LinkedIn acquires Lynda.com and hopes to "create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce"

Early MOOCs and Internet-based classes focused on traditional university courses, but there has been a shift of emphasis toward vocational traning and lifelong learning.

Lynda.com has focused on vocational training and lifelong learning since its begining in 1995. They have developed over 2,900 video courses in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese and have 4 million subscribers in 150 countries.

LindedIn has 350 million users who are looking for career advancement and job opportunities. (It's currently the 14th most visited Web site on the Internet).

LinkedIn has acquired Lynda.com and one can imagine the combined company pointing users to specific courses that would help them move up in their current positions or find better jobs.

That seems to be the basic idea and they say they want to do it on an ambitious global scale. Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content at LinkedIn, says the vision of the merged company is to "create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce" and their goal is to "lift and transform the global ecomomy."

(That sounds like something you might hear in a VC pitch in the comedy TV series "Silicon Valley," but let's suspend judgement).

They hope to create an "economic graph" -- compling databases with profiles of every member of the global workforce (what they have studied and what their skills are) and the available jobs and skills required to obtain those jobs at every every company in the world. Those databases plus an inventory of courses offered by every higher education organization and university will let people find the training they need to get a specific job and let employers find the people who are qualified to do a particular job.

My first reaction is that establishing standards and definitions that would enable them to come close to that vision across a variety of industries, cultures and languages is impossible, but they might be able to create economic graphs for specific industries and countries.

I worked as a consultant to Hyundai some time ago, and the Human Resources department had a system for tracking employee skills, job skill requirements and available training classes. There are also human resources software packages like Trackstar for such systems. Perhaps LinkedIn will take a bottom-up approach, replicating this sort of system industry by industry.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post asking if there was a place for Lynda.com and other online training companies in the MOOC discussion. It's become clear that the answer is "yes" and with this acquisition, LinkedIn will be a prominent player and competitor to companies like Udacity and Coursera. To the extent that company hiring practices and societal certification change, they will also be an alternative to universities for students whose promary goal is getting a good job.

Here is a video of LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner describing the Economic Graph and their vision for the next ten years:

Innovations in vocational education and certification

Certification options from Coursera and the California Community Colleges

MOOCs are often used for vocational training rather than a traditional college degree and Coursera has launched six "Coursera Specializations" for vocational training.

A Coursera Specialization requires completion of a group of related courses followed by a capstone project. A Specializations consists of several online courses, developed at universities, leading up to a real capstone project/case study developed by a company in the relevant industry.

For example, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and Instagram have collaborated on an interaction design Specialization. UCSD will provide six MOOC-format courses and the capstone project will come from Instagram.

Students can still take the courses for free, but they will not receive a certification of completion and will not be allowed to do the capstone project. Students wishing to complete the capstone and receive a certificate of completion will pay a tuition of $343.

A sample Specialization completion certificate

Another approach to vocational education is being taken by the California Community Colleges, which are proposing fifteen vocationally-oriented bachelors degrees. For comparison with Coursera, consider this proposal for an interaction design degree from Santa Monica College (SMC).

The SMC interaction design curriculum

The SMC program would take longer to complete and would cost more in terms of tuition and opportunity cost, but it covers more ground and is taught face-to-face.

These are interesting, innovative times for vocational education. Hiring practices and societal values will eventually determine the winners, but for now, how would you advise a young person who wanted to become an interaction designer?

Who will provide entry-level and continuing vocational education?

Universities are doing an increasingly poor job of entry-level training -- will industry take over?

My first job after college was with IBM. As soon as I was hired, I was sent to San Francisco for an eight-week training course in which I was introduced to the organization and its culture and taught to wire the control panels of unit-record machines and design unit-record systems. After that phase one training, I worked for a while, then went to a second and later a third class.

In those days, IBM hired people regardless of their major in school, based on an aptitude test and interviews. (The most senior technical person in our office and my first mentor was an English major). IBM assumed the responsibility of training entry-level employees.

A few decades later, universities were expected to finance entry-level training. Companies wanted new hires who were productive on day one. That worked pretty well as long as the cost of education was reasonable. (My tuition at UCLA was $76 per semester).

