Skillshare now gives users skill set badges with its new redesign

The Web has brought human beings together in a tremendously powerful way. We’re connecting all the time. We’re tweeting, poking, emailing and Skyping. But one New York City based startup has taken it to the next level of higher learning. Launched in April 2011, Skillshare is a community marketplace that enables users to learn anything from anyone. The company wants to close the “skills gap” in society by allowing people to share their skills and knowledge with their peers.

We interviewed the founder of Skillshare, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, better known as “Mike K”, in our feature piece How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education. We asked him how he envisions the future of education:

He said: “Technology has the opportunity to completely disrupt education by democratizing learning. There’s something fundamentally wrong when a college degree can cost upwards of $100,000 when all of the information can be learned for free on Khan Academy. We need to go back to the true goal of education: learning new skills.”

In the past 7 months, Skillshare has been listening to its community and working on a new experience that better emphasizes the diverse collection of skills and passions of that community. Today, Skillshare unveiled a new site design that makes it easier to find the kinds of classes and teachers that you’re looking for as well as a new, profile design with skill oriented badges.

The Learn section has been redesigned for vertical browsing so it’s easier to discover classes that match the categories and skill sets that you’re interested in. To see classes from other cities, just hit the Change City drop down.

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Profiles received a major revamp. Each profile now features a collection of skill sets so you’ll be able to tell exactly what types of skills a person can teach or what a user is passionate about learning. The new profiles also include stats to show the number of hours learned and taught by skill set. For teachers, you’ll see how many students they’ve taught and recommendations they’ve received. Lastly, each profile is verified by social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Check out Jeff Ramos’ profile below:

Want to know more about Skillshare? Also read about how Skillshare helped raise over $20,000 for hackNY.