By DJ Pfeifle.
Until recently, Lynda.com was a service given freely to Evergreen students, under an agreement with the founder and Evergreen alumni Lynda Weinman. Sometime this year, however, after a recent buyout of the website by LinkedIn, the agreement was dropped and the service no longer available.
Lynda.com is a website that offers video tutorials in many different disciplines, such as computer science, writing, and art, among others. The software training website was offered to students free of charge under the community section upon logging into My Evergreen, but the link now says the website is “no longer available as a free resource.” The website is now known as LinkedIn Learning, and offers the same services as before the buyout.
Staff only realized the resource wasn’t working after students reported the issue. Director of Academic and Enterprise Technologies Rip Hemingway explained, “We discovered it after LinkedIn had shut us down.” He said that he was unsure whether a broadcast message announcing the change was sent to students, and the Journal could not find an anouncement.
Hemingway said the website functioned “on the periphery of an official paid service [and] was shut down without any warning by LinkedIn.” There was potential for the service to remain available, but after conversations between LinkedIn and Evergreen, LinkedIn offered the college the ability to continue services by purchasing an institutional license for a paid annual subscription. At that point, the service was determined by senior staff to be too expensive to maintain for the time being.
The school is looking at potential resource-sharing with other groups that already have paid contracts for the service, like Timberland Regional Library. Students who have Timberland library cards can currently access the resource with their library account information. Hemingway said that other similar resources have been mentioned, but there is no specific timeline for when something like Lynda.com will be directly available through the school.
Senior student Finian Gallagher shared how he valued Lynda.com, saying, “I used to be in INS and I would help my classmates with their excel graphs. I’m not in the class anymore, but I’m still helping them with stuff that I’ve learned with Lynda.”
Another student, Matthew Lowdermilk, has used the website to learn independently for years. “I used it for learning Backbone, a JavaScript framework, and Lynda was a quality resource,” he said.
Lowdermilk also explained how the site can be a source for students struggling to learn at the pace or in the style of a professor’s way of teaching, saying, “If that doesn’t fit you so well, finding another perspective, another way of being taught, that is very helpful.”
As far as alternatives beyond the Timberland library, there are many free websites and apps that offer similar services. Khan Academy is a well-known and popular service that is free to use. Khan Academy also offers interactive tutorials so you can test your skills in real time. Coursera is another resource that aims to bring free quality education to anyone who seeks it. There’s also always YouTube tutorials to help out with whatever it is you are looking to learn.
