Story by Kristina Kincer / Contributing Writer
Photo courtesy of Flickr
By the end of September, all students, faculty and staff will have access to Lynda.com, a self-teaching educational website with videos offering users the ability to learn skills at their own pace.
“In the spring and early summer of 2016, we put together a contract with Lynda that will allow all currently enrolled students, employees, faculty and staff to access the system,” said MTSU Associate Vice President for Information Technology Tom Wallace. “There will be a website where you can go, and there will be a link you click on … and all of Lynda’s material will be accessible to us.”
Lynda.com offers thousands of videos tutorials taught by industry experts that focus on cultivating users’ skills in software, creativity and business.
This is not the first time MTSU has used Lynda software on campus. The James E. Walker Library, Jennings A. Jones College of Business and the College of Media and Entertainment currently have or previously had a Lynda contract.
“The library … did not renew its contract this year, the College of Media and Entertainment let theirs go and the Jones College of Business will migrate its credited hours over to MTSU’s Lynda when their contract expires in December,” Wallace explained.
MTSU’s contract with Lynda will be available for the entire campus for the next three years.
“We have been working with all the departments so that they knew this was coming,” Wallace said. “[The] Vice President of Information Technology and CIO, Bruce Petryshak, was in the budget hearing meetings with the deans, President Sidney McPhee and the Provost.”
Anyone who uses Lynda will receive training completion certifications and validations of its online courses that remain valid even after graduation.
There are currently some email authentication issues that the school and Microsoft are working to fix together before the Lynda software can be fully accessible on campus, according to Wallace.
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