Find a local nonprofit or other organization you like and ask them what tech help they need. Many small nonprofits are starving for IT resources, either for financial or cultural reasons.
It's not glamorous, but if you're willing to volunteer your time helping with an org's Wordpress site or making sure everyone is educated about phishing and 2FA, you can make a meaningful impact in your community.
What are you doing to market your courses? Given Udemy's generous split when you drive outside traffic to your courses, it seems like that's super important to make money on the platform.
From http://americangut.org/our-results-so-far/ - "The American Gut project has many more samples representing more groups of people than other studies, such as the Human Microbiome Project, Global Gut, or Personal Genome Project."
No hard numbers on their site, but there's over 7500 contributors on their sample collection kit fundraising page.
The use of teletext news, even among younger people, was a surprising discovery from my time living in Sweden a few years ago. I wrote some observations about it at the time: http://blog.meshul.am/2013/03/05/let-them-read-text/
I just tried this yesterday, but ran into a wall: To transfer USD to GBP, you need to get your bank to initiate an international wire transfer.
If I could remotely trigger a large international wire transfer from my bank, I wouldn't need a 3rd party service.
Living abroad, requests to transfer money are usually met with "just step into a branch and we'll take care of that". But my nearest branch is 2,000 miles away and I'm not planning to step anywhere near there in the next year or so.
The best I've gotten is "then just overnight us a notarized letter", which works, except for the part where Notaries are mostly a US invention so the few existing overseas ones will happily charge you $150 to put their stamp on the document. ... which the bank will then find some tiny flaw with (when the FedEx package trickles through their mailroom a week later) that can be corrected by simply overnighting a new notarized letter.
When I was with a smallish Credit Union (Langley Federal Credit Union) they would just have me write the note out, scan it and email it to them. Then I would call them about an hour later and it was authorized. They did charge a flat $12 fee.
With all due respect, are you sure you're doing it right? The entire raison d'etre of Transferwise is cutting their bank-run international wire transfers out of the loop.
That's how they work everywhere except the US. For us, we have to do a BIC/IBAN transfer to an account in Estonia. (Just re-checked the instructions they mailed me yesterday to verify that's the case.)
If they had a US account you could do with ACH, life would be easy. But they don't.
I used TransferWise to move GBP to EUR. It worked well and was cheaper than the bank, but note that they take slightly more than they need for the transfer to hedge against currency fluctuations, then pay back the extra later. This was annoying as the bank charges me if I go over a certain number of transactions per month.
I recently built an Android app [1] that implements this idea in pretty much the most basic way possible. It just fires a notification at a specified time every day. The notification can link to a URL, which I point to a Google Form for responding to the notification (e.g. "How many pushups have you done today?"). I've been meaning to allow push frequencies other than once-daily, just haven't gotten around to it yet.
It's not glamorous, but if you're willing to volunteer your time helping with an org's Wordpress site or making sure everyone is educated about phishing and 2FA, you can make a meaningful impact in your community.