course.
- Mark a response as the Top Answer to indicate the top response to other students, or select a question and answer as a Featured Question.
- Access the lecture where the student asked the question and view timestamps of when a question was asked and responded to. All of this provides additional context to students’ questions to help instructors respond efficiently.
Managing the Q&A dashboard
Set your availability
If you wish to provide students with a timeframe for when they can expect to receive a response to their question, or inform them that you’re out of the office, you can do so by setting an availability status. The availability status can be set on an individual course basis or for all of your courses.
You can access the Availability page by clicking Availability on the left-hand side of the course management page.
Please note: the instructor availability status can only be set by the primary instructor on the course.
Marking your questions as "Read"
The message should automatically be marked as read when any of the below events happen:
- Instructor puts their cursor in the reply text field
- Instructor clicks anywhere in the message (to see all replies, open the discussion post, go to the student’s profile, mark as helpful etc.)
The instructor can also manually mark the question as read or unread by clicking on the dot at the top of the question.
The difference between unread and unanswered
Unread indicates that you, as the instructor, have not yet marked the question as "read". Unanswered means that no response has been marked as "Top Answer". Only the instructor and original poster can mark responses as "Top Answer".
Sorting by oldest to newest
When an instructor sorts questions by oldest to newest, the question time will be determined by the most recent response time.
Upvote a question or answer, or sort by most upvoted
You can recommend questions or answers you believe others should see by clicking on the upvote (arrow) icon.
You can also find and prioritize questions that have received upvotes from your students, by using the Most upvoted filter.
Getting context for the question
If the student asked a question within a particular lecture, the instructors will see a link to the lecture right underneath the course title.
Using AI assistance in Q&A (beta)
Udemy has launched a beta version of its AI-supported Q&A tool, initially available to select instructors teaching specific, technical topics in English. We expect to expand coverage of the feature to additional topics and languages over time.
When responding to learner queries, certain instructors might come across the "AI-generated answer" feature available for newly submitted questions. If an instructor selects this function, the tool will create a preliminary response based on an AI model trained with the course material and previous Q&A sessions for the instructor to review..
Instructors should review the AI-generated draft response for accuracy, making any necessary edits before posting. Once the response is finalized, instructors can post it like any other response by simply clicking "post".
Please note: An AI-generated draft will only appear if:
- The course is in a category/subcategory included in the current beta
- The original learner query does NOT have an image attached
- The original learner query is ~350 words or less
Please allow up to 12 hours after the original learner query for an AI-assisted response to become available.
Currently, the answers generated with the “AI” label is only visible to instructors for informational purposes and will not be displayed to learners.
Accessing Q&A Insights
Instructors can explore insights to better understand their learners' questions. To access this feature, click on Q&A Insights.
Filtering options: You can filter by course and time range.
Lectures with the most questions: From your selected course, cards displaying lectures with the most learner questions will appear. You can explore different themes for lectures with a sufficient number of questions for analysis. Click each theme bubble to view summaries and sample quotes.
- Not seeing themes? This might be because there hasn't been enough learner interaction to identify recurring topics within the set time frame. As learner engagement increases, themes will become visible.
Click on the buttons Watch lecture or Edit lecture to view or update your content directly from the dashboard based on user insights.