Udemy instructors are expressing frustration after a technical glitch caused many course ratings to drop suddenly. Instructors noticed that their courses showed significant decreases overnight without any new reviews to explain the change.

One instructor shared on Udemy’s community forum, “All the calculations are completely wrong! For example, one of my courses that has 351 ratings and was way above 4.2 is now, overnight, dropped to a perfect 1.0?”

The unexpected rating changes have left many instructors concerned about the potential impact on their course enrollments and reputations. Course ratings play a vital role and can directly influence instructors’ incomes.

In response to the concerns, Udemy acknowledged the issue. Eliana, a Udemy representative, posted an announcement stating, “We want to inform you that we are aware that some of your courses have experienced a sudden drop in ratings despite not receiving any recent reviews. Please rest assured that our engineering team is actively investigating the root cause of this issue.”

This rating glitch comes on the heels of Udemy’s recent announcement of a 20% workforce reduction and plans to move some jobs to “lower-cost geographies.”

The issue was first reported on Udemy’s forums on September 20th and acknowledged by Udemy on September 21st. At the time of writing this post, the glitch had not yet been fixed.

GenAI Rollout to Blame?

There is some speculation on the forums that this bug is related to Udemy’s Gen AI rollout which was announced early this year at the end of July. Instructors were given the option to opt out of the Gen AI program, and the window ended on September 12th.

Udemy’s GenAI program includes features like an AI assistant for learners, AI-powered learning paths for organizations, and AI content creation tools for instructors.