How to Upload Your Course on Udemy | Instructor Setup Guide | Easily 2026

Have your lesson outline, recorded videos, and any supporting files ready before you start Udemy's upload process. Instructors who begin the wizard without a clear plan tend to leave courses sitting in draft status for weeks, since the setup screens ask questions that are much easier to answer when you already know your course's structure.

From your instructor view, the Courses page includes a "Jump Into Course Creation" panel with a prominent Create Your Course button, plus a set of linked resources underneath — guides for creating an engaging course, getting started with video, and building an audience. These resources are worth skimming even briefly before you click through, since they're written specifically for the stage you're about to enter.

Step 2 of the setup wizard asks for a working title, with placeholder text like "Learn Photoshop CS6 from Scratch" to show the kind of specific, outcome-focused phrasing that works well. Udemy reassures you directly that this title isn't final and can be changed later, so use this field to describe what the course teaches rather than agonizing over marketing language you'll likely revise once the course is complete.

The final step asks how many hours per week you can realistically put toward building the course, with four options from "very busy right now" up to "lots of flexibility." Udemy states plainly that there's no wrong answer here and that it can help you reach your goals regardless of your available time — the honest answer shapes the pacing guidance you'll see afterward, so there's no benefit to overstating how much time you actually have.

Before students will trust an unfamiliar course, they check who's teaching it. Fill in your instructor profile with a clear bio, a professional photo, and any credentials relevant to your subject — this profile appears on every course you publish, so it's worth getting right once rather than patching it together after your first course is already live.

With the shell created and your profile in place, upload your videos and supporting files section by section, keeping them in the same sequence you planned during outlining. Uploading out of order is one of the more common causes of a confusing course structure, since Udemy's builder generally reflects the order you add content in until you manually rearrange it.

Once everything is uploaded, review the factors that affect discoverability — a complete instructor profile, clear course description, and organized curriculum all feed into how Udemy surfaces your course in search and recommendations. A course that's technically finished but thin on these details will struggle to reach students even if the content itself is strong.