But, that system has broken down -- society has cut support for universities and, to be honest, IBM did a better job of entry-level training than many of our universities. As we see below, today's students often borrow large sums to pay for their college education and many end up in dead-end jobs.

Percent of graduates in jobs not requiring a degree
College graduates: age 22-65 with a bachelor's degree or higher
Recent graduates: age 22-27 with a bachelor's degree or higher
Shaded areas designate recessions.

Good non-college jobs: at least $45,000 a year
low-wage jobs: $25,000 a year or less
Shaded areas designate recessions.

It is way too soon to call it a trend, but the Internet may be taking us back toward industry-financed entry-level job training. The most IBM-like example is AT&T's sponsorship of the development of an online masters degree in computer science at Georgia Tech. The first semester of that program has been completed and the students are satisfied and the administration is optimistic, but not declaring victory yet.

Yesterday, AT&T (and others) announced that they would be participating in the development of tech-oriented "nanodegrees" on the Udacity platform. (Udacity also hosts the Georgia Tech MS).

IBM may not be offering the same 3-phase training that I had as a new hire, but they are offering MOOCs at universities through their Academic Initiative and have recently agreed to partner with 28 business schools and universities on developing data science curriculum and programs.

The Georgia Tech MS degree will cost students $7,000 and a Udacity nanodegree will cost approximately $2,400 -- about $200 per month for 12 months. AT&T is sponsoring some of their employees in the masters program and will offer internships to 100 nanodegree graduates.

Online education has also reduced the cost of tuition reimbursement benefits for employers. Starbucks is offering tuition reimbursement for employees who complete an online bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University.

Online education has boomed with the spread of Massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have had successes and failures, but the infusion of capital and interest has triggered a wave of innovation in technology and pedagogy. New media often mimic and substitute for old media. We first saw MOOCs as a replacement for university education, but it may be that their major impact will be on vocational training.

Udacity has pivoted from university education to lifelong vocational training and the deal looks good enough to induce companies like AT&T and Starbucks to cover part of the cost.

What might it mean if employer-subsidized vocational training catches on?

Traditional universities will lose students. The majority of students see a degree as a path to a job, and universities control certification. If a $2,400 nanodegree gets one a good entry-level job, many students will skip the university.

University education is much more common today than it was when I started at IBM. Universities, like many other organizations, typically try to grow, leading to aggressive marketing programs and lowered admission standards. While a university might have an incentive to admit and retain poorly qualified students, an employer does not. The company personnel department may replace the university admission committee as the gatekeeper to the middle class.

That might be efficient, but tying education to employment has a downside. Consider the effect of tying medical insurance to employment -- it is an important part of an employee's benefits, but it discourages mobility, harming both the economy and the individual.

The courses I have mentioned here are not typical MOOCs, but they are compatible with MOOCs. For example, Udacity has not spelled out the details, but a nanodegree will involve testing for certification and, no doubt, more personal interaction with instructors than today's MOOCs. However, they also intend to make the teaching material available as a MOOC. Self-study students will not get credit or personal attention, but they will have access to the same material as paying students. The material will be a fringe benefit for society and an advertisement for Udacity.

As Steve Jobs used to say -- one more thing. I've been talking about vocational training, but I think there is also demand for curiosity-driven, non-degree, lifelong edcuation -- edutainment if you will. That may be the way those nanodegree graduates round out their education.

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Update 9/19/2014

At a lower level, we are also seeing online trade schools. For example, Open Colleges in Australia. They claim to have over 700,000 students and offer trade school courses in these areas:

That sounds good, but digging a bit deeper I became skeptical. The site reminded me of a TV ad for a trade school -- lots of rosy career promises, special offers and testimonials from students. I tried to find the cost of their classes or career preparation programs, but did not find a way to get the cost without starting to enroll. I did, however, learn that I could pay by the month or fortnight and would get a discount if I paid up front for the entire course.

With my skepticism aroused, I took their multiple choice test of my language, literacy and numeracy skills and learned that I was skillful enough to be admitted to their Certificate III and IV level courses. I was not qualified for their Diploma level courses. Did I mention that I gave random answers to the questions? Just lucky I guess.

I did not spend much time on their site and they may do a great job of training and finding employment for their students, but whether they do or do not, there may be room for MOOC-like trade schools.

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Update 6/1/2015

Google wants more Android developers so Udacity has added an Android Development nanodegree.

Udacity drops free certificates in their shift toward lifelong vocational education -- universities should pay attention

Udacity has continued with its shift of focus toward lifelong vocational education by phasing out certificates of free courseware completion. The courseware will still be available free, but a certificate will require interaction with "coaches," projects and testing.

The certified course model is explained here and they are offering courses in three certified tracks for now: Data Science, Web Development the Georgia Tech Masters in CS.

Udacity is not trying to compete with universities by offering the equivalent of a college education at a lower price -- they are doing something more subversive -- trying to alter the vocational certification process.

The reason most students go to college is to get a job or get a better job -- what do employers look for in making hiring decisions and will that change in the future?

Consider Google -- here is an excerpt from an interview of Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google:

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Maybe Udacity is on to something universities should pay attention to. If Udacity is right, what does that imply for undergraduate education? For research universities?
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Update
4/23/2014

Sal Khan published a book, The One World Schoolhouse on his educational philosophy and strategy. Here is an interview on the book and the future of the Khan Academy. His view of certification -- of signaling competence -- is not unlike that of Udacity.

Thrun shifts Udacity toward lifelong vocational education

You will want to read this article on Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, the man who popularized MOOCs with his 2011 artifical intelligence class.

He has abandoned the goal of bringing conventional college courses to low performing students in developed and developing countries, and pivoted toward vocational education.

The switch was motivated by the poor results of San Jose State University students who used Udacity material rather than conventional textbooks in "flipped" classrooms. The results left Thrun dissilusioned -- "I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial, but the data was at odds with this idea."

Thrun himself prepared the material for an introductory statistics course to be used at San Jose State. He did his best, stating that "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done -- It was a good class."

But the students did poorly and Thrun concluded that they had a "lousy product."

I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students.

His response to this experience is to focus on industrial education, stating that "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment." As such they are developing an AT&T-sponsored masters degree at Georgia Tech and training material for developers.

Thrun's revelation has produced a sense of schadenfreude among some academics, who were happy to say "we told you so" and perhaps breathe a sigh of relief that their jobs will remain secure.

But, even if many college courses are best taught in a conventional classroom or in a flipped class with a conventional textbook, those jobs may still be in danger. If Thrun is right about industrial education -- jobs -- being the true value of education, we may see more and more students foregoing college altogether for offerings like Thrun's.

Those San Jose students want jobs and they are increasingly aware of the rising direct cost and opportunity cost of a college degree.

When speaking of his five-year old son, Thrun reveals his vision of the future of education, saying "I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education -- I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning."

Udacity has already moved into workforce training, and I think they have been working on lifelong learning all along.
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Update 11/30/2013
There is a long discussion of this post on Slashdot.
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Update 3/25/2014

As Udacity moves away from university education, Coursera hires a university administrator as CEO -- Richard C. Levin, who was president of Yale University for 20 years. No one seems to have figured out the university-course business model, but Levin's international experience indicates that he sees a global market -- for students and teachers.

MOOC monetization -- a free sample strategy

The high cost of education has been one of the drivers of interest in MOOCs, and nearly all MOOCs have been free up to this point. We are in the "invest to get users" stage.

I've heard speculation on ways to monetize MOOCs, and would like suggest one I've not encountered -- the free sample model.

We are starting to get some data on MOOCs. For example, Katy Jordan pulled together completion rate data on 26 of the MOOCs that have been offered by Coursera, EDx and Udacity:



MOOC critics point to these low completion rates as evidence that MOOCs are a Bad Idea, but those large enrollment numbers are still encouraging, so let's look further. Here is a plot of the number of views of the first and last videos each week in the Bioelectricity course at Duke University:



As you see, it is long-tail, y=1/x type graph. One way to look at the long tail is to conclude that the majority of enrollees were dissatisfied and the course was a failure. But an alternative explanation is that the folks were not really enrollees, they were browsers, and, like shoppers in any situation, most decide not to buy.

