You know the saying, “Never stop learning.” Skillshare, a website where you can learn any number of skills by watching video lecture series, helps you make good on that goal. A couple of years ago, Skillshare shifted its focus to teaching skills for creative types, and it now offers a world of educational content that can benefit your career, indulge your hobbies, or simply help you accomplish something new. Many of the courses have additional materials, like worksheets and readings, plus interactive community spaces where students can share their work and give each other feedback. It doesn’t cost much, either. Skillshare is an Editors’ Choice pick for online learning services.
While Skillshare is a fun place to feed your brain, it might not have the kinds of courses you’re looking for. If you’re after inspirational words and advice from people at the very top of their fields, MasterClass is better. Comparing MasterClass and Skillshare isn’t an apples-to-apples affair, though. If you need to study more traditional academic topics, like trigonometry and organic chemistry, Khan Academy is the way to go. Both of these services are also Editors’ Choices winners.
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Skillshare offers a free version with a limited selection of courses. As of this writing, a Premium membership costs $167.88 per year. You won’t see the price until you create an account and choose to upgrade, however, and people in some markets outside the US may see much lower pricing. Skillshare also offers accounts Teams accounts for groups, which cost $159 per person per year.
There’s a 30-day free trial of the Premium version but you have to have an account and add your payment information to get it.
The free version gives you access to a small selection of video classes and their related content, such as PDF workbooks and community discussions. You can watch the intro video of any class, but you’re locked out of most of them, otherwise. In testing, I found it difficult to determine which classes were available to free users, which was disappointing.
A Premium membership unlocks the entire catalog of courses and lets you download classes to the Skillshare mobile app to watch offline. When you pay for the annual membership, you get perks from affiliates, too, such as discounts on Adobe software, Squarespace subscriptions, Society6 goods, and more.
Skillshare Teams is the same as a Premium annual subscription in terms of access, but it’s designed for organizations who want to administer Skillshare accounts for their staff or members.
How Much Do Other Learning Sites Cost?
The cost of online learning is all over the map, with prices changing all the time. Skillshare’s current price is fair, though we would prefer if Skillshare offered a monthly subscription option, rather than just the annual one.
By comparison, MasterClass starts at $180 per year with no option for a monthly subscription either. LinkedIn Learning costs $29.99 per month or $239.88 per year. Khan Academy is totally free. It’s a nonprofit organization, and you can donate to the site if you want to support it monetarily.
Other sites that offer more practical skills training, such as Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy, offer some courses for free while others cost anywhere from $40 to $400 per month.
Let’s look at what Skillshare has to offer. The site broadly lumps classes into three categories: Create, Build, and Thrive.
Create has subtopics for creators of all stripes: animators, creative writers, filmmakers, artists, graphic designers, illustrators, musicians, photographers, UI and UX designers, and web developers.
Build has subtopics related to business: analytics, freelance and entrepreneurship, leadership and management, and marketing.
Thrive only has two subtopics at the moment: lifestyle and productivity.
Use the search bar to check for classes that don’t obviously fit into these categories. Take the topic of cooking, for example. Skillshare has plenty of classes on cooking, but you might not know it from these three categories.
Classes don’t have a fixed format. Some contain a handful of videos that run about 10 minutes each. Other classes have 50 short videos of only one or two minutes each. Some classes have assignments. When that’s the case, learners share their creations with other people who have taken the class, usually in a comments section for the course. Some teachers stick around to give feedback on student work or answer questions, while others clearly haven’t logged onto the site in a long time.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of courses: Skillshare Originals and classes that are created by individuals. When individuals create a class, they can earn money from it. More on that in a bit.
Skillshare Originals are courses produced by Skillshare. Some are cocreated with partners, like Mailchimp, Patreon, and Eataly. They may have celebrity or semi-celebrity instructors, and the production quality is guaranteed to be high. An Original class almost always contains several videos of about 8 to 10 minutes each, clearly labeled and meant for you to watch in order. Because the videos are fairly short, you can watch them in fits and starts, pausing and resuming the class as needed. This structure making it possible to set your own pace.
To be fair, the best classes from the user-created content are similarly structured: short, sequential, and labeled clearly. Since we first began reviewing Skillshare, the company has started auditing user-created videos and pulling those that don’t meet Skillshare’s quality standards. There are still hundreds of classes on the service. You can tell which ones are good because they get high ratings from learners and many students sign up for them.
While you, the learner, may never know how much work went into creating a class, the best ones clearly follow a detailed outline but don’t force the instructor to read word-for-word from a script. The best instructors know where the lesson is going and can take you there in an authentic way. It’s a far superior structure to the scripted style of most classes on LinkedIn Learning, where all too many instructors have an overly corporate and sometimes robotic stage presence.
Getting Started
To use Skillshare, you create an account and choose some areas of interest so the site can suggest classes.
