Class Central

Some more news out of Coursera. Another round of layoffs after the Udemy merger: 10% of its workforce. The first one came in July, just eight weeks after the merger closed. By my estimates, that's about 250 people this time. Including the July round, it's almost 500. Coursera and Udemy had 2,687 employees between them at the end of 2025. So that's almost 20% of the combined workforce. This is the sixth round of layoffs across the two companies since 2022. I put all six in one table, with costs and headcounts [1]. [1] https://lnkd.in/gXqFACQ2

Last week, Coursera told Ollie users it’s shutting down the app, just five months after launching it. Instead, it's focusing on a combined Coursera and Udemy platform, which CEO Greg Hart calls “the future of the business.” It’s one of many moves Coursera made in Q3, its first full quarter with Udemy. It laid off employees, put $100 million into Andrew Ng’s new AI startup, and now, the new platform. Coursera doesn’t expect these moves to pay off soon. Combined revenue fell for the third time this year, and in 2027, it expects both businesses to stay flat or shrink more. Our full analysis of Q3 2026 is coming soon!

Will Coursera be forced to get a new CEO? An investment group bought a large stake in Groupon. The group’s co-founder eventually became Groupon’s CEO. Now the same group has acquired almost 15% of Coursera, and Coursera has adopted a “poison pill” that could dilute its stake. This is all new to me, so I will let an LLM explain the gist of Coursera’s most recent filing: “If an investor reaches 15% ownership without board approval, other shareholders can get extra shares on favorable terms. This would dilute that investor’s stake and make taking control much more expensive.” I didn’t dig too deep, but the investor seems to be the Prague-based investment group Pale Fire Capital. Coursera hasn’t named them explicitly, but they recently reported a stake of about 14.7% in Coursera. Pale Fire’s co-founder, Dušan Šenkypl, joined Groupon’s board in 2022 and became its CEO in 2023, initially on an interim basis. Not sure how this will turn out or what their goals are this time around. Coursera’s market cap is shy of a billion dollars, well below its roughly $1.5B in annual revenues. Seems ripe for an activist investor to step in. Unfortunately, none of this seems to have much to do with learning or education. I will keep digging, but would love to hear from people who have experience in this sort of thing.

At the rate AI (sorry, SI) is advancing, it'll soon figure out that people hate data centers. Maybe it'll even spot the most obvious spy on the planet. Jokes aside, recent events clearly show how out of touch the tech (and edtech) industry is. It spent years fully in cahoots with fascists, believing this was the new normal. Rather, this is the new normal they desired, and they used their platforms to push it, to be free from accountability. Reminds me of this quote from Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian freedom fighter, at the first All India Trade Union Congress in 1920: "India... has been bled white by the forces of organised capital and is today lying prostrate at its feet. Militarism and Imperialism are the twin children of Capitalism; they are one in three and three in one. ... It is only lately that an antidote has been discovered, and the antidote is organised labour." Edtech is more worried about losing access to "organized capital." This is why it stays silent when schools and universities are bombed, and when the very children it claims as its "mission" are kidnapped from schools in broad daylight. Some even welcome it, since chaos opens the door to privatizing and monetizing public education. In fact, you will see the very perpetrators given prime time on stage at conferences like ASU+GSV, pretty much unchallenged. The edtech punditry does a ton of sanewashing. Maybe something I will explore in the future, but enough ranting for now.

We change the illustration on Class Central's homepage for different occasion: Diwali, Halloween, our birthday. We call them “Homepage Heroes.” I like to think it gives the homepage a bit of personality and reflects what’s happening in the world. If you’re in India, you’ll see our Diwali Hero. For the rest of the world, we’ve made a small update to our usual learner.

Andrew Ng’s Stanford machine learning class is free on YouTube. So is MIT's Private Pilot Ground School. They’re two of the 8,000+ free university courses we’ve collected in one list, from 18 institutions. A few more you’ll find inside: -> Yale University's Game Theory -> 900+ The Open University courses with free certificates -> IIT lectures on NPTEL, with 479M views on YouTube Plus MIT OpenCourseWare from Japan, Taiwan, Turkey and the Netherlands. Save the list now! https://lnkd.in/eThBfR4T

When the merger was announced in December, Coursera was worth about $1.3 billion and Udemy $800 million. After yesterday's earnings call, the combined company is worth about $1 billion. If I had to give one reason, I would say that combined revenue has declined every quarter this year. 391M (Q4 2025) → $387M (Q1 2026) → $381M (Q2) → $377M (Q3). And Coursera expects another decline in Q4, with revenue guidance of $358M-$366M million. Consumer revenue fell the most. I suspect much of that came from Udemy. Coursera pointed to declining single-course sales on Udemy. I wrote a while back about Udemy pushing subscriptions because it keeps more of the revenue: 85%, compared with 63% on single-course sales it brings in itself. It's what caused Udemy's stock price to crater, and now we are seeing the cycle repeat.

Chegg Inc. spent about $500 million buying a coding bootcamp and a language app. They are the future of Chegg, if it has one. Together they make up what Chegg calls "Skilling." It bought Thinkful, the bootcamp, for nearly $80 million in 2019, and Busuu, the language app, for about $420 million in 2022. Chegg made $51.8 million in its latest quarter, half of what it made a year earlier. So my colleague Kanishka Nangare looked into where that money comes from now. Surprisingly, most of it still comes from the old business. "Academic Services," which includes its homework help, brought in about two-thirds of it. But it's dropping fast: $34 million, down from $88 million a year earlier. Skilling brought in the rest, about $17.5 million. But it has been flat since Chegg split out the number. Busuu's sales to businesses grew 39% the last time Chegg broke them out, while its career courses keep shrinking. Kanishka's full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/gE9ebQkz

Chegg Inc. lost about half its students to AI. It even sued Google, saying its AI Overviews were eating into Chegg’s traffic. Last month, it lost that case too. Despite this, and its valuation drop from $14 billion in 2021 to under $80 million, Chegg is still standing. We wanted to know how. We went through its finances to see how it's making money, and we sensed a possible pivot: from homework help to skilling. This pivot hasn’t paid off yet. Chegg lost $3 million last quarter. And after paying off its debt, it has about $38 million in cash, a little more than its quarterly operating expenses. Read our full analysis here: https://lnkd.in/dA5j-Dnm

Fellow overthinkers, we recently added an interesting free course to our catalog: CodeSignal’s path - From Spiraling to Deciding Curious? Here’s the course: https://lnkd.in/dUqEzyzw