We can also think of their motivation. Maybe some were not interested in "completing" the course and getting "credit" -- they wanted something less complete, less formal. We have data on that from the Duke course as well. As shown here, fun and enjoyment was the strongest motivator.



Similar motivation was reported by students in a programming class. Sixty four percent of the students said they were interested in the course out of personal interest and curiosity, 33% for professional advancement and only 3 percent for university studies.

These three studies are small and limited, but perhaps we should be thinking about MOOCs as entertainment and lifelong learning as well as for formal education and vocational training, which brings us to free sample pricing. We can view enrollment over time as follows:



The spike in the first few weeks is mostly browsers -- people who want to see what the course is like and what the workload is. They would be getting a free sample.

After a few weeks, the enrollment decline slows and we are left with the students who are interested in completing the course. As we have seen, some are seeking formal credit and others entertainment and the joy of lifelong learning. Those people would presumably be willing to pay for the course. How much?

San Jose State University is currently running a trial in which students will get credit for Udacity courses for $150. The results of that pilot study are not yet in, but $150 is less than the University price.

How about the non-credit students? Let's say a typical MOOC runs 10 weeks and the first three weeks are free. What would people pay for seven weeks of entertainment or lifelong learning? Would it be as much as a movie? A hardback book? A steak dinner?

We can noodle around with a simple spreadsheet and get some napkin-sketch revenue estimates. For example, let's assume a for-credit price of $50 for a certificate of completion and a non-credit price of $20. The median number of students completing the MOOCs shown above was 2,777. Assuming that ten percent of those are for-credit students and the MOOC can be offered four times a year, we get annual revenue of $214,000. If we use the mean completion rate of 4,447, the revenue estimate increases to $343,000.

Note that under these assumptions, the bulk of the projected revenue is from the entertainment students, not for credit students.

If an organization offers several courses, are numbers like that sufficient to cover the overhead of management and administration, production, software refinement, community facilitation, hosting and bandwidth, etc. and pay a teacher who is full time on a single course?

A question for any good teacher reading this -- how effective a teacher would you be if you only taught one course and spent full time delivering and improving it?

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Update, 4/17/2013

Coursera revealed that they had revenue of $220,000 in the first quarter after starting to charge for verified completion certificates (http://bit.ly/12nd8Rb).  The income was from students paying between $30 and $100 per certificate.  Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said prices were "around" $50.

This gives us a first cut estimate of what someone hoping to get job or school credit for a course might be willing to pay.  No doubt, the going price for certified completion will be higher than the price for un-certified completion for entertainment and curiosity.

(Coursera uers who pay for certification have to submit a photo ID of themselves to the company and are also tracked based on their “unique typing pattern” to ensure that people who take tests or turn in assignments are who they say they are).
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Update 5/23/2013

I posited a simple characterization of people signing up for MOOCs as either "browsing" or "enrolling." Phil Hill presents a more nuanced characterization in his blog post on blog student types, classifying students as no-shows, observers, drop-ins, passive participants and active participants. Details are presented in the paper called Deconstructing Disengagement: Analyzing Learner Subpopulations in Massive Open Online Courses.
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Update 11/27/2013

This post in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that MOOCs have failed in higher education, and are better suited to vocational training and lifelong learning.
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Update 12/1/2013

Prominent MOOC provider Udacity has shifted emphasis from college credit courses toward vocational training and lifelong learning.
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Update 12/9/2013

A University of Pennsylvania study of a million enrollees in 16 MOOCs shows they have relatively few active users and low completion rates.

• Course completion rates are very low, averaging 4% across all courses and ranging from 2% to 14% depending on the course and measurement of completion.
• Across the 16 courses, completion rates are somewhat higher, on average, for courses with lower workloads for students and fewer homework assignments (about 6% versus 2.5%).
• Variations in completion rates based on other course characteristics (e.g., course length, availability of live chat) were not statistically significant.
• The total number of individuals accessing a course varied considerably across courses, ranging from more than 110,000 for “Introduction to Operations Management” to about 13,000 for “Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources.”
• Across all courses, about half of those who registered viewed at least one lecture within their selected course. The share of registrants viewing at least one lecture ranged from a low of 27% for “Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources” to a high of 68% for “Fundamentals of Pharmacology.”