To hear the talk around MTSU, you might think there is a new
teacher on campus named Lynda whose class everyone wants to take.
And you wouldn’t be far off—the University’s new contract
with online training website Lynda.com is creating a lot of buzz this fall.
Billy Pittard, chairman of MTSU’s Department of Electronic
Media Communications, knows the company’s namesake, Lynda Weinman, and in fact
worked for her three years before joining the MTSU faculty in 2011.
He said the campus-wide Lynda.com subscription is a
tremendous benefit for educators, staff and especially the University’s nearly
23,000 students.
“It’s a tragedy when you have to spend class time teaching
software skills, because everyone is at different levels,” said Pittard, who
worked at Lynda.com in California during 2008–2011. “This is one of those
opportunities to flip the classroom. You can assign learning software skills
outside of class, then in class learn how to do something worthwhile with that
software.”
Frustrated over the complex, hard-to-follow technical
manuals available at the time, Weinman launched Lynda.com in 1995 as a site
where students could get free training. Such resources are common today, thanks
in large part to her work.
With thousands of training videos, Lynda.com is designed to
help anyone learn business, software, technology, and creative skills to
achieve personal and professional goals.
Pittard, who developed content and recruited teachers for
Lynda.com, said the first step in getting the most out of the website is to
learn how to learn from it.
“You can go ahead and browse Lynda.com to get ideas about
how you might use the materials for your classes—and also about how you might
use them for your own professional/personal development. Lynda.com has
excellent search-ability, so give that a try for any specific topics you might
be interested in,” Pittard said.
He said his department has been using it for years and
envisions a benefit for every campus college.
“You can assign a whole ‘course’ and require the students to
earn a certificate of completion. The subscription includes the ability to
download all materials used in the course videos,” he said.
The benefit for MTSU students from this subscription will be
long-lasting, he said, both for their education and subsequent career. An
individual subscription to Lynda.com costs hundreds of dollars.
“When I was working at Lynda.com, it was amazing to me the
feedback we got from subscribers. A total stranger would walk up and say, ‘So
you work at Lynda.com?’ I would say, ‘Yeah.’ They would say, ‘I got my job
because of Lynda.com, ’ ” he said.
“For someone trying to learn a piece of software, I honestly
don’t think there is a better way.”
Michael Wheaton, assistant to the director of library
technology at the James E. Walker Library, has already discovered that.
“I was trying to figure out how to make a YouTube video
accessible to people with hearing disabilities. I was having trouble figuring
out how to caption a video,” he said.
He did a quick Lynda.com search for “captioning YouTube
video” and 3 minutes later was doing it.
“I didn’t have to sit through a long lecture that covered
way more than I needed to accomplish that task. Instead, I received exactly the
dose of information needed,” Wheaton said.
“Because Lynda.com tracks progress by user, it allows larger
training packages to be broken into manageable chunks based upon the amount of
time available, and when it is convenient, students return right where they
left off.”
No comments:
Post a Comment