LinkedIn Offering Online Courses to Ontario Post-Secondary Students

Education is often the entry point to a meaningful career, so the most successful career-oriented website is doing their part to spread the knowledge.

LinkedIn has announced a partnership with eCampusOntario and Ontario’s Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development to make learning content on their site Lynda.com available to every post-secondary student, staff member and faculty in Ontario. This totals more than one million new potential members to the Lynda.com platform.

“We get so excited about the possibilities that could come from the integration of lynda.com and LinkedIn,” wrote LinkedIn’s global head of product Ryan Roslansky when the company acquired Lynda.com. “Imagine being a job seeker and being able to instantly know what skills are needed for the available jobs in a desired city, like Denver, and then to be prompted to take the relevant and accredited course to help you acquire this skill. Or doing a search on SlideShare to learn about integrated marketing and then to be prompted with a lynda.com course on the same subject.”

There are 44 universities and colleges in Ontario that now have the ability to access the online Lynda.com platform. Faculty will be able to further develop their career, or admin can keep staff up-to-date on the latest learning trends like networking or software development.

Instructors can also use Lynda.com resources to supplement their own curriculum in the classroom and modernize a very traditional learning model. Lynda.com offers mapped sets of courses and videos that can fit into several kinds of courses currently offered in post-secondary institutions. This integration will give students more flexibility to learn at their own pace.

The collaboration also lets teachers map that in-class content to specific skills and test them on the fly. For example, a teacher can assign Excel functions to students then apply those skills in the middle of a class to create interactive case studies.

LinkedIn and Lynda.com offer a comprehensive economic graph, so students can see what kinds of skills are most in-demand, and start teaching themselves new techniques or lessons to better prepare for a dream job or high-paying career.

There is a massive amount of content covered through the Lynda.com platform with a hugely comprehensive library. Students and faculty can browse through courses focusing on 3D animation, business, IT and more. There’s even some niche programming on the site such as customer experience, music notation, podcasting, and SDKs. There are video tutorials, full courses, learning paths and more to choose from.

LinkedIn bought Lynda.com for $1.5 billion in April 2015 with the intent to create “economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, which is north of 3 billion people.”