Get schooled online by celebrities like Steve Martin, Shonda Rhimes
If you learn from the best, you'll become the best. That's the theory, anyway.
The online education site MasterClass is all about finding your inner genius by learning from experts in their fields, even if it is only online. Want to learn tennis via video? Then who could be better than Serena Williams.
While it's not offering extensive coding lectures like Khan Academy, MasterClass has upped their online class offerings with 12 different celebrities in the past year. In March, they announced an acting class with Steve Martin and a few more star-powered courses are on their way.
A one-time $90 fee (per course) gives you access to high-caliber how-tos in filmmaking, cooking, performing, singing, acting, screenwriting, music producing and even film scoring.
Your instructors are none other than Christina Aguilera, Kevin Spacey, Usher, Gordon Ramsay, James Patterson, Dustin Hoffman, Werner Herzog, Aaron Sorkin, Reba McEntire, Hans Zimmer, Deadmau5, and the aforementioned tennis great, Serena Williams.
It's quite the list from the San Francisco-based online learning company, which launched in 2015. It hopes a recent $35 million funding round will also boost awareness of the program.
With the new funding (making a total of $56.4 million already raised), MasterClass has been pushing hard with ads geared towards young professionals on places like Facebook and YouTube.
"We're an online education platform, so most of our advertising is done online," a company spokesman said. "We try to target prospective students who might have an interest in a particular class topic or instructor."
It's unclear how many people are registered for classes, but around a year ago, the company claimed more than 30,000 were signed up with only five classes on offer.
Of course, you aren't actually going to class with Usher to learn "the art of performance" -- only watching a video lesson from him. But still, you can say you learned your moves from Usher.
On Twitter, several people have posted about the classes with good feedback, but as many pointed out, it will sting your wallet. Celebrity time is not cheap, apparently.
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Topics Celebrities
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
