Why Lynda Is The Best Friend You Didn’t Know You Had
As an Instructional Associate for Newhouse, I help a professor teach multimedia storytelling. A big part of multimedia storytelling is done with video. An important part of video is editing. That’s when the video is really made, according to some. Therefore, before the IA-ship was given to me, Newhouse had a few questions for me. That went like this:
“Do you have experience with movie-production?”
“Of course!”
“And you know how to edit as well?”
“That’s when the movie is made, so yes, I do know how to edit.”
“And how familiar are you with Adobe Premier?”
“With what?”
As many Newhouse students will know, Newhouse works with Adobe Premiere, a software program for editing. Back home in Europe we prefer to work with Final Cut Pro, because back home we worship everything Apple. Don’t blame us, please.
Newhouse told me not to worry, as long as I made sure I was familiar enough with Adobe to explain the basics to Freshmen. I did not worry about Premier during Bootcamp because there where a million-and-one other things to worry about, but a week before I had to explain to Freshman how to use Premier, I did start to worry. Nightmares passed before my mind’s eye about angry students who had unanswered questions because their IA learnt the trade with a different program. I send an email to the professor I would be IA’ing for: what to do? My professor’s answer was short and simple: check out Lynda.com.
Lynda is a training website that offers a wide array of courses for several entry levels. There are courses about design, technology and business. A few examples are advanced SEO, Photoshop for beginners and how to make your blog marketable. Needless to say, the site offers everything one needs to know about Premier.
Premier was of enormous value when I prepared for my IA-ship, but I think the website is one of the best tools out there for every communication professional-to-be.
The site was founded by Lynda Weinman, who had worked as a special-effects animator on movies such as RoboCop 2 and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. She also worked as a professor of digital design. Weinmann is dubbed as ‘the mother of the internet’ because of her career in e-learning. Due to the popularity of Lynda.com, LinkedIn bought the site in 2015 for 1.5 billion dollars in cash and stock.
Every other article written about how to land a job as a communication graduate mentions that the industry is changing ever so rapidly and that no one really knows how that will play out. For those of us who want to be part of this industry, having a broad scope of skills is more important now than it has been in any time of the past. Lynda.com is an excellent tool for doing this. And for us Newhouse students, it’s free of charge.
