Udemy vs Blackboard Learn

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Our analysts compared Udemy vs Blackboard Learn based on data from our 400+ point analysis of LMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

Udemy is an online learning platform with over 40 million students. Over 80% of the top Fortune 100 companies use it. Lessons are self-paced and recorded by industry specialists. The subjects include business, design, developing and programming, marketing, music, personal development, photography, IT and more. Other courses are more tailored to specific, in-demand and professional skill sets like cyber security, ethical hacking, financial analysis, graphic design, machine learning, Adobe Photoshop, PMP, SQL and web development.

Once purchased, classes are available to the user indefinitely. Learners can reference them for a refresher. Overall, it has 50,000 instructors and 130,000 courses taught in more than 60 languages from over 190 different countries. To date, it’s seen over 245 million enrollments.
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Blackboard is an educational management tool used commonly in K-12, higher education, online education and corporate training. It’s cloud-based and has several add ons including Learn, Open LMS, Classroom, Predict, Intelligence, Ally, Collaborate and more. All have different specialties that add to the primary online education functions.

The core product, Blackboard Learn, includes course management, mobile accessibility and insights into data and analytics. Upgraded versions have more robust facilities, including advanced web conferencing, virtual classrooms and more in-depth reporting.
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$20 Monthly
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$9,500 Annually
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Insights

