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

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

#111
post #5

This is a pretty interesting acquisition. Linkedin is trying to position themselves as a full service job market. If you want a particular job, go to Linkedin and even if you are missing a few skills you can pick it up on their site and get "Linkedin Certified". This provides Linkedin with a series of "Linkedin Certified Professionals" that recruiters need to pay to get access to. It's an interesting position to be i…

It's quite terrible, I mean, amazing for Lynda :) Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinking ship. The 'one-stop for all your learning needs' is simply a bad model - all programmers know this. You have to go and seek out different resources that work for you and now we CAN, more than ever. The only reason to choose Lynda is out of ignorance or lazine…

I would see Lynda as being more valuable for specific software packages like Adobe Illustrator. Videos teaching programming don't really fit my learning model. I really need to build and tweak to learn. A walkthrough like on video seems better suited to software packages.

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

#112
post #5

This is a pretty interesting acquisition. Linkedin is trying to position themselves as a full service job market. If you want a particular job, go to Linkedin and even if you are missing a few skills you can pick it up on their site and get "Linkedin Certified". This provides Linkedin with a series of "Linkedin Certified Professionals" that recruiters need to pay to get access to. It's an interesting position to be i…

I've heard a few Jeff Weiner speeches, and he's very big about connecting and improving human capital. This is him putting his money where his mouth is.

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

#113
post #5

This is a pretty interesting acquisition. Linkedin is trying to position themselves as a full service job market. If you want a particular job, go to Linkedin and even if you are missing a few skills you can pick it up on their site and get "Linkedin Certified". This provides Linkedin with a series of "Linkedin Certified Professionals" that recruiters need to pay to get access to. It's an interesting position to be i…

It's quite terrible, I mean, amazing for Lynda :) Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinking ship. The 'one-stop for all your learning needs' is simply a bad model - all programmers know this. You have to go and seek out different resources that work for you and now we CAN, more than ever. The only reason to choose Lynda is out of ignorance or lazine…

> what has Lynda got to offer?

Lots of practical vocational skills that fill in the gaps of an academic track.

> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda?

Depends on how diverse said programmer would like to be. Maybe there's a tidbit about being a real estate broker or plumber or data-entry drone that some working programmer re-maps to a problem they've been chewing on for months.

My $0.02: Being open to new experiences and having an always-on learning POV goes a long way to fertilize success.

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

#114
I'm 100% sure LinkedIn probably offered to buy Coursera at a similar price: 1. A lot of Coursera's engineers are LinkedIn veterans. 2. Coursera is arguably a much better quality and more highly regarded education platform than Lynda. 3. Coursera certifications were something LinkedIn and Coursera were actively working on.

I would imagine that Coursera refused because their vision of education is much broader than what they might have been able to achieve within LinkedIn. What do you guys think?

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

#115
post #5

This is a pretty interesting acquisition. Linkedin is trying to position themselves as a full service job market. If you want a particular job, go to Linkedin and even if you are missing a few skills you can pick it up on their site and get "Linkedin Certified". This provides Linkedin with a series of "Linkedin Certified Professionals" that recruiters need to pay to get access to. It's an interesting position to be i…

It's quite terrible, I mean, amazing for Lynda :) Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinking ship. The 'one-stop for all your learning needs' is simply a bad model - all programmers know this. You have to go and seek out different resources that work for you and now we CAN, more than ever. The only reason to choose Lynda is out of ignorance or lazine…

Exactly.

Take is as someone who has been teaching himself how to code, Lynda, Codecademy, even Udacity are not going to cut it. These are good if you want to play at coding. But if you want to do anything serious, you'll have to check out actual lecture videos and books.

For example, I was trying to figure out linked lists and the best resources were either from solo Youtubers, or a couple of videos uploaded by MIT and IIT (in India)

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

#116
post #96

What can be LinkedIn's take on this?

From LinkedIn's conference call: Strategic rationale: - Believes that the acquisition of lynda.com will be an important step to fulfilling LinkedIn's vision of developing an "economic graph" - Views lynda.com as essential for professionals to advance their skill sets - Believes that acquisition of lynda.com will expand the addressable opportunity by 30B into corporate employee education and professional certification…

What's good StreetAccounts highlights

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

#117
post #5

This is a pretty interesting acquisition. Linkedin is trying to position themselves as a full service job market. If you want a particular job, go to Linkedin and even if you are missing a few skills you can pick it up on their site and get "Linkedin Certified". This provides Linkedin with a series of "Linkedin Certified Professionals" that recruiters need to pay to get access to. It's an interesting position to be i…

It's quite terrible, I mean, amazing for Lynda :) Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer? It's a sinking ship. The 'one-stop for all your learning needs' is simply a bad model - all programmers know this. You have to go and seek out different resources that work for you and now we CAN, more than ever. The only reason to choose Lynda is out of ignorance or lazine…

I take statistical mechanics classes for fun on Coursera. I learn what Powerpoint buttons to push to make an animation from Lynda. I do not ever in my life want to spend ten weeks listening to lectures about Powerpoint. I want to get my Powerpoint crap done as fast as possible, and Lynda is pretty useful for those job skills.

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

#118

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 w…

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.

Wait until you start seeing neverending Lynda.com spam now. "Your LinkedIn contact checked out a new course", or something similar

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

#119
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you had a Server 2000 MCSE on your CV right now, Why? It would show strength and background of your past and history.

"Server 2000,2003,2007,2013 MCSE" or such, would show continuous strength.

Yes, but that is different than the argument that was made.
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