As a keen follower of all things edtech you will likely have noticed that MOOC platforms like Udacity and now Coursera are moving away from classic higher education subjects and increasingly into tech skills. Startups like Udemy served that vertical early on. If you think about it, it is somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy that a Silicon Valley startup is serving the ecosystem it exists in.
Besides being a potentially big money maker for Coursera, tech skills are also the main market for Lynda.com which now belongs to LinkedIn. Getting competition from this heavily funded player cannot stay unanswered. So what if LinkedIn decides to become a MOOC platform and to partner up with higher education institutions?
Stripped down to their essentials, both Coursera and Lynda.com are simply nextgen learning management systems. Sure, there might be slight differences to serve the respective markets better, but I’d say about 90% of the products are the same.
The major difference is in the content published on the platforms. For Coursera this meant turning offline higher education lectures into online lectures, for Lynda.com it meant turning offline tech training into self-paced online tech training.
Both platforms use video lectures as their cornerstone, beefed up with community interaction, review quizzes and eventually graded tests.
Technically, there is no reason for Lynda.com / LinkedIn not to make a move into higher education; to sign up some universities and run a MOOC on Big Data, Computer Science or whatever is needed in the workplace. LinkedIn is in a far better position to adapt its offering to market needs as it can dive into a deep pool of data from its users, both from people looking for work and companies looking for talent with specific skills. A huge competitive advantage!
The recently launched Learning Paths already show the power of the combined platforms when it comes to serving online courses to tech workers who have a need to constantly adapt their skills to new requirements in the workplace or when they are looking for a new job. Last week’s launch of the LinkedIn Students app once more points toward a deeper involvement of LinkedIn and eventually Lynda.com in the higher education vertical.
Picture by Emile Krijgsman via Flickr