Last Friday I attended the 3rd UK Academic user group for Lynda.com which saw many Higher Education institutions come together to discuss 3 topics which sit high on everyone’s agenda, these being:
- Academic Engagement
- Careers / Employability
- Promotion of Lynda.com
Only being able to take part in one activity while the others were fed-back at the end of the day, I chose Academic Engagement. Here we discussed the challenges we have in proving/showcasing the benefits of Lynda.com to the academic community. We shared success stories and tried to understand why some instances work and alternatively why some fail. This was really interesting, especially to hear that others had the same or similar issues. It seems that the group felt peer examples would be a great way to explain the value of Lynda.com – if users could see Lynda.com being used effectively in the curriculum then this could help expand its use across our institutions.
Additionally we identified areas across our institutions who might help us promote its effectiveness, not only to staff but also students. For each institution this was slightly different, partly because each institution had slightly different objectives but equally each institution as slightly different setups, in terms of teams/departments and who owns Lynda.com as service – but this certainly helped me connect the dots regarding my institution and the various parties who can help.
I won’t expand on the other 2 areas now, partly because I didn’t take part in those discussions but also Lynda.com representatives are planning to compile the information they collated and packs will be sent to all users to formalise plans, enabling each institution for move forward within each area.
