Alex Davidson
Staff Writer
Lynda.com is a service provided to Parkland students by the college that is meant to teach students information that might not be in their standard course material or that they have forgotten.
The website, which is owned by LinkedIn, is a collection of online courses available to teach people about a wide variety of topics. It is free for Parkland College students, and is a useful tool when it comes to remembering material from a previous class.
“Lynda is really useful when I don’t remember something and need a refresher,” says Mariah Sherman, a Parkland student.
There are over 1,000 courses available, most of which are under three hours long. Each course is broken up into different sections as well so that students don’t have to sit through each course all at once.
The website is good for learning new skills, as well. There are courses in almost every subject, from two-dimensional drawing, to writing, and to AutoCAD. These courses can make for a fun hobby; and for students who haven’t decided on a major, it can help them find something that works for them.
There are courses for things that are not normally learned in class, as well. Many courses cover topics that could be useful in being successful in the transition from high school to college.
“There’s a lot of student tools on productivity [and] study skills,” says Tracey Hickox, Director of the Center for Academic Success.
The site has a section titled “Learning Paths” that takes different courses and groups them together into separate sections meant to tackle the important parts of whatever path students want to take. These Learning Paths have names such as “Become a Web Designer” and “Become a Digital Marketer,” and are meant to help teach students the skills to do whatever they want.
There is also a page on the site that contains a list of all the classes completed. Each course completes comes with a “certificate of completion,” which proves you took the course. These are earned these by watching every video in a course. Depending on the field students go into, and whether or not they absorbed the information, these can be used as résumé boosters.
The website has also been implemented in some classrooms. In graphic design classes especially, Lynda.com is now required to get full points for classes. This ensures students learn how to use the program on their own, so that if they need to expand their skills with something new they can.
“We introduce Lynda.com in the very first, 100-level first semester class,” says Paul Young, an instructor of graphic design at Parkland. “[We] hope that students will get a taste of how far they can go and how quickly they can go, [so] that in more advanced classes, we don’t need to force students to use [Lynda.com] for full credit.”
To sign up for Lynda.com and start using the service, click the link on the right side of your my.parkland.edu page and sign in with your Microsoft account.
