Today, an online course delivery platform Skilljar announced it is accepting Bitcoin for hundreds of online education classes. Now it becomes one of the first online education platforms to integrate digital currency as payment for various courses such as yoga, graphic design, and programming.
“We are a platform that enables companies to deliver online courses directly from their own websites,” said CEO and co-founder of Skilljar Sandi Lin to Cointelegraph. It can be said that Skilljar is similar to Shopify in concept thought it is a unique education delivery platform.
Here are a few examples of courses that are powered by Skilljar today:
The company was founded in 2013 by three former Amazon employees. And now the decision to adopt Bitcoin as a payment method opens doors both for people who wish to pursue higher learning and for online courses looking to recruit new students.
“We’re really excited to accept Bitcoin for our Food Startup Branding classes,” said Danielle Gould, CEO and founder of Food+Tech Connect in the official press release. She added:
“Because our goal is to decentralize and democratize learning, it’s important for us to align ourselves with innovative technologies that share our ethos. Skilljar’s platform has made it very easy.”
Unlike most other platforms and e-commerce sites, Skilljar integrated Stripe's Bitcoin beta program.
“I learned about Stripe's beta program for Bitcoin. We had previously integrated with Stripe for credit and debit card processing, so this meant we could add Bitcoin while also leveraging our existing payments integration. Going through Stripe also means that neither we nor our instructors need to hold Bitcoins directly,” commented Sandi Lin.
- The Skilljar team
The idea to integrate digital currency was also driven by several of Skilljar instructors asked for the feature specifically to adopt Bitcoin. Also, the main features of digital currency here fit perfectly as they can solve problems with currency conversion and fees. Sandi Lin said:
“Our business is very international. Because online courses are a digital product, we have many international instructors and students. So we feel the pain of currency conversion fees on a daily basis.”
Today, no matter where you live you may find something interesting that is worth learning for yourself or, if you’re a teacher, you can even open your own online courses at Skilljar. For centuries education has been one of the biggest influences on progress and development. Now it may become an important aspect for digital currency promotion.
You can watch a short 72 second video about Skilljar's course platform here.