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> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not

by rosser 12y ago

> What few skills can a working programmer get from Lynda? Honestly... The myopia some technologists display is really staggering sometimes. I mean, it's not like people who aren't technologists would ever want to learn new skills or anything, would they? They should totally just stay at their menial, paper-shuffling desk jobs, or serve lattes to programmers, or something.

alexashka 12y ago
"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.
- unreal37 12y ago
  Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees? People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value. Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.
  - vtlynch 12y ago
    This comment is a gem. Its not good. But its a gem.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - KaoruAoiShiho 12y ago
    Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).
  - cmurf 12y ago
    I'm curious what your position is on the value of air, and how much it should cost rather than how much it does cost. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/american-students-head-germany-free-college http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/a...
- megamann 12y ago
  I'm not going to disagree that the free classes from Stanford and MIT aren't better, but I find courses on Lynda, coursea, etc to be easier to swallow with the way they break it down and generally have a better delivery of content. Watching a video of a professor give a lecture is even more stale than sitting in the class and from the few courses I've worked through that's what was offered from the universities. Also, I'm currently doing the modules on data science on coursea and that is put together by people from John Hopkins. I like this the most because the information is coming from a verifiable good source and in a format that is easy to digest.
- freshhawk 12y ago
  Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford? Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide. Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.
  - alexashka 12y ago
    Here is what google gave me in 0.31 seconds for photoshop retouching: https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=photoshop%20retouching https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Smashing magazine 70 free resources? Sounds good. Let's go down the list, HDR images in Photopshop: google gave me https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=hdr%20images%20photoshop%20tutorial https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... The first link seems quite in depth and adequate. Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the first two examples I gave you took less than a minute to find FREE answers for. Even if you do find some edge case where Lynda happens to have a better solution than what I can gather online within 5 minutes, what does that prove? Lynda can't match MIT or Stanford, or Apple's developer resources. Instead of pivoting, they're selling what's available freely, for money, to those who are incompetent at using the internet. That's their business model. If you think that's ok and worth 1.5 billion, great, we simply have a different outlook on life.
    - rosser 12y ago
      No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all. Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that. I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid. They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning. I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b. [1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition! [2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it... Oh, wait. EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility. EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"
mason240 12y ago
Why would people not interested in technology want to learn programming?
- rosser 12y ago
  Lynda offers courses in many things besides programming.

by rosser 12y ago

alexashka 12y ago

"Now that we have free Stanford, MIT, etc courses online, for free, what has Lynda got to offer?" I'm not saying people shouldn't learn. I'm saying there are superior alternatives for every area Lynda is offering to teach. Not sure whose point of view you're disagreeing with really.

unreal37 12y ago
Lynda.com currently makes a $150 million per year in revenue. With all those free sources you mention, how are they doing that? Why are companies paying for education for their employees? People pay for education. People will continue to pay for good education, forever. Education will never ever be free, because it has value. Oh you can pick up some Ruby on Rails skills with a manual and some free tutorials. Not really what we're talking about here though.
- vtlynch 12y ago
  This comment is a gem. Its not good. But its a gem.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- KaoruAoiShiho 12y ago
  Really shortsighted to think of the value as in the cash extracted from the student. The real value is that more people are educated. Ways that an educator can see the cash from that created value are various. They can make job referrals, they can do credentialing signaling, they can do ads, they can sell premium tools while providing free education on how the use the tools. So yeah, education can be free, should be free, and will be free (and in most cases are already free if you consider public schooling).
- cmurf 12y ago
  I'm curious what your position is on the value of air, and how much it should cost rather than how much it does cost. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/american-students-head-germany-free-college http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/a...
megamann 12y ago
I'm not going to disagree that the free classes from Stanford and MIT aren't better, but I find courses on Lynda, coursea, etc to be easier to swallow with the way they break it down and generally have a better delivery of content. Watching a video of a professor give a lecture is even more stale than sitting in the class and from the few courses I've worked through that's what was offered from the universities. Also, I'm currently doing the modules on data science on coursea and that is put together by people from John Hopkins. I like this the most because the information is coming from a verifiable good source and in a format that is easy to digest.
freshhawk 12y ago
Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford? Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide. Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.
- alexashka 12y ago
  Here is what google gave me in 0.31 seconds for photoshop retouching: https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=photoshop%20retouching https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Smashing magazine 70 free resources? Sounds good. Let's go down the list, HDR images in Photopshop: google gave me https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=hdr%20images%20photoshop%20tutorial https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... The first link seems quite in depth and adequate. Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the first two examples I gave you took less than a minute to find FREE answers for. Even if you do find some edge case where Lynda happens to have a better solution than what I can gather online within 5 minutes, what does that prove? Lynda can't match MIT or Stanford, or Apple's developer resources. Instead of pivoting, they're selling what's available freely, for money, to those who are incompetent at using the internet. That's their business model. If you think that's ok and worth 1.5 billion, great, we simply have a different outlook on life.
  - rosser 12y ago
    No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all. Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that. I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid. They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning. I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b. [1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition! [2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it... Oh, wait. EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility. EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"

mason240 12y ago

Why would people not interested in technology want to learn programming?

rosser 12y ago
Lynda offers courses in many things besides programming.