You can find classes by browsing topics, checking out recommended or trending classes, or using the search bar. When you find an interesting course, you can bookmark it to watch later. Your account saves and keeps track of all the courses you bookmark, and you can organize them into playlists.
When you click to enter a course, you see the video player at the center, a list of all the videos in the course to the right, and a complete description of the class and teacher below the player. You can also see how many students have expressed interest in the class. Skillshare members can rate videos overall and indicate whether they’re suitable for beginners, people with experience, or people at all levels.
The Learner’s Perspective
I watched several classes while testing Skillshare, including courses on interior design, interior styling, memoir writing, personal essay writing, cooking, applying for jobs, and more.
You can turn on closed captioning, speed up or slow down the video playback speed, pause, skip ahead, go back, and so forth. When videos are short and have accurate titles, you can easily jump back and rewatch a particular moment from the course.
The interior design class was thorough and well-produced. The instructor used very short videos, which were labeled clearly and sequenced appropriately. She wore a lavalier microphone on her shirt and filmed the class with a good camera. She combined shots of her speaking about interior design principles with example images of designed rooms. This instructor provides some neat resources, too, such as apps and websites for virtually designing rooms and exploring color palettes.
Among the writing courses, Roxane Gray’s on essay writing, Ashley C. Ford’s on personal nonfiction writing, and Mary Karr’s on memoirs were all fantastic. Except for a few cutaways to book covers and websites, almost all of these three classes consisted entirely of the writer talking.
A new course on self-care by Jonathan Van Ness, best known from the television show Queer Eye, is entertaining to watch. The content doesn’t go deep into one specific area, the way many of the other classes do, but rather touches on many subjects, including journaling, skin care routines, decoupage, and yoga. The content is all very watchable, but it lacks depth. Skillshare could have done a better job shaping this course into something more specific. That’s an area where MasterClass excels. It has A-list celebrities and people at the very top of their fields teaching you about their fields with great depth and detail.
Community Features and Interaction
When courses call for learner participation, you can usually join by looking at the discussion area below the video. Often you see instructions for what to share, such as pictures from a room you redesigned or a personal essay. Other learners can then comment on your work. People seem to follow an unspoken rule on Skillshare: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. All the comments we saw were positive and seemed to show students in good spirits. That type of feedback is less effective than deep, critical analysis, but it’s something.
If you want more interaction and community engagement, you can try Skillshare Workshops. Workshops are classes that involve more structure and community involvement. They run between set dates and generally have a timeline and deadlines that students should follow. There isn’t anything magical separating Workshops from other classes, unless having deadlines and a community of other students motivates you to follow through and do the work.
Some of Skillshare’s non-workshop classes come with projects anyway, which are developed by the instructor. They’re entirely optional. Other students who take the class can’t see that you watched the class videos but didn’t participate; that’s true of Workshops as well.
The amount of participation varies dramatically. In the writing classes, for example, many students uploaded essays. In a sewing machine class, however, no one posted pictures of their sample projects. A Workshop about watercolor painting had a healthy amount of activity, though much of it was from a Skillshare community manager or students posting about how much they love watercolors.
What I didn’t find were debates about the theory behind or purpose of the topics themselves. In other experiences with academic online learning, instructors are always trying to get students to help each other learn by fostering deeper discussions. Why do we do what we do? Is this the best method and why? What are the shortcomings of this process or school of thought? That’s not the realm of Skillshare. MasterClass has glimmers of it, but there it comes from the instructors, not the learners.
The Teacher’s Perspective
With Skillshare, anyone can be a learner or teacher (or both). Teachers are responsible for every aspect of their course, from designing it to uploading videos and materials. Teachers who host courses on Skillshare earn money by referring students and other teachers, as well as through royalties.
How much can Skillshare teachers make? According to the company, the royalties calculation works like this: First, Skillshare creates a pool of money each month for royalties, which is 30% of the Premium membership revenue. Second, Skillshare adds up the number of minutes that Premium members (both paying and those on the free trial) watched your videos. You must have at least 30 Premium minutes watched across all your videos to qualify for royalties each month. When students increase the playback speed, it decreases the time watched; if a learner plays a 10-minute video at 2x speed, the teacher earns five minutes. Finally, Skillshare adds up all the Premium minutes watched for the month and calculates a percentage per teacher. If a teacher gets 1% of all minutes watched, they get 1% of the royalty pot.
See the Skillshare Teacher Handbook for more on creating classes, payment, and other details.
Indulge Your Creative Skills
Skillshare lets you dabble in new skills, and you might even find some classes that challenge you in meaningful ways. It’s better than it used to be, in terms of quality control and focus. Its focus has changed to skills for creative people, including business development, using software, and memoir writing. Skillshare’s great range of content makes it easy to recommend to anyone looking to learn new skills or sharpen existing ones. It’s an Editors’ Choice winner for online learning.
As for other online learning services, MasterClass and Khan Academy are both Editors’ Choice winners, too. MasterClass is best for inspiration and advice, while Khan Academy excels for academic learning.
