Lynda.com was founded in 1995 and offered free video-based courses to supplement co-founder, Lynda Weinman’s books on web design (“Lynda Weinman,” n.d.). The platform evolved into an online virtual knowledge library where people had access with a monthly subscription fee. In 2015, LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com and rebranded it to “Lynda.com From LinkedIn”. In 2016, Microsoft acquired Lynda.com’s parent company LinkedIn. This acquisition of Lynda.com seems to be driven by LinkedIn’s efforts to excel its growth in the field of online education (Chaykowski, 2016). Although Lynda.com was renamed as LinkedIn Learning, the original website still exists until the full merger is completed.
Depending upon the level of membership, members may take courses in several categories and interests such as accounting, animation, social media, and interactive design. Lynda.com separates itself from a MOOC by offering an option to commit to an entire class on one topic or to select a single video of interest from a library of choices (Porter, 2015). Lynda.com has created “learning pathways” which offer a series of courses that build on knowledge and skills for a specific career path (ie. instructional designer) (Chaykowski, 2016). Upon completion of a pathway, the recipient is awarded a certificate of completion that can be added to the user’s LinkedIn profile (Chaykowski, 2016). The video can be used for more than just interest as they can assist the learner in making a career change.
As of 2019, Lynda.com has more than 236,601 video tutorials and over 7450 courses and has been adopted by colleges, universities, governments, and businesses around the world (Lynda.com, 2019). These numbers suggest a growing use of the platform and have left our team with plenty of questions. To deepen our understanding of this platform, our team is taking a Lynda video course together. We will use an inquiry approach to learning as we view the video courses and experience the learning hands-on (Justice, Rice, Roy, Hudspith, & Jenkins, 2009). The following list of questions generated from our first team meeting is intentionally broad as we did not want to narrow our curiosity in the learning process just yet. Upon completion of watching the curated video and through further research into the literature, we hope to have more answers.
- What are the limitations and advantages of Lynda.com (such as quality, access, bandwidth, interactivity, accessibility, learner engagement)?
- As a predominant training and development force in the e-learning industry, what effects (if any) might Lynda.com have on the way online continuing education evolves in the future, or how this might impact other e-learning providers?
- What is the social-economic accessibility of Lynda.com?
- How can Lynda.com videos be used for a flipped classroom? Is there any research available to support this?
- Does the design of the Lynda.com videos and courses follow research on how to reduce cognitive load, promote active learning and engage students (length, style, interactivity, the balance of audio and visual element)?
- How well are the videos optimized for accessibility? Do they follow inclusive design best practices?
- Who are the “experts” presenting the videos; is there a requirement to produce these videos? Are they credible?
- How does Lynda.com ensure the video content continues to be relevant? Who creates/writes the content? How frequently is the video content re-evaluated?
- How is learning assessed on Lynda.com?
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References
Hogle, P. (2017, March 22). Six reasons to incorporate curated content into elearning development.
Justice, C., Rice, J., Roy, D., Hudspith, B., & Jenkins, H. (2009). Inquiry-based learning in higher education: administrators’ perspectives on integrating inquiry pedagogy into the curriculum. Higher education, 58(6), 841-855.
Lynda.com. (2019). All Courses | lynda.com. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.lynda.com/allcourses
Lynda Weiman. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 13, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynda_Weinman
Porter, J. (2015, April 27). From near failure to a $1.5 billion sale: The epic story of Lynda.com.
Thanks for sharing your questions Team Lynda, I am genuinely curious to see how you address them and what answers you come up with. I wonder if you had considered looking at the way people use Lynda. I have personally been using it for many years, but I have never completed a full course; instead a use it as a just-in-time resource. I use it mostly for software related questions, but I can often find a short video which answers my question, and the curated content means I find quality answers much faster than conducting a google search.
It is an interesting direction you mentioned, Jessica. Your insight is valuable and aligns with my (Beata) experience how my students (and myself) use the video library. A key strength of the Lynda.com video repository is that it is easily searchable, allowing users to locate relevant courses and video segments according to their topics of interest (Morin, 2017). The contents menu, with its segment titles and durations, provides a great mechanism to identify and select specific video segments, so we don’t need to watch an entire 3-hour course. I have not come across any usage report other than a short video by the original owner Lynda Weinman (which I am not able to locate now) describes that the courses are intentionally designed to have a few or a lot of short length videos to allow to watch only individual ones. Lynda Weinman’s description is supported by literature where the positive effects of scaffolding are described. According to Cojean & Jamet, (2018) scaffolding helps the information seeking process. The Lynda.com courses by using a table of contents and identifying the different chapters and providing meaningful video titles allow information to be located more easily (Cojean & Jamet, 2018).
References
Cojean, S., & Jamet, E. (2018). The role of scaffolding in improving information seeking in videos. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 34(6), 960–969. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12303
Morin, J. C. (2017). Flipping the classroom with Lynda.com. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 16(4), 627–629. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2017.0283
(Copied over from earlier team blog.) Good idea to start your exploration from an open-minded stance and let your curiosity run for a while. Your questions range from practical (1) to speculative (2), to social justice (3) and so on – this sequence will give you a good range of options to delve into further as you take the course. Eventually you’ll want to home in on a few or connect them together and see how they play out in a selected course.
As an additional possible line of inquiry, Lynda.com of course is a proprietary system and, as you note, connected to LinkedIn and owned by Microsoft. These connections are part of a business strategy to connect skills, employers, job seekers and learning opportunities. A critical inquiry approach could be enhanced with one of the angles being the big-picture taking shape with Lynda.com. Is Lynda.com a representative example of curated content, or is it something at least somewhat different? If so, what is the difference and why should we be interested? Some education jurisdictions and institutions are using Lynda.com as replacement for or supplement to internal training in such areas as office software or media development, to give two examples. How is it becoming “online education” (Chaykowski, 2016) – i.e. is it aiming to become not just a training supplement for HR or IT departments in institutions, but a full-on online course provider?