Using Skillshare for Homeschool Electives
Skillshare is an educational platform where students can watch videos on a wide variety of subjects. Skillshare's focus is on having industry professionals make videos about how to do things relevant to their industry. Because they are professions working in the field, many of them are experts on the subject matter that they are teaching.
Rather than paying per class, students sign up for a monthly subscription. The subscription, then, gives them access to the many thousands of classes available on the platform. Currently, the subscription price is $15 per month.
Skillshare does offer some free classes. In 2019, there were 2000 free ones. But as is the case with most of these types of subscription services, they give you free ones to get you interested so you will buy a subscription. The free ones are good. But, let's face it, the paid ones are much better.
Classes are not accredited, and most do not have any type of Certificate of Completion. Rather, they are simply designed to give students access to information that they might not find elsewhere.
One of the assets of having a Skillshare subscription is that it isn't just for the students. Parents can also find all sorts of videos about things that may be of interest. And since families pay only the monthly subscription price to access as many videos as they like per month, there isn't an extra charge for the parents to watch too.
Skillshare's subscription renewal is "ongoing", meaning that it automatically renews every month until you stop it. We did not have any trouble at all stopping our subscription, though, when we tried it. So, this should not be a concern.
As of 2019, there were 27,000 classes available on Skillshare, with instructors from all over the world. As you can imagine, not everyone who signs up to be an instructor is an expert in the field or is a working professional in that field. Skillshare has to take their word for it. So, not all the classes carry the same value. However, we have seen enough be impressed by the quality of the service. If one class isn't as good, just go to another one.
Skillshare allows you to select videos you want to watch and place them in an area personalized to you. That way, you can find them quickly when you want to watch them. When we used Skillshare to homeschool, we went through and picked out videos and watched them, and if we wanted our students to see them, we put them in our Video Choice area. Then, when the student went into Skillshare, we simply told them to select the video from that area. It worked very well.
Many of the videos are structured around the completion of a particular project, like an art project. So, they are great for things like Art class.
Skillshare would not be acceptable in place of a homeschooling curriculum for major classes, but they make a great "add-on" to classes to give the class something extra. And, they very good for elective classes such as Art.
With so many video choices, it is not surprising that you can find videos on just about anything craft or tech related. There are even videos that show how to do many folk crafts that have been lost through the years and crafts from foreign countries.
We highly recommend Skillshare for use as an Add-on to classes and for use in electives, such as Art, Music, and Home Ec.
You can find their website at www.skillshare.com.
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