Skillshare Review – Earn from Your Online Course

Technology keeps advancing and bringing with it amazing innovations. One of such innovations is the ease with which you can learn about anything that you wish to know over the internet.

More than that, you may only have to pay just a token for the knowledge. There are many learning sites available where you can enroll to get the knowledge you desire. One of such is Skillshare.

Skillshare is an online course website where you can teach or learn a course of your choice. There are several thousand courses on their website that people subscribe to. You can sign up as a teacher on their website.

On Skillshare, you can produce your courses and earn money when people get your course materials. Skillshare has been in existence since 2010 and is growing its online presence really fast.

How to Make Money on Skillshare

• Whenever you refer someone to the platform through your personal referral link, you are paid a commission of $10
• You can also make money from the platform when people watch your Skillshare classes.

So to earn from Skillshare, you have to keep promoting its platform and also the classes that you hold with them to be able to earn from them. You can also leverage its platform to design your class and learning materials in such a way that you can funnel traffic to your website and email list.

You can create many courses that the students will patronize. You can also become a paid speaker. Skillshare does not have any stringent criteria for joining them.

What Can People Learn on Skillshare?

These courses include:

• Creative topics
• Writing
• Technical subjects
• Business and entrepreneurship
• Accounting and finance
• Lifestyle
• Programming

Skillshare Pricing

Skillshare purchase is by subscription. It costs $8.25 if you wish to pay for one year upfront or $15 if you prefer to pay on a monthly basis. They also have team plans for the company which is at $99 for each user, for a year.

To Sign Up as a Learner

Once you log on to the platform, you sign up by providing your name and setting your password. You may also wish to sign up using your Facebook or Google account.

You get to enjoy a one-month free trial but you will have to give them your card details, so they can deduct from your account when your free trial expires. Once you have subscribed to them, you can select any course of your choice.

When you indicate your areas of interest, Skillshare can recommend appropriate courses from its library of courses.

Use the Reviews

There are so many courses you can choose from on Skillshare. But based on your subjects of interest, you will be given recommendations for a group of courses that can go together. The browse menu at the top left is helpful as you delve into specific topic categories.

There are different courses on Skillshare but the quality of courses differs. You will find the courses to be of good quality; however, you will still find better ones. That is why reading reviews are very important.

When you review the comments on courses offered by different tutors, you will be able to decide on the best one for you. Unfortunately, you can only see the review scores of individual courses.

Sometimes, you can be guided by looking at the number of students that each course has. You can use the bonus subscription to check out the courses. If you are not satisfied with one course, you can try out another.

The Learning Experience

You will find the course content played through a video window. The course is divided into bite-size classes. The courses and duration of each lesson can differ, ranging from a few minutes to several hours.

Below the video window, you will find other information including the instructor’s profile, project details, and links to other information.  Some courses may provide you with very detailed course materials while the materials from other courses may seem scanty.

You may also find some instructors that prefer that you should visit their website before you can receive more instructional materials. In the video player, you can speed up playback and rewind if you need to listen to any part again.

Project and Learner Interaction

Some courses may wish to test you on what you have learned. You may be asked to present something similar to that of your instructor or to other students.

The platform also provides a means of interaction among the students and you will find people liking or commenting on others’ projects.

Workshops

In addition to your courses, you may sometimes have workshops to attend. This increases your mode of study. Such workshops are run at particular times and involve interacting with other learners.

During the course, you are expected to watch the videos and read all instructional materials given to you.

Skillshare Affiliation

Skillshare is an independent institution and has no affiliation with other learning institutions. They also encourage users to share their projects among themselves, so they can gain more knowledge from each other.

Certification

At the end of a course, Skillshare will not issue you a certificate. This makes them different from other platforms like Coursera and eDX that allow their learners to download their certificates and connect to them using their LinkedIn profile.

Skillshare App

You may wish to download the Skillshare app on your mobile device, so you can tune into your learning platform at any time. The app is easy to use and you can use it to follow how you are progressing with the training.

So you can still be enjoying your training as you move around and even carry out some of your activities.

