CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Skillshare

In a Nutshell

Skillshare has been working with Verbit since 2018, but has now doubled down on its commitments to inclusivity and accessibility, shifting its captioning business to Verbit in full. Skillshare has implemented Verbit as an integral part of its platform to provide better usability capabilities to its teachers and students, while offering additional tools that help international learners. Providing captions and an interactive transcript widget for every class is improving the student experience and adoption of the Skillshare platform, as well as ensuring courses meet ADA regulations.

The Challenges

At the beginning of the year, a small percentage of Skillshare’s content had captions, which limited the amount of classes certain individuals could take. Skillshare’s team wanted to place accessibility at the forefront of its culture and ensure its platform encouraged the success of individuals who learn differently. Skillshare needed an efficient solution to caption all of its existing content without the need for manual effort. Additionally, the company was focusing more on internationalization, with almost half of its students being based outside of the US. Skillshare needed a trusted partner to help quickly caption more materials and provide a written source to be used to generate translations from in order to help non-native English speakers.

Quick captioning and transcription of thousands of videos

Tools designed to meet student accessibility needs

Engagement tools to help international and remote viewers

A partner to provide guidance and customized tools

Susan Threadgill

Product Lead, Skillshare

"I truly believe we have the best-in-class transcription experience right now when I look across the board to all of our competitors. It's clean. It's visually user-friendly. It's responsive, having the ability to search for content within a video or click to the place. It just works really well.”

The Solution

Accessibility expertise
Accurate captions and transcripts to make the platform compliant and inclusive to all learners

Improved engagement tools
Providing interactive transcription tools to combat video fatigue and help learners focus

Automation
An API to remove the manual work of captioning thousands of Skillshare’s videos

The Results

Accessibility For All Learners

“Our main focus this year is around making sure that the learning experience is accessible to everybody. We really wanted to ensure that all of our content had captions. So if you’re hard of hearing or deaf, or if English is your second language, or maybe you just learn better by reading along vs. listening, you’re able to use captions and transcripts.”

Meeting International Student Needs

“We have a global audience… With everything captioned, we can now offer translations of that content as well. We don’t really have a lot of courses today that are taught in a language other than English, so now that’s kind of opened up the door.”

Captioning Content Bulks Quickly

“We have 25,000+ classes. We’re continuously adding more all the time. [The process] had to be automated. We’re really excited to know that Verbit had an API that we could actually use so that we could really kind of build out this automation pipeline for us.”

Increased Engagement & User Satisfaction

“We learned really early on that adding transcripts is a really big value add to increase engagement and overall user satisfaction. So it just became a win-win no-brainer there when we learned that.”

“Online learning and remote education is going to be much more visually heavy, but that doesn’t always work for everybody’s learning styles. You really unlocked this new learning area for our students so that we can just be a more inclusive and accessible platform.” – Susan Threadgill, Product Lead, Skillshare

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