Whether or not college leaders realize it, last week's announcement by LinkedIn that it would spend $1.5 billion to buy Lynda.com, a provider of consumer-focused online courses, carries notable consequences for higher education.
In 2011, Marc Andreessen's Wall Street Journal article "Why Software is Eating the World" asserted that software would continue to disrupt new industries, with the next targets being health care and education.
LinkedIn announced today that it has acquired a leading e-learning service, Lynda.com, for $1.5 billion in cash and stock. The move is part of LinkedIn's bid to become more than an online resume platform.
University of California President Janet Napolitano took recently to the pages of the Washington Post to review and critique new books on the future of higher education by University Ventures Fund Managing Director Ryan Craig (College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education) and New America...
A scenario in which a student can use a Pell Grant to help pay for a bundle of edX courses no longer seems so far-fetched.
The national skills gap is well documented in the mainstream media and a top priority for policymakers and CEOs alike. Our system of higher education produces only one STEM graduate for every 2.5 job openings. The numbers are even worse for women, who earn just 18% of computer science...
In 2003, the iTunes Store unbundled the CD. Suddenly, consumers could purchase only the songs they wanted rather than the bundle designated by the artist and label. Sales of digital singles soared but overall revenue fell 50% in a decade.It is with good reason that cable companies fiercely oppose...
A new breed of for-profit coding schools has emerged in recent years, largely as a skills-focused alternative to traditional higher education. Now one of them has joined forces with a traditional university to build a master's program.
In the early '90s, I could tell what someone thought about the Internet's prospects for transforming higher education by listening to their vocabulary. If they used terms like "distance learning" or "distance education," they'd probably been working in continuing education for some time and saw the Internet as simply the latest in a line of technologies - beginning with correspondence courses, and including the latest two-way video systems - to expand the reach of...
There are seemingly no problems that tech entrepreneurs won't try to solve. From health care to entertainment to education, founders often decide that there's got to be an app (or site or cloud-based platform) to shake things up. In the case of the companies listed here, the founders were right. Each one is changing the market it has...
