Prepared by: Lee Nau (lee@leenau.com)
Lynda.com has provided practical educational materials for aspiring and practicing designers, engineers, and photographers since 1995. Lynda was founded by Lynda Weinman and her husband, Bruce, to help people learn to use Adobe tools using online video. Lynda.com is a pioneer of online learning and has, in the last 20 years, offered 5700 courses and 255 thousand video tutorials. In 2015, Lynda.com was acquired by LinkedIn.
Lynda.com is uniquely positioned to offer internationalized content for a global market, by adding non-English language content (and subtitling) to their industry-leading courses on a wide variety of topics, primarily focused on engineering, design, and photography offerings. Now that Lynda.com has been acquired by LinkedIn, the opportunity for stretching this incredibly useful brand globally has never been greater.
Lynda.com provides exceptional professionally-produced video courses at two pricing tiers on a wide variety of topics. Lynda’s revenue comes from subscribers and corporations -- with two consumer subscription tiers, the $25/month base plan and the $37.50/month premium plan (that comes with downloadable files). In 2011, Lynda hit $70 million in revenues from 1 million paying members (from a TechCrunch article).
Currently, Lynda.com trains users on a variety of topics, but the bulk of course offerings are in technical, design, and artistic fields. Their award-winning Adobe courses give hands-on instruction for everyone from beginners to advanced users. In addition to professional development coursework, Lynda offers coursework related to technical hobbies and soft skills -- from music to photography to 3D printing to video production.
Lynda's users include a wide variety of learners -- aspiring designers, developers who wish to come up to speed in a language or framework, musicians who want to learn to produce their own video content, and business people who want to understand social media, marketing, and technology topics.
John, 61, male, lives in Texas, wants to travel with his wife, Sheryl. He's interested in Getting Started with Photography and Wordpress.com Essential Training.
User Goal: Learn to shoot travel photos with his new DSLR camera and share them with friends and family using Wordpress.
Ashley, 24, recent college graduate, lives in Southern California. She is interested in learning the Adobe Creative Cloud applications: Introduction to Graphic Design, Illustrator CC Essential Training, Photoshop CC Essential Training, and InDesign CC Essential Training.
User Goal: Learn graphic design, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe InDesign CC, in order to make a transition to a user experience design career.
Lisa, 35, web developer, lives in New York City. She's interested in Node.js Essential Training, Up and Running with React.js, and other related courses.
User Goal: Learn React.js and Node.js for her new job as a startup web developer.
Eric, 43, photographer, lives in Ireland. He's curious about the Adobe Photoshop CC One-on-One series: Fundamentals, Advanced, and Master.
User Goal: Learn Adobe Photoshop CC to improve his photography.
TXQ Corporation, an enterprise software company, has an enterprise account to encourage continuous learning from their employees. The service is particularly popular among the company's engineers and designers.
User Goal: Provide quality education materials for employee growth.
Lara, 22, administrative assistant, lives in São Paulo, Brazil. She studied English in school, but would prefer content in Portuguese.
User Goal: Learn video production so she can post her videos in YouTube. She would prefer content in Portuguese, her native language.
Estelle, 39, travel agent and aspiring singer-songwriter, lives in Nantes, France. She doesn't speak English very well and would be grateful for courses in, or subtitled in, French.
User Goal: Learn audio production and recording techniques, so she can finish her album herself and embark on her music career. She would prefer content in French, her native language.
Alberto, 20, computer science student at the University of Trieste in Italy. While there are many good Rails courses in English, most of them are not subtitled in Italian.
User Goal: Learn Ruby on Rails for a school project. He would prefer content in Italian, his native language.
Wen, 32, software engineer at a large corporation in Taipei, Taiwan.
User Goal: Learn functional programming for his job as a software engineer. He would prefer content in Mandarin, his native language.