  • Upskilled Workforce: Identifies staff with the right abilities and navigates the continuously changing duties in the modern workplace. Provides an easy, affordable talent upgrade for organizations with competency gaps. Courses are skill-based and taught by experts.
  • Culture of Learning: Teaches and trains employees with a variety of self-paced classes. This allows an organization to promote education affordably. Allows companies to give more time and focus to development opportunities. Creates a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Increased Efficiency: Allows workers to improve skills and become more efficient at their job. Increased automation levels make it a massive time and money saver, especially given the fast rate at which jobs change in the modern era. Lets HR staff focus less on manual information input and more on advanced staff development.
  • Happier Workforce: Lets employees acquire new skills and grow in their job, one of the top requests for employees in any workforce. Through a course library, users can expand their minds, meet career goals and feel better about their place of employment. Showcases the level of dedication with an investment in people.
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  • Mass Communications: A message can be written and then sent via social media, email, voice message, SMS or push notification to everyone who needs to see it.nbsp;
  • Student Retention: It provides data on incoming and outgoing students, which helps with the development of student retention strategies. Some functions within the dashboard are also specifically geared toward targeting at-risk learners. 
  • Accessibility: Not only does it allow for accessible file formats such as semantic HTML, audio files, ePub and electronic braille, but it can audit content sent out by instructors and return with annotations to improve accessibility. It is also fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 
  • Parental Involvement: Parents get access to see how students are doing and address potential problems early in the process. 
  • Multiple Translations: Over 15 different languages are available, including Arabic, English, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Dutch, Russian, Korean and more. 
  • Implementation: Through a partner program, users can get help with implementation through technical support and strategy analysis. 
  • Accreditation Tracking/Documentation: The assessment and accreditation solution makes institutional reporting automatic, helps provide documentation where needed and streamlines evidence collection. 
  • Partnerships: More services are available for buyers who use partner programs. This support may be technical, marketing or strategic and varies depending on the different levels of partnership.  
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  • Class Creation and Management: Manages and creates lectures, text, multimedia, slides, videos and additional resources bundled together for lessons. Offers testing and assignment options like quizzes, practice tests and coding exercises. The license for courses never expires and learners can finish at their own pace.
  • Instructor Capabilities: Sells classes and accepts payment through the solution via PayPal or Payoneer when students enroll. Designs lessons to help people advance skills, upgrade careers or explore hobbies. Offers training that details how to build units, curriculum pages, an instructor dashboard and others. Last, allow students to connect with instructors via messaging, Q&As and announcements. Instructors own all the rights to the class material.
  • Devices: Operates on laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile. Works on both iOS and Android. By downloading classes, users can watch them offline and view them with Chromecast or Apple TV.
  • Certifications: Sends a certificate of completion when users complete paid classes for reimbursement. Showcase talent or dole out bragging rights. Certifications aren’t available for free courses or ones that only have practice exams.
  • Affiliates: Promotes an affiliate program for organizations or individuals who want to promote courses on their blog or website. Users make a commission for each sale.
  • Subjects: Offers a variety of courses on different topics such as:
    • IT and Tech: Provides courses in IT AWS certification, ethical hacking, hardware, networking, operating systems, security and others. It also provides information needed for IT certification like Microsoft Azure, Cisco CCNA, CompTIA A+, CompTIA Security+, Windows Server and others.
    • Marketing: Teaches useful marketing competencies in areas such as copywriting, digital marketing, Facebook ads and marketing, Google AdWords, Instagram marketing, SEO, social media marketing and more.
    • Design: Covers subjects such as animation and 3D, architectural design, fashion, game design, graphic design, interior design, user experience and web design.
    • Business: Offers courses that cover communication, entrepreneurial skills, finance, management, Microsoft Power BI, project management, sales, stock trading, strategic thinking and others.
    • Music Education: Provides classes such as music fundamentals, instruments, production, software, techniques, vocals and others.
    • Health and Fitness: Offers art therapy, aromatherapy, CBT dance, dieting, first aid, fitness, general health, herbalism, massage, meditation, mental health, nutrition, safety, self-defense, sports and yoga.
    • Teaching & Academics: Comes with calculus, engineering, English, German, humanities, IELTS, Japanese, math, online ed, science, Spanish, test prep and more.
    • Office Productivity: Teaches learners how to increase efficiency and get trained in key office tech. Offers classes in Data Analysis, Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft and others.
    • Finance & Accounting: Comes with accounting, blockchain, bookkeeping, compliance, cryptocurrency, day trading, economics, finance certification, financial modeling, investing, money management, taxes and more.
    • Lifestyle: Offers several classes that apply other areas of life, such as arts and crafts, beverage and food, beauty, gaming, home improvement, makeup, neuro-linguistic programming, pet care, pet training, portraiture, travel and others.
    • Personal Development: Teaches skills focused at soft skills or life skills. Provides health and wellness, increasing learning and memory or financial issues. Some course categories include energy healing, life coaching, memory, mindfulness, neuro-linguistic programming, reiki, speed reading, stock trading and technical analysis.
  • Udemy for Business: For organizations looking for ways to host corporate training, this coexisting platform is an option. It supports company training, creates learning paths for employees and provides over 2,000 courses. For more information, see its separate product page.
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  • Integration: It can be integrated with other essential educational programs such as Student Information Systems, lunch systems, online grade books and others to make collecting data easy. 
  • Collaboration: Through web conferencing and virtual classrooms, students, peers and coworkers can collaborate on projects and content creation. 
  • Mobile App: The app, which is available across several devices, offers mobile-friendly content that’s been adjusted to flip less on a phone screen. Learners can access tests, quizzes, notes and more. 
  • SaaS: It’s a software-as-a-service or cloud-based product. This means the hosting is online and not local. 
  • Templates: When instructors create courses, they can choose from several pre-made templates and customize as needed. 
  • Strategic Planning: Extra services include strategic planning, which comes with market research, help to develop a comprehensive strategy, deployment support and more. 
  • E-Commerce: It allows users to buy or sell courses, training materials and other content. This can be used as a revenue source or to find more information for a program. 
  • Sales Training and Development: In addition to its uses in K-12 and higher education, it helps with the training of employees to keep them in compliance or certified in a corporate setting. Individual workers can be tracked, and areas of improvement can be easily identified. 
  • Registration: It manages learners throughout the enrollment process and can help them sign up along pre-defined learning paths or prerequisites. 
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
LMS Software

#6

among all
LMS Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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AI-based Capabilities Assessments Collaboration Compliance Content And Course Management ECommerce Learning Delivery Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting And Dashboard User Management And Gamification 14 82 100 100 91 0 68 78 87 100 91 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 675 reviews
Good User Sentiment 1521 reviews
91%
of users recommend this product

Udemy has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 675 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

79%
of users recommend this product

Blackboard Learn has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 79% when considering 1521 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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4.9 (18)
4.5 (559)
3.9 (789)
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4.1 (456)
4.9 (102)
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4.2 (54)
3.9 (5)
3.8 (204)

Awards

Udemy stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Blackboard Learn and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Compliance.

Compliance Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Useful Functionality: Over 90% of users who discussed features were pleased with the system’s components, notably self-paced learning capabilities.
Upskills Workforce: Users felt that the classes helped train employees in necessary skills in over 90% of reviews that discussed it.
Great for Training: More than 80% of reviewers who discussed using it as a training tool were pleased.
Excellent Courses: Learners loved the quality of the courses themselves in over 70% of comments that talked about it.
Skilled Instructors: Over 60% of users who discussed the teachers felt they were communicative and well-versed in the topics.
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Grading: A total of 80% of users who mentioned the grading capabilities felt it worked well and saved them time.
Effective Communication: Over 70% of users who mentioned communications features were thrilled with the discussion boards, messaging, live classrooms and other features.
Great Customer Support: More than two-thirds of reviewers who mentioned the customer support had good experiences with the staff.
Easy to Use: Users felt that the UI worked well in over 50% of reviews.
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Refund Issues: Just under 80% of users who talked about refunds said they had problems getting their money back and didn’t like the policy.
Price: While over 50% of users felt it was reasonably priced, 46% of users who talked about price felt they were overcharged or didn’t like the pricing structure.
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Poor Mobile Function: Around 75% who mentioned the app said they had issues with the design, especially on mobile.
Issues with Features: Over 41% of users said there were holes in the functionality of the integrations, grading features and said there was too much text on the website.
Steep Learning Curve: While many said the UI was easy-to-use, over 40% of those mentioned it said it took a long time to learn.
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Udemy is an online learning solution that provides instructor-led learning classes. Users can pick from a varied selection of topics and train at their own pace. Most reviewers were especially pleased with the features, especially the ability to control the speed of learning. Reviewers left overwhelmingly positive comments on the quality of the classes. Many learners said they were still able to contact their instructors when needed. Most users felt their teachers were skilled and knew their subjects well. Users praised its skill-building both in personal and corporate environments. Though users did like the classes, they also recommended heavily screening for quality. Some complained that the platform didn’t vet what was on the site well. Udemy has reviews for all of its classes left by users. Most people recommended weeding out the good ones from the bad ones. The most significant criticism by far came from people trying to get refunds. They said they had trouble contacting customer support or didn’t receive their money back. Others disliked the 30-day refund policy and felt cheated by it. Users were split on the price of the courses. Classes often came with discounts and some felt they were reasonably priced. Others felt they were too expensive or got angry when they paid for a class that was later offered for free. Udemy is a helpful resource for self-paced learners who have a specific set of skills they want. Vet the courses carefully, wait for discounts and look for details if the price isn’t satisfactory. It doesn’t have HR functionality as it’s more of a content library than a full LMS. Larger organizations who want to take an analytics-driven approach to learning should look elsewhere.

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Blackboard is an online learning solution used most commonly in educational institutions. As one of the biggest players in the market, its users appreciate its features, useability, grading functions and the different channels of communication. The most common complaint was that it’s hard to learn. However, many said it was easy to navigate after getting over the initial learning curve. Though many people liked its features, there were gaps and additional functionalities wished for in almost every category. Its lack of accessibility was also an issue for some users. This solution is good for institutions looking to implement a standardized learning solution. However, it’s important to compare it to its big competitors as some complained it was generic or too similar to other systems. Still, this can be an extremely efficient platform for online and blended learning.

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