Skillshare
Skillshare is a site with video courses on a variety of topics: photography, cooking, marketing, programming, foreign languages, and more. Access to the courses is paid, but you do not have to pay for each course individually, but for a subscription to the entire content. That is, in terms of payment, SkillShare is like online movie theaters, like Netflix or AmediaTeka. In my opinion, this is a plus, because it is often better to take a couple or three courses on the same topic.
The courses are built in a format of “video lessons + projects (homework). With video lessons all clear – just a series of videos that need to watch one after another. The interface looks like playlists on YouTube: the list of lessons on the right, the window with the video on the left.
Videos can be sped up and slowed down, there are no subtitles in most courses, but instructors usually speak plain language and quite clearly (especially in language courses).
SkillShare adheres to principles:
courses are short and to the point,
broken down into short lessons,
everything is extremely practical.
This format is especially suitable for all sorts of crafts, arts, like drawing, where you have to watch and repeat. Some authors also publish a series of relatively long (10-20 minutes) lectures, if this format is appropriate in their case.
Projects are homework, exercises, any content or assignments that teachers give to students for independent work. For example, if it is a drawing course, a project might be a drawing. If it’s a writing course, a project is a story or essay. Some courses do not have projects because the subject matter itself does not imply one. For example, projects usually do not exist in marketing courses – this is not the kind of field of study where you can draw/bake something and show it.
Why do we need SkillShare when we have YouTube?
This question begs itself: why pay for SkillShare when there are lessons on YouTube? Personally, I used SkillShare first for free with a promotion and then with a paid subscription. And here’s why I bought the subscription:
YouTube is an entertainment platform after all, not an educational one. There are a lot of distractions like recommendations, sticking to comments, urging you to click the bell 5 times per video, and ads, of course. On SkillShare, it’s like a classroom, all the attention is on learning.
Since I had used the free trial period before, I clearly understood what I was paying for and knew that for me such a product was worth the money.
The platform has an app – a full-fledged mobile version, all the functionality in place (and not much of it). In the app you can save videos for offline viewing, but save within the app, you can not throw away on a flash drive.
The main plus for me is the convenience and “packaged” courses. I often have to re-source something and collect information for a long time by bits and pieces – it’s very tedious. Of course, since the platform is in English, without knowing English there is nothing better than watching English lessons. By the way, I have often mentioned this and will not get tired to mention it: knowledge of English at least at the level of understanding gives great, huge advantages in terms of information accessibility.
Of the disadvantages, I will note that almost anyone can become a teacher on SkillShare, the content there does not have to be super high quality, that is, you can put simply a bad course. That is, bad content is there. However, the top rated content is still of good, sometimes even excellent quality – professionals tell the story, the film is good, and the lessons are relevant and competent. Such courses are watched by thousands of students, they get a lot of likes, comments, and go to the top, while the bad, shoddy courses sit somewhere at the bottom of the rating.