LinkedIn to Buy Online Education Site Lynda.com for $1.5B

They could very well partner. Let's say you are a recruiter looking for someone who knows machine learning and is based (or wiling to move to) a certain place. A quick search on linkedin and you are shown, amongst others, all the candidates who completed the Machine Learning course on Coursera and match your location criteria. And the other way works as well: if you completed an online course and tell linkedin about it, it can indicate you positions in your area were your new skills could be useful.

I think this is exactly right. If you look at what's going on at education in general right now, "credentialing" is one of the top challenges for education startups. Particularly for MOOCs but also for bootcamps. How are hiring managers supposed to know which certificates mean something or which classes actually teach people something? LinkedIn's revenue right now is all about services to make recruiting easier.

As an outsider looking in, LinkedIn's purchase of Lynda.com looks like an odd duck in comparison to their previous acquisitions[1].

As far as I can tell, the Lynda.com brand name isn't that well known outside of tech circles. (Virtually all of their courses are Adobe, Microsoft Office, and web development, etc) I'm guessing those computer courses are relevant to less than 5% of LinkedIn's user base. It was very recently (last year or so) that Lynda started doing more business courses[2] (how to calculate ROI, how to write a business plan, etc) Since those business courses are probably their thinnest and weakest offerings, I can only speculate that it was a partly a "proof-of-concept" to show a prospective acquirer (such as LinkedIn) the breadth of topics the content platform could deliver.

In that case, LinkedIn is really buying Lynda's content delivery platform (the technology) as opposed to seeing value in the existing portfolio of courses (the copyrights).

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. I'm somewhat saddened that a controversial company like LinkedIn (UI dark patterns, creepy privacy invasions) was the one who bought them. I would have preferred a company like github (synergy with code sharing) or Apple (enhance iTunesU) to do it. Unfortunately, github doesn't have the cash/stock and Apple is busy with more grandiose plans.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn#Acquisitions

[2]http://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-training-tutorials/484-...

This, to me, is terrible news. I am a big fan of Lynda.com. They've always had a great library (both for tech' stuff but are also one of few sites that offer non-tech video training (business courses, photography, etc) and their prices were always very reasonable.

LinkedIn can only make the site worse as far as I am concerned, and I already avoid LinkedIn due to the fact that they've essentially become spammers who work to allow other spammers to spam you. That's all they are, a giant spam platform at this point.

So too bad about Lynda. It will be greatly missed (by me).

Totally agree. I simply cannot see Lynda.com's current (amazing) setup blending well with LinkedIn. Lynda.com is going the way of the History Channel.