As an educator, I’ve watched the popularity of online learning go ballistic over the last few years. Online tutorials are efficient, available 24/7, and you can replay them till they sink in.
Quality videos in everything from burnishing your Adobe Photoshop chops to Java programming are available for free on venues such as youtube.com or Khan’s Academy.
Of course there’s a whole other universe of pay-for courses that universities like the University of Hawaii promote. Not to knock the great free stuff out there, but the adage about "getting what you pay for" is really true.
This is where Lynda.com really shines.
The site has a vast array of short (usually in the two- to three-minute range) tutorials that generally cover software skills. This is professional-echelon software training, but there are also vids for hobbyists on less technical areas such as home computing and photography. There are also some fine courses on business-coaching themes such as achieving your goals, becoming an entrepreneur, etc.
Yes, you have to pay for it, but at $25 a month it’s not going to break the bank.
I came to Lynda.com late. Family members and friends had raved about it over the past year, but I never made the time to investigate until I really had a problem to solve.
Specifically, one of my friends has a website whose Google ranking was suffering. He needed a crash course in SEO (search engine optimization). So I started looking online (Googling of course) at SEO tutorials. There were a lot of tips in written format but very little on video that was decent, much less up to date. One of my go-to tech mavens, Tony Stanford, suggested I check Lynda.com, and it struck me that I’d better invest a little time in this.
The upshot: I found several courses on Lynda.com on SEO that were extremely informative and up to date and had great production values. They weren’t snazzy Hollywood productions, but they didn’t have to be. The videos would cut from teachers talking to hands-on demonstrations of apps such as Google AdWords. Instructors go into detail to elucidate precisely what they’re doing and why. When the level of instruction gets more difficult to follow, the lecturer will often circle in yellow, or highlight, the area of the screen he wants you to see. The video/audio quality of the presentation was excellent, and the quality of instructors was superb.
The largest audience for Lynda.com is software-literate users who may want to brush up on skills rather than novices who want to get trained to an advanced level from scratch. In the case of my search for SEO enlightenment, courses varied from "basic," where you are told how to correctly formulate a meta tag, to advanced tutorials on how to design an SEO-friendly website.
What was really admirable about Lynda.com was the spectrum of courses (there are more than 1,000). Based on what I saw, this is content well worth paying for.
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Mike Meyer, former Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, now manages IT for Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.
