Pros & Cons
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- High-quality lectures and tutorials
- Good focus on learning materials for creatives
- Optional assignments and community interaction
- Some free courses
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- Expensive
- Must pay for a full year; lacks a monthly subscription option
- Can find similar content for free elsewhere
Skillshare Specs
| Some Celebrity Instructors | |
| Some Courses Free | |
| User Created Classes |
Skillshare is a useful educational service that lets you learn creative and artistic skills by watching in-depth video lectures and tutorials. Although specializing in the arts, it also covers career skills related to running a creative business, like marketing and social media. In addition, the excellent online learning tool lets you gain additional knowledge from optional assignments and the thriving community. The downside? Cost. Skillshare is easy to recommend, but for courses that cost less money, you should check out Coursera, Khan Academy, and MasterClass, our Editors' Choice winners for academic, free, and paid online learning, respectively.
Plans and Prices
A Premium Skillshare account costs $167.88 per year with no option to pay monthly. That's a big up-front cost. You can create a free account to watch a very limited course selection, but you need a paid account to get any value out of Skillshare.
It's aggravating that you can't even see the price until you create an account. Likewise, a seven-day free trial (down from 30 days when I last reviewed it) requires an account, not to mention payment information.
A business-grade version, Skillshare for Teams, starts at $199 per person per year, up about 25% since 2022. It has the same courses that Premium members get. The only major difference is that it's designed to be administered centrally across staff. You can fire up Skillshare on the web as well as on Android and iOS devices.
Whenever you consider paying for online learning, you should ask yourself whether you can get the same videos from TikTok, YouTube, or another app for free. Several years ago, Skillshare was better about having exclusive content. Now, I've found some Skillshare classes on YouTube. Skillshare should probably have a stricter contract with its instructors or be more proactive about enforcing content. Finding the same class elsewhere for free devalues the site.
It's difficult to judge the cost of online learning services against one another since they don't all make for apples-to-apples comparisons. One of my favorites, MasterClass, starts at $120 per year and is a much better deal with its celebrity-focused expertise. LinkedIn Learning costs $39.99 per month with a Premium LinkedIn account, although a number of public libraries give patrons free access (don't overlook your library when it comes to free tech resources). Educational site Khan Academy is totally free.
Other sites offering practical skills training, such as Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy, offer some courses for free, while others cost between $40 and $400 per month.
(Credit: Skillshare/PCMag)What Can You Learn Using Skillshare?
Skillshare's courses cover all the fine arts, like drawing and painting by hand. In addition, you can pick up skills in animation, filmmaking, graphic design, music, photography, UI, UX, and web development. More business-oriented classes teach entrepreneurship, leadership, management, and marketing. Lifestyle and productivity get some play, too.
When you set up an account, Skillshare asks you about topics of interest, and it suggests courses to you on your homepage based on what you selected. The search bar does a decent job of unearthing anything else you might want to find.
What Are Skillshare Classes Like?
Classes don't have a fixed format, and the quality and quantity vary. Some courses have a few videos that run about 10 minutes each, while others might have 50 short videos of only one or two minutes each. It all depends on who made them.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of courses: Skillshare Originals, which are those produced by Skillshare, and classes uploaded by individuals. When individuals create a class, they can earn money from it. More on that in a bit.
Some classes have assignments. When that's the case, you're invited to share your creations with other people who have taken the class, usually in a comments section. Some teachers stick around to give feedback on student work or answer questions, which enhances the learning experience. However, other teachers clearly haven't logged onto the site in a long time. Khan Academy lacks this feedback.
Some Skillshare Originals are created with partners, such as Mailchimp (email marketing) and Patreon (crowdfunding). They may have celebrity or semi-celebrity instructors, and the production quality is delightfully 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.
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The best classes from the user-created content are similarly structured: short, sequential, and labeled clearly. Skillshare, the company, says that it audits user-created videos and pulls those that don't meet its quality standards. Regardless, you can tell which ones are good because they get high ratings from other members, and many students sign up for them.
(Credit: Skillshare/PCMag)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 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 With Skillshare
Once you get up and running with an account, you can bookmark classes, follow instructors so you'll know when they upload more classes, and save Learning Paths (multiple courses on the same topic that Skillshare recommends as a set). Your account also saves and keeps track of all the courses you've started and completed.
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 class and teacher descriptions 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.
(Credit: Skillshare/PCMag)The Learner's Perspective
While testing Skillshare, I watched several classes, including courses on interior design, interior styling, memoir writing, personal essay writing, cooking, and job applications.
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.
Some courses, like the ones on interior design, show the instructor talking and feature real-world examples of the points they make. Other courses, like those focused on the art of writing, for example, don't have as much visual interest. You could easily listen to them without watching the screen.
Celebrity courses don't always hit the mark. One on self-care by Jonathan Van Ness from Queer Eye, for example, is entertaining but lacks depth. He touches lightly on many subjects—journaling, skin care routines, decoupage, yoga—but has no real expertise to share about any of them. Skillshare could have done a better job shaping this course into something more specific. That's an area where MasterClass excels. It has plenty of A-list celebrities and people at the very top of their fields, but the crew behind MasterClass clearly goes to great lengths to shape the lesson and make sure there's substance.
(Credit: Skillshare/PCMag)Community Features and Interaction
When courses call for participation, you scroll below the video and join either a class project section or a discussion section. For projects, you usually upload something to share, like a digital drawing you made. Other members 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. Comments tend to be positive, which feels good online but isn't helpful if you're trying to improve your skills. Don't expect to find critical peer analysis.
Skillshare has a section called 1-on-1 where you can find an instructor and pay them for an individual tutoring-type session (the prices vary per instructor). Depending on the topic, you might be signing up for a portfolio review or feedback on your work. A quick browse through some instructor profiles in the Writing and Publishing section didn't instill a lot of confidence. For example, some professionals were selling coaching sessions ("how to chase your dreams as a writer"), while others offered to teach ESL and Urdu. It didn't seem like these people were vetted at all.
(Credit: Skillshare/PCMag)The Teacher's Perspective
With Skillshare, anyone can be a learner, 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 and through royalties.
How much can Skillshare teachers make? The calculation has changed in recent years and is less transparent than before. Skillshare creates a pool of money each month for teacher payouts, which is 20% of membership revenue (down from 30% a few years ago). In addition, the company adds up the number of minutes that paying members watched your videos, though other factors can affect that calculation, such as the geographic location of the learners. Skillshare adds up all the Premium minutes watched for the month and calculates a payout percentage per teacher. Eligible teachers can earn additional money if they have positive engagement from learners, such as receiving a positive student review on one of their classes. See the Skillshare Teacher Handbook for more on creating classes, payment, and other details.