As technology continues to evolve and the needs of employers are constantly changing, job seekers and current professionals alike need highly dynamic upskilling resources that can keep pace with these rapid changes.

With Gale Presents: Udemy, libraries can provide their patrons with access to thousands of high-quality, on-demand online courses taught by over 10,000 world-class instructors across 16 languages for upskilling in cutting-edge skills related to business, technology, leadership, and personal development. And the best part is, these courses are regularly updated with fresh, relevant content—making them extremely responsive to shifting workplace requirements.

A highly responsive service

Gale Presents: Udemy is a collection of nearly 30,000 expert-led courses that are specially curated from Udemy’s marketplace of 250,000 upskilling courses. “These are the very best and most relevant courses for professionals looking to enhance their job skills,” says Senior Product Manager Casey Anderson.

Taught by world-class thought leaders, subject-matter experts, bestselling authors, and award-winning professors who are making significant advancements in their fields, the courses are carefully chosen based on engagement data and user feedback from Udemy’s 77 million learners—ensuring that all content is of the highest quality and covers in-demand topics.

With a diverse pool of more than 10,000 instructors, library patrons can find Udemy instructors whose expertise and teaching style fit their own unique learning preferences. What’s more, the dynamic nature of Gale Presents: Udemy courses are perfectly suited to the ever-shifting needs of employers and job seekers, Anderson observes.

“Udemy instructors incorporate qualitative feedback from learners and quantitative data from the platform to continuously enhance and innovate their courses,” she explains. They’re tapped into the latest developments in their respective fields, such as how automation and AI are changing the skills required on the job.

The platform makes course revisions easy for instructors. For instance, instructors have access to dashboards that give them insight into user engagement, so they can see what’s working—and what isn’t—and adapt their content accordingly. A user-friendly course editor enables instructors to add or remove lectures, update existing content, and rearrange the course structure as needed.

The collection itself is also very agile and responsive to users’ needs, with courses being added, updated, and retired monthly in response to user feedback and changing industry demands. “This enables the service to remain relevant and up to date at all times,” Anderson asserts. In fact, 60 percent of Gale Presents: Udemy courses have been updated within the last two years.

60% of Gale Presents: Udemy courses have been updated in the last two years.

Of the 30,000 courses in Gale Presents: Udemy, more than 16,000 are taught by native-speaking instructors in 15 different languages, which helps libraries reach diverse populations. With nearly 68 million people speaking a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, this feature is a key benefit for libraries, Anderson says.

Because the courses are taught by native speakers, they’re tailored to cultural nuances that may vary by region—and they bring authentic learning experiences that go well beyond traditional content dubbing and video captions. Content is available in Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Part of Gale’s Adult Learning Suite

Gale Presents: Udemy is part of Gale’s Adult Learning Suite, which provides a full complement of learning options for adults to earn a high school diploma, develop new skills, and/or prepare for college or their careers. All these resources are self-paced and fully accessible online, so patrons can accomplish their goals on their own time.

The other resources in Gale’s Adult Learning Suite include…

● Gale Presents: Excel Adult High School, which enables adults to learn online at their own pace as they work toward an accredited high school diploma. The program includes 40 high-interest electives relevant to fast-growing occupations, including science, technology, and healthcare. Students receive personalized support from academic and success coaches and can access BRYTE, an on-demand AI tutor.

● Gale Presents: Peterson’s Test and Career Prep: With standardized test preparation, college planning, career exploration, and job search tools, this resource offers everything patrons need to take the next step in their education or career. Users can access practice tests, financial aid information, a resumé builder, and more.

The Denver Public Library has been a subscriber to Gale Presents: Udemy since 2020. “Udemy has everything we are looking for” in a platform for professionals to enhance their skills, Collection Services Manager Stacey Watson told the publication Westword. “And the depth of coursework is really something.”

For instance, Watson said the service’s coding courses include a built-in virtual coding environment where patrons can practice their work and then check it and fix their errors.

And because Gale’s privacy policies and safeguards align with the standards that libraries expect, “we knew [we] could be confident that patron privacy would be protected,” she noted.

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