Skillshare is the world’s largest online learning community for creativity. Industry experts offer over 30,000 video-based classes in various disciplines, from graphic design to photography, to Skillshare’s more than 12 million registered members. Skillshare’s mission is to support professional and personal growth through creativity. Skillshare recently raised a $66 million Series D funding round to help the company meet the international demand for its enterprise offerings.
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 Challenge
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 initiatives and culture and ensure its platform was built to encourage the success of individuals who learn in different ways. 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 capable of quickly captioning materials and creating a written copy they could use to generate translations for non-native English speakers.
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. We were able to build pop- over videos so you could read the transcriptions and watch our content at the same time. It just works really well.”
The Solution
Verbit provided Skillshare with an automated process built on automatic speech recognition technology and edited by professional transcribers. Verbit also developed an operations process and clear transcription timeline to help Skillshare meet its quality needs and SLA. Threadgill stated that the hallmark of the whole experience was the visuals Verbit provided to users by customizing a pre-built widget to meet Skillshare’s needs and incorporating it into its site. Skillshare’s teachers are excited to unlock these capabilities for their students and said they’re expecting Verbit’s captions and transcripts to lead to more video and class completions. Through this partnership, Skillshare can meet its compliance obligations while promoting its leadership’s values by making courses inclusive for all users.
Verbit offered:
Accessibility expertise: Accurate captions and transcripts to make the platform not only compliant, but more inclusive to all learners’ needs from the get-go
Automation: An API to remove manual tasks and ease the process of captioning thousands of Skillshare’s videos
Improved engagement tools: A combat to video fatigue by providing interactive transcription tools to help learners focus and succeed
Customization & guidance: A dedicated team to address Skillshare’s unique needs
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.”
Susan Threadgill
Product Lead,
Skillshare
“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.”
