interesting conversation with Skillshare's CEO Matt Cooper on the Trending in Education podcast.
Skillshare is an online education platform with over 5 million users and over 20,000 classes taught by a network of 6,000 teachers across dozens of fields.
Students pay a monthly fee subscription fee of $15 per month ($99 per year) for unlimited access to the courses. They also have about 1,000 free course available on their site.
The courses themselves are mostly short (an hour or less) and include a project that the student is expected to complete. The courses are also vocational in the sense that they teach a specific skill.
Among other points of differentiation, Skillshare has targeted freelancers and independent workers.
This means most of their classes have topics of interest to freelancers interested in learning new business related skills, such as technology, web development and design, creative skills and classes on entrepreneurship.
Key quote from Mr. Cooper from the Fast Company article Skillshare finds its groove by helping freelancers learn:
“In a freelance world you don’t have the same set of resources and structure around you,” says CEO Matt Cooper. “You can’t walk down the hall and ask the subject matter expert how to do something. That’s a gap that we can fill.”
In addition to teaching independent workers and freelancers, Skillshare employs them. All of their teachers are independent workers and Skillshare says the average teacher makes about $3,000 a year, with top earners making as much as $40,000.
The picture below is from Skillshare's site and shows some of the reasons people choose to become teachers on the site.
Other education platforms also employ freelance teachers. For those interested in teaching, The Economics of Teaching in an Online Learning Marketplace provides a nice review of this topic and covers a variety of the online education platforms.
On-demand learning platforms play an important role in helping independent workers (and others) build marketable skills. We believe they will continue to grow in importance in the coming years.
VC firms tend to agree and have heavily funded this sector.
Skillshare, for example, recently raised $28 million. This means even more educational options and support for independent workers.
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