LinkedIn to Buy Online Education Site Lynda.com for $1.5B • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by alexashka » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 4:19 AM UTC

Throwaway90283 wrote: post #150

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…

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…

That's great, what's the website?

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

#152

Post by raiyu » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 4:24 AM UTC

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?

I agree that some certifications are out of style, specifically in programming because you can glean so much more data about a candidate from their code rather than a certification.

However, in other areas, if the certification is sufficiently difficult to attain such as Cisco's networking certificates, or where you can't assign a task or review past work to determine an individual's skill level I think certifications can be helpful even in a startup hiring environment.

For example, if you are applying as a product management and have relatively junior experience but you have a great feel for our product and market I would still be potentially worried about how well you can interface with a team. So seeing a certification around SCRUM or Agile, in this particular case will certainly be helpful.

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

#153

Post by seoguru » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 4:47 AM UTC

dougbarrett wrote: post #146

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!

Wow, lots of Ojai people here, I'm one too :-) remember when Lynda.com was across from OYES (http://ojaiyes.org/)

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

#154

Post by calinet6 » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 3:20 PM UTC

seoguru wrote: post #153

dougbarrett wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Wow, lots of Ojai people here, I'm one too :-) remember when Lynda.com was across from OYES ( http://ojaiyes.org/ )

Good ol' Ojai! Yep, they had their roots there. It was indeed across from OYES and the farmer's market, on Matilija St. I believe they moved to a larger space in the same square, before finally moving to TO when they started doing more videos and fewer live classes.

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

#155

Post by cmurf » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

I'm curious what your position is on the value of air, and how much it should cost rather than how much it does cost. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/a...