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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

#121

Post by rosser »

alexashka wrote: post #107
kirinan wrote: 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 few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly...

The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes.

I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.

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

#123

Post by alexashka »

rosser wrote: post #121
alexashka wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.

"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?"

I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach.

Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.

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

#124

Post by unreal37 »

alexashka wrote: post #123
rosser wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.

"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.

Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees?

People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value.

Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.

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

#125

Post by vtlynch »

unreal37 wrote: post #124
alexashka wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.

Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees? People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value. Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not real…

This comment is a gem. Its not good. But its a gem.

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

#126

Post by megamann »

alexashka wrote: post #123
rosser wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.

"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.

I'm not going to disagree that the free classes from Stanford and MIT aren't better, but I find courses on Lynda, coursea, etc to be easier to swallow with the way they break it down and generally have a better delivery of content. Watching a video of a professor give a lecture is even more stale than sitting in the class and from the few courses I've worked through that's what was offered from the universities.

Also, I'm currently doing the modules on data science on coursea and that is put together by people from John Hopkins. I like this the most because the information is coming from a verifiable good source and in a format that is easy to digest.

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

#127

Post by jonah »

calinet6 wrote: post #21

Congratulations Lynda.com! Story time. When I was in high school, I worked in a little computer lab in my small hometown of Ojai, California, that taught classes in Photoshop, Fireworks, web design and development, Flash, and more. That little technology education company was just called "Lynda," and classes were taught directly by Lynda Weinman, Bruce Heavin, and others. There were maybe ten or twelve employees. I l…

Righton. I was at MetaTools/MetaCreations just down the road in Carpinteria. Lynda ran the Bryce Camp and Painter training courses for us. Some of her very first ones.

The current Lynda.com HQ is now in Carpinteria - right across the highway from the old Meta offices off Bailard Ave.

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

#128

Post by RockyMcNuts »

strictnein wrote: post #79
eli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some certs mean nothing, but some of the MOOCs do apparently earn you some credence. I know the NSA, for instance, regards completing Coursera's Data Science specialization [0] as at least noteworthy enough to mention it in their Data Science job listings. [0] https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1

Strikes me as an R data wrangler certification, not a hard core data science quant / codebreaker, not that there's anything wrong with that.

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

#129

Post by GCA10 »

dd367 wrote: post #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 wha…

Coursera doesn't monetize nearly as well.

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

#130

Post by orionblastar »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #46
eli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My personal opinion is that credentialing is going out of style anyway. Employers want to see what you can do, not where you learned. Put another way -- when's the last time you cared if someone was Microsoft Visual C++ .NET certified?

Back in 2001 I asked my manager about taking Microsoft certified classes to earn a Microsoft developer certificate. He told me it was a waste of time as all of the tests for it are on file sharing networks and Microsoft doesn't change their tests often enough so people study the pirated tests and then pay for the exams and get certified without knowing the material.

At least that was his reason for not supporting me and getting money for me to take classes on it.

I was already a very good Visual BASIC programmer. I earned a reputation for debugging other people's code and fixing databases in SQL Server.

They would have comp sci bachelor of science holders, who could not even program. I had to train them in Visual BASIC to get them started. I only had an Associates because I could not afford a Bachelors.

I take MOOC classes for free, so I don't get certified, but at least I learn new skills.

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