Did you think that graduating from high school or college meant your education was finished? Think again. Even assuming that you were paying attention in every class—and who among us really was?—you probably weren’t being taught the skills you need to succeed in a modern workplace, understand complex business issues, or excel at a high-tech hobby.
I’m talking about things like accounting and finance, digital photography, game design, social media marketing, video editing, or Web graphics. For help mastering these kinds of subjects, your options were always pretty limited. You could get a friend to teach you, or you could take an extension or community-college class, or you could buy one of the “For Dummies” books. That was about it.
But that’s all changing fast. Thanks to the spread of broadband Internet access and a huge drop in the costs of video production, more and more schools, scholars, startups, and individual authors are putting instructional video online. You can access much of it for free at sites like Khan Academy, YouTube’s science and education channels, or MIT’s OpenCourseWare site. Many more materials are available for a per-course or subscription fee.
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| Lynda.com |
| Founded: 1995 |
| Executive Team: Bruce Heavin, co-founder and chief creative officer; Lynda Weinman, co-founder and executive chair; Eric Robison, president and chief executive officer |
| Mission: “To help you learn the skills you need to achieve your full potential.” |
| Funding: $103 million Series A Round, January 2013, from Accel Partners, Spectrum Equity, and Meritech Capital Partners |
| Pricing: Individual memberships $25/month or $250/year, Premium membership $37.50/month or $375/year |
As you might expect, some of the new video-based courses are painfully bad—no one wants to listen to someone narrating a bunch of PowerPoint slides. But some of them are very good indeed. It all depends on the production values, and—just as in a real-world classroom—on the skill of the teacher.
Lately, I’ve been getting to know the folks at Lynda.com, one of the pioneering companies in online video instruction. In fact, I recently hosted co-founders Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin and CEO Eric Robison at my San Francisco office, and we had a long conversation about the different ways people use Lynda.com’s library of 92,000 videos, which are recorded by expert teachers, and are heavy on software how-to courses. At a higher level, we also talked how the Internet is changing the way we learn.
At the time of their visit, Weinman and her crew had just released a big piece of news: after 17 years without any outside investment, the Carpinteria, CA-based company had raised a whopping $103 million in venture financing. That means they’ll be able to branch out into more subjects, deepen existing courses, expand internationally, and—crucially—brace for increasing competition.
“I do think we are at an inflection point where a lot more people are open to the idea of online education,” Weinman says. “There are a lot of assumptions about education, which are very rooted in the 20th century, that are being challenged today.”
She’s got that right. Perhaps the biggest assumption being turned upside down is the idea that students and teachers need to be in the same room—or even the same hemisphere. Through platforms like Coursera, edX, and Udacity, dozens of universities are putting lecture videos, tests and quizzes, and other course materials online and throwing them open to learners everywhere. These so-called “Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOCs) often include community sites where remote learners can interact with instructors and rate one another’s progress.
The philosophy behind MOOCs is that the power of the Internet can open up the rich intellectual resources of the world’s top universities to everyone. But it’s unclear so far how many Internet users complete the courses, or what practical knowledge they gain. And one thing most MOOCs don’t yet provide is formal degree credit, meaning auditors do a lot of the same work as tuition-paying university students, but without any formal reward.
There’s another set of e-learning sites where the material isn’t geared toward would-be university students, but rather toward self-motivated, mid-career learners who want to update their job skills, open up a new career path, or explore a new pastime. At these sites, the courses are usually designed expressly for online audiences—in other words, there’s no real-world class listening to each “lecture.” This is the category that Lynda.com belongs to, along with competitors like Codecademy, Khan Academy, Treehouse, and Udemy. (Until recently I would have counted Austrian startup video2brain among the competition, but Lynda.com acquired it in February.)
Lynda.com’s history dates back to the earliest days of the Web in the mid-1990s, when Weinman wrote one of the first books on designing graphics for websites and opened a digital arts training center in Ojai, CA. After the dot-com crash and 9/11 killed Web companies’ travel and training budgets, Weinman and Heavin decided to try something different: they’d put videos from the training center online and offer access by subscription.
Success in the online video business didn’t come overnight. A decade ago, no one had broadband, YouTube didn’t exist, and
