Skip to content

MasterClass – learn a new skill (or maybe 100?)

The education app that enlists celebrities to teach you their craft

It’s a new year. Perhaps it’s time you made good on that promise to learn some new skills? But guitar lessons are expensive, all the local pottery workshops are full, and you haven’t got the time to take that night class on starting a business. Not to mention that pesky pandemic putting all kinds of classes on hold.

Maybe your iPhone can help. There are plenty of educational apps around these days, and they don’t come much bigger than this.

Disclosure: our affiliation with MasterClass means we may receive a commission if you sign up via our link.

MasterClass offers in-depth video lessons from household names on a broad range of subjects. And the expert teachers aren’t D-list duds, either: the service includes Martin Scorsese on filmmaking, Gordon Ramsay on cookery, Margaret Atwood on creative writing, and even Serena Williams on tennis.

You can get acting lessons from Samuel L. Jackson and magic lessons from Penn and Teller. What more do you need to know?!

With a single membership, you can learn about interior design, poker, singing, business leadership, photography, chess, gardening, and even space exploration. There’s an overwhelming amount of knowledge on offer from an impressive array of familiar faces. Whatever your creative itch, MasterClass most likely has a class and a celeb to scratch it for you. And from what we’ve seen of the courses, the production values are way above anything else we’ve tried on the App Store.

Fancy yourself a writer? There’s a successful author for almost every style

Those who love learning new skills will be like a kid in a candy shop here, with nearly 100 classes accessible to members. Membership costs a little more than a standard TV streaming service (around $15/month), but feels much more intimate and worthwhile than a Netflix binge. If you watch even just one class a month, think how much you’ll have grown by the start of next year!

MasterClass

The MasterClass iOS app (free to download) is a great way to consume the classes on the go, but we’d recommend you sign up via the official website rather than the app. MasterClass sometimes runs sales or two-for-one offers online that aren’t accessible to app users, and it’s also possible to gift memberships to others from the site.