Retiring my HCI course – Ruth Stalker-Firth

I created a course about human-computer interaction (HCI) on Udemy back in 2020. It was fun and fresh and two hours long. I probably should have left it like that and then once it had earned me the equivalent of teaching a course in a university as a sessional lecturer, offered it for free.

Instead, I kept adding materials and now it’s a bit of a monster, like HCI itself, it’s a Frankenstein made up of different domains, with no core competencies, and comes in at five-and-a-half hours long. I have tried to reorganise it to satisfy those people who don’t feel that they need to know about certain aspects of HCI, giving them focused UX tools and examples whilst offering a deep dive into HCI guidelines, theory and history. However, it is still not working too well for me.

The last time I looked, it had 1,160 students, though that number fluctuates all the time. However, I won’t be looking at it anymore because it just takes up too much of my mental energy for many different reasons, including the lack of support that Udemy gives instructors and the ability to refute some of the inaccurate/uninformed comments that people have the legitimacy to leave, with 1-star reviews, which discredit the course based on their lack of knowledge about what HCI actually is.

I used to think it was a charming testament to the democracy of the Internet. I don’t anymore. Udemy’s advice is to go and argue with people in the comments. I don’t want to argue with people online. It’s just not healthy. One could argue that I should be managing student expectations better, and I have added materials to do that, but some people’s mind just cannot be changed and they’re the ones who leave one star reviews that impact the overall rating.

The other negative thing about it too as the AI assistant. Now I love AI, always have always will, and I definitely think generative AI has its place, but when it is churning out absolute twaddle about UX and HCI as it is doing, because whilst it is extraordinarily impressive, it is basically just predictive text on steroids and has no context, it doesn’t understand anything, it’s just a parrot, doing unhelpful things such as using UX and HCI as interchangeable terms which there are not. So much so that it is giving students wrong information with my name on top, then I get a bit upset. I don’t think the AI assistant is doing Udemy any favours.

I can no longer offer the course for free (Udemy has a two hour limit on free courses) unless I constantly create coupons (see below) and I no longer wish to update it as it has long passed the point of diminishing returns, so I am retiring it. I have notified Udemy who will only let me unpublish it in October 2025 and then I can take a long hard look at it and decide what to do with all of the materials I have there.

There is a lot of great stuff in there and in fact other people who teach HCI on Udemy are students on my course, so go figure! I guess they’ve probably put some of my stuff in their course, so it will keep getting to the students one way or another whether I have a course on Udemy or not.

It has been a really interesting experience, but I don’t think I would teach on Udemy again. In the meantime I have created a coupon to give the course away here:

https://www.udemy.com/course/human-computer-interactions/?couponCode=F2D6362741E972E8F502
#udemycoupon (expires 25/8/25)

I loved this whole online course creation experience, until I didn’t, and may someday create another course somewhere using everything I learnt over five years on Udemy.

A 2-minute overview of the course

My course on human-computer interaction

I designed the materials as a fusion between the academic lectures I’ve given and the practical design skills a UX consultant needs using everything I’ve ever blogged about on this website: 101 ways to think about human-computer interaction.

In this course you will learn about:

* The Human: We look at the human through the lense of cognitive science: Perception, memory and psychology so we can manage and guide user expectations when looking at an interface. We then learn how capture information about our users thorugh cultural probes, so that we create user personas, journeys and scenarios, so that we know all about users need and preferences from I/O to operating systems.

* The Computer: We consider different inputs and outputs from barcodes to touch screens with a focus on accuracy and learnability, so we can choose the right one, as we define what data we need, and what the system architecture should look like and how that reflects the mental processing of our user group.

* The Interaction: We learn all of the HCI guides and rules and UX laws and tools and apply them all to creating an effective visual design solution.

*The Evaluation: We explore different ways of measuring whether our design is a success.

By the end of the course, you will have all the skills you need to design a mobile app or website and to speak with confidence about the interaction between people and the increasingly complex computer systems our modern culture demands, thus becoming an agent for change, yourself.