Serendipity35

Back at the start of the new school year in September, LinkedIn announced on their blog the launch of LinkedIn Learning, an online learning platform. I first heard about it via some panic posts about it being something colleges should fear. 

With goals of "enabling individuals and organizations to discover and develop the skills through a personalized, data-driven learning experience," schools should welcome the help. Correct?

LinkedIn Learning is really an extension of what the company did when they acquired content from Lynda.com. Combining that content with LinkedIn’s professional data and network gives them 450 million member profiles. If you use that big data, you can view how people, jobs, industries, organizations and even skills evolve over time.

LinkedIn Learning provides a dashboard that someone can use to identify the skills someone might need and then deliver "courses." I never viewed Lynda.com as a threat to the university. My school subscribed and we used it for a time as a way to bring students and faculty up to speed on specific software.

I don't see their new platform as a threat to the college degree either. In fact, I would guess that professionals out in the working world (and probably already with at least an undergraduate degree), job seekers and corporate trainers would be be the main audience.

The platform could be more of a threat to the MOOC approach to learning. So, why would I choose to pay for a course at LinkedIn rather than take a free course from a MOOC provider? As with any online course, the anytime, anywhere convenience is appealing. I might do it if the courses were smaller in enrollment and therefore more personalized. I would find some kind of certification or other way to use successful completion towards advancement in my organization. I would want a reasonable price. The ability to tie together a sequence of related courses into a concentration would also be appealing.

I saw this expansion of their lynda.com purchase described by those panicked and critical educators as a recommendation engine to courses or even a "Netflix for learning." I get that, but I could also compare it with Amazon's recommendations and those of many other websites that use AI to mine users to see trends. That is not a bad thing, and it is not something college allow or do very well now.

LinkedIn has of 9,000+ digital courses, most taught by industry experts. They cover a wide range of business, creative and technical topics, from leadership “soft skills” to design principles to programming. They claim that they add at least 25 courses a week. They offer courses in German, Spanish, Japanese and French.

I suppose it is the data-driven personalization that really interests me. Imagine a college where your personal "guidance" was better designed, but also where the department, majors and degrees were better designed. Do you know how long and how much time and work would be required to add 25 courses to a college catalog?

What LinkedIn Learning has on its side is that their recommendations are positioned within a familiar online space where employees and employers already feel comfortable.

This will not displace higher education any more than MOOCs or online education. Like those trends, it will disrupt, if it is successful. And perhaps higher education will be forced to adapt sooner than later. I think LinkedIn will view higher education as a secondary market.