Teach on Skillshare

You can create your lessons and courses and make money through them. You also get paid royalty when users watch your courses. You are paid based on how long users stay on your course. The learners have to have watched your courses for 30 minutes every month. Teachers with Skillshare are paid some money from a royalty pool which is 30% t0 50% what they get from premium membership. On average, a teacher can earn up to $200 a month.

Create Your Course on Skillshare

To create a course on Skillshare, you will need to have a very clear microphone. Your headphones will do, but to give it more clarity, you can use a Blue Yeti USB microphone. It will make your recording seem more professional. Using these tools, you can create very professional courses and earn from them.

You can create your course content and break them into modules and lessons within the modules. There are many topics that you can teach on Skillshare; however, some topics do get more patronage than some others.

You may be teaching on new hobby skills that your learners can acquire. Or some skills that can be of use to them as they seek more knowledge about their profession or as they try to change their profession.

You can look at topics that are trending or are highly-demanding in your area of interest and create courses on them. Such courses usually fetch more earnings as you will find learners available to take them.

Skillshare does regularly update its list of class ideas and then reach out to the teachers through emails to work with their colleagues and to implement such topics and ideas.

Publishing Your Content on Skillshare

When you are set to publish your content on Skillshare, you will need to:

• Upload your videos onto the platform. Make sure your videos are clear, audible, and carefully created
• The title of your video should describe your lesson at a glance, it will be easy to tell what your lesson is about
• Skillshare will automatically add a thumbnail to your video’s cover photo. But you may want to customize them and add images that give a description of the lesson
• The class title should contain the type of keywords that the learners will be searching with regards to that course content. Make the title interesting enough to arouse the curiosity of the learners such that they will be willing and eager to click on the course
• The class description should have an interesting description of what the learners are being offered in terms of what they will be learning from your course and what makes you qualified to teach the course. Sometimes the teachers do add a backlink to the course description that will lead the students to their website, so they can have an insight into what the teacher has to offer
• There has to be a class project as required by Skillshare. You may ask them to write on a topic they have learned, create something similar to what they have been taught, or share their ideas on what they will do to build on a topic that they have learned. Or they may perform simple tasks like drag-and-drop or choose appropriate options. You just need to be creative as you design your class project
• Class type should be set to “premium” so you can get your earning from the minutes of courses watched. You can create an unlimited access link under the promote tab, so you can share it with your friends or non-Skillshare followers
• It is important to indicate the level, so people can know if the course is best suited for beginners, or if it is for intermediate or advanced students.

Service Support from Skillshare

Users on the platform can access their staff whenever they need some help.

Skillshare Recommended Practices

• Skillshare is quite flexible in terms of the kind of courses that can be published on their platform. However, there are guidelines that they expect you to follow as you publish your courses on their platform.
• The courses you teach should be educational courses that can add value to the learners. Your courses should not be promotional and should not contain any get-rich-quick schemes
• Your video content should be as long as 10 minutes or more but not less. You are even allowed to have up to about 60 minutes of video content
• You are also expected to design a class project; through such projects, students will be able to demonstrate their understanding of the course. It does not have to be a complex project but something that can add to the experience of the learners on the platform
• You will also be expected to follow the community guidelines.

Setting Up Your Profile Page

Your profile page should contain your profile photo, your name, title, your profile title, website link, social link, text blurb, and any other relevant content.

Your Skillshare classes will be included at the bottom of your profile and it will show their length, students, and if they are new courses. Your profile page will go a long way in motivating the learners to take your courses.

Promoting Your Skillshare Classes

The number of audiences you have online does not necessarily determine your success on Skillshare; nevertheless, your progress will be fast if you have a good number of followers, so you can, from time to time, remind them to check your Skillshare classes.

As you promote your classes, you will be able to earn money when people watch your videos for long minutes and when you refer people to the platform. You need to use your class referral link to refer.

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Canceling Your Skillshare Subscription

You may be subscribed to Skillshare for as long as you wish but at any point that you desire to cancel your subscription, you can do it by going to the profile icon, next, you go to account settings, select payments, and click on cancel membership.

Conclusion

Skillshare is a platform where you can get access to more than 30,000 courses for a very minimal subscription charge. You may wish to join the platform as a teacher where you can create courses and earn from them. You should give it a try using the free subscription.

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