Udemy is a very well-known online learning platform. It contains thousands upon thousands of courses, covering any subject imaginable. And this is why many people go there to improve their professional skills.
As a software developer, I have used Udemy quite a lot, both as a student and as an instructor. I have published a number of coding courses on the platform. And it is indeed a great platform for both publishers and students.
However, I have recently discovered a smaller online learning platform – Skillshare. Although it is not well-known as Udemy, it has some distinct advantages over it. In this post, I will cover those.
No need to buy courses
There are quite a lot of free courses on Udemy. However, most of those neither teach you the subject in depth nor provide any information beyond what you could have easily found just by googling.
If you want to learn something genuinely useful, you will have to buy some premium courses. Unfortunately, each course is sold to you individually. So, if you are interested in 20 different premium courses, you will have to pay 20 times.
Not so with Skillshare. You still have an option of accessing free courses. Fort those, all you have to do is register on the website. And, just like with Udemy, most of the courses are premium. However, how you pay for them, is completely different.
On Skillshare, all you need to do is pay a subscription fee. The amount of the fee depends on whether you choose to pay it monthly or annually. However, even if you opt for the most expensive option, it will still be well less per month than a price of an average premium course on Udemy.
And, as long as you are paying for your subscription, you won’t have to pay a penny extra. All courses become available to you for free, regardless whether they are premium or not. And it doesn’t matter how many of those courses you then consume. The subscription fee remains the same.
Vigorous manual review process
The problem with Udemy is that anyone can post a course there, as long as it meets the minimum criteria in terms of video resolution and audio quality. And nobody verifies whether the content itself is good enough. This is why you can find many courses on Udemy that won’t give you much in terms of useful knowledge.
On Skillshare, each published class (this is what courses are known as) gets reviewed by a human. And the reviewers are pretty strict about the quality standards of the content.
They run a three strike system and if you, as a publisher, accumulate three strikes, you are banned from the platform. And you can get a strike for having videos without much value in terms of the content or for not having a well-defined class project.
So, even though there are fewer courses on Skillshare than there are on Udemy, the ones on Skillshare are often of a much better quality.
Project-based learning
While on Udemy a course format can be absolutely anything, the Skillshare instructors are forced to base each of their classes around an assignment, which in Skillshare terms is known as a “project”.
Each course page has a detailed description of what students are expected to complete if they are to follow the instructions outlined in the video lectures. And the description is always easy to follow; otherwise the instructor gets a strike. And the students are asked to submit their work once the project is completed.
So, on Skillshare, each class is almost guaranteed to be engaging and immersive, while it’s not necessary the case on Udemy. Many Udemy courses are just collections of dry facts presented by someone explaining them in monotonous voice. They don’t instruct you on how to actually practice what they taught you. So, even though you’ve spent time watching videos, it will be easy to forget all the information afterwards.
Focusing on one module at a time
On Udemy, courses can be of a various size. Some are just over half an hour, while others can be as big as 16 hours.
Skillshare uses the concept of classes rather than courses. Each class focuses on a single part of a wider subject and is usually no more than an hour and a half.
This, together with the guaranteed assignment, ensures that you would gain a good understanding of a particular subject if you complete the course. And, if you want to learn more, you can simply take the next class. After all, it’s all already paid for.
You can try Skillshare for free for two months
Perhaps the best thing about Skillshare is that it offers its users premium membership completely free of charge for entire two months.
Since Skillshare is not as big as some other learning platforms, you may still be reluctant about paying for its subscription. What if you are only interested in a niche area that doesn’t have that many courses? In this case, you would end up paying the subscription fee for something that you aren’t using, regardless of how low the fee is.
However, when you can access all of its premium content for free for entire two months, it’s a completely different ball game. You can find out for yourself how useful Skillshare is without paying a penny. So, it’s completely risk-free.
And to find out how awesome Skillshare is, you can subscribe for it right here: