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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by gutnor »

loco5niner wrote: post #119
gohrt wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Actually that is spot on. The problem of the line is that it shows something positive ( got a cert 14 years ago ), but also something negative ( there have been 4 generations of servers in the meanwhile, where are the cert )

Obviously that is easy to explain in an interview, the problem is getting the interview in the first place. Resume are not analysed, they are scanned by irrational human, sensible to effect similar to https://xkcd.com/641/

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

#143

Post by rosser »

mason240 wrote: post #139
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.

Why would people not interested in technology want to learn programming?

Lynda offers courses in many things besides programming.

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

#144

Post by rtpg »

whatok wrote: post #85
rtpg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lynda.com courses aren't like MOOCs. They're not classes on theory, but rather condensed practical things, to get you up and running quickly. They're really aimed at working people catching up on new tech/learning the bases of new skills. I do recommend the service if you want to figure out how to get started quickly with things like final cut or whatnot. It's realllly high quality stuff condensed into 2h or so

I realize what Lynda courses are like and have done some in the past which is why I mentioned the "learn how to do x" concept in my post. Other non-traditional MOOC services offered by non-college institutions have a lot of programs mirroring or closely resembling the Lynda approach. There's also zero reason why Coursera and the like would not be able to pivot into this area.

Ah, sorry, I misread how you wrote that.

My impression has been that Coursera is really about applying Socrate's (or is it Aristotle's) dream: free classical education for all.

Learning about Final Cut Pro is great, but getting classes on general machine learning ( at least ones that are worth more than a 2000 word blog post) generally require going to a school with a 5 digit price tag. I think Coursera and Lynda aren't trying to compete with each other on that end.

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

#145

Post by sels »

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…

Next step LinkedIn University.

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

#146

Post by dougbarrett »

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…

Fellow Ojai native as well! Where was this computer lab you worked at? I knew Lynda was based up in the Santa Barbara area, but didn't know it had it's roots in Ojai, very cool to see!

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

#147

Post by aikah »

Zelphyr wrote: post #89
aikah wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Daphne Koller must be happy today, this is a huge validation for Coursera business model. makes no sense. It would be like saying Facebook success validates Twitter business model, just because they are both social networks. Lynda doesn't issue certificates if you complete their courses. And AFAIK they don't work directly with universities or colleges. Coursera content is academic, while Lynda.com is practical and…

From a business standpoint it makes total sense. Investors see Coursera and Lynda as being in the same or similar market so Lynda getting bought helps them clarify the valuation of Coursera if its for sale . If Coursera has taken investment money then it is for sale.

> From a business standpoint it makes total sense.

Investors are not idiots. Not saying you are, you might be just misguided. Lynda and Coursera are nothing alike.

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

#148

Post by rosser »

alexashka wrote: post #140
freshhawk wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford? Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide. Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.

Here is what google gave me in 0.31 seconds for photoshop retouching: https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Smashing magazine 70 free resources? Sounds good. Let's go down the list, HDR images in Photopshop: google gave me https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... The first link seems quite in depth and adequate. Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the f…

No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all.

Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that.

I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid.

They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning.

I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b.

[1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition!

[2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it...

Oh, wait.

EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility.

EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"

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

#149

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

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…

Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).

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

#150

Post by Throwaway90283 »

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…

I didn't know how to write a line of PHP or MySQL (previously a frontend designer/developer). I went through a couple of the courses on Lynda because I had an idea for a project I wanted to develop. I started writing backend code for the project within a week of starting the Lynda tutorials to practice what I was learning. The project started gaining traction and users a couple of weeks after that, and I quit my job a year later. Today, it generates about 70k a year in passive income.

Lynda brought me from not knowing how to declare a variable, to being able to develop a simple site with a database, user registration, commenting, administrative pages, etc, in a very short period of time. It's a great resource to hit the ground running in a week. However, like you said, you then need to to grow using other resources to learn how to sprint.

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