Introduction
Welcome to the September edition of our University of Edinburgh LinkedIn Learning newsletter. With the new Academic Year just around the corner, this edition explores how you can develop useful start-of-term skills, create a habit of learning with weekly goals, and utilise LinkedIn Learning's many features to develop key skills to enhance your career.
If you're new to LinkedIn Learning, don't worry, we'll cover how to create your free account and access the service, and we'll hear how Tracy Steinberg of the Digital Skills Design and Training team has utilised LinkedIn Learning content in her popular Developing Your Data Skills programme. Finally, we'll take a closer look at our LinkedIn Learning service usage statistics for the last 90 days.
You can find an alternative format version of this newsletter and links to past editions on the LinkedIn Learning newsletter section of our website.
Service Usage: Past 90 days
Here's a quick look at our University's LinkedIn Learning usage over the last 90 days (June/July/August).
- 1,783 total viewers
- 12,126 courses viewed
- 57,359 videos viewed
- 2,904 hours of content consumed
- 98 mins average viewing duration per user
The five most popular courses over the Summer period were:
Getting started with LinkedIn Learning
The University provides all staff and students with free access to over 20,000 courses and 250,000 videos through our LinkedIn Learning subscription. If you've yet to create your free account, follow the steps below to get started.
- Visit the LinkedIn Learning website and enter your University email address.
- When redirected to the University login page, enter your University User Number (UUN) and password.
- Decide whether or not to connect your personal LinkedIn account to your learning account (find out more about connecting to a LinkedIn account).
- Browse the home page or content library for courses.
If you're interested in finding out how to get the most out of LinkedIn Learning, visit our training, help and support page where you'll find video tutorials and booking links for our webinars.
New skills for the new Academic Year
Although the start of term is a busy period for many of us here at The University of Edinburgh, it's the perfect opportunity to take time to think about the skills you'll need to help you work or study more effectively in the year ahead - and that's where LinkedIn Learning comes in.
To help lighten the load, we've created two individual start of term content collections, carefully curated for new and existing staff and students. Click on the links below to get started (University login required).
Developing Your Data Skills Programme X Linkedin Learning: A Case Study
Tracy Steinberg runs a free six-month 'Developing Your Data Skills' programme for staff and students. Now in its seventh year, the programme is a self-paced, self-study development initiative offered by Tracy as part of the Digital Skills Design and Training Team. This article explores how Tracy has integrated LinkedIn Learning and its content into her highly successful program.
LinkedIn Learning plays a crucial role in Tracy's programme, serving as the data skills tutorial team thanks to its range of excellent instructors. These instructors come with outstanding credentials, either as academics or professionals from the data tech industry. With a vast amount of material available, simply typing 'data' into LinkedIn Learning’s search bar yields around 38,000 results, providing Tracy with ample content to learn from and build into her programme.
The programme consists of three capability levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced, and is divided into three main sections: introduction and programming, statistics and analysis, and data visualisation. Despite the complexity of the subject, Tracy has consistently found enough material to fill 90 hours of content each year for all three levels. Even when LinkedIn Learning updates its courses, the archived content remains available for those who have already started watching. Over time, Tracy has identified a ‘data family’ of popular presenters who are specialists in their respective areas and frequently used in the programme. Courses created by new presenters are also introduced to gauge learners’ preferences and determine if their content should be explored further in future years.
LinkedIn Learning’s bite-size videos make it easy to mix and match videos from various courses, and the entire library of over 250,000 videos is captioned and transcribed. The courses come equipped with exercise files and quizzes to allow for learner interaction, and the videos can easily be formed into collections. Better still, the course library is available in a range of different languages.
For students, Tracy places video and course links into a self-paced Learn Ultra course, and for staff, into the University's People and Money system. Tracy's programme is designed to be flexible, allowing it to be taken anywhere and at any time, something LinkedIn Learning helps with thanks to its iOS and Android mobile apps. The learner can also view their entire course viewing/completion history, and save content for future reference.
As well as embedding its content into her programme, Tracy also uses the platform to generate content ideas for short one-hour data webinars that run outside the main Data Skills programme.
Tracy has a deep appreciation for LinkedIn Learning and attributes much of the success of the Data Skills Programme to it. In Tracy's opinion, LinkedIn Learning is a wonderful platform to use and has become an important benefit offered by the University.
If you'd like to find out more about Tracy's programme then visit the Developing Your Data Skills section of our website.
set a target. Achieve success
The Weekly Goal setting on LinkedIn Learning allows you to set a target for yourself to spend a certain amount of time learning each week. You can choose a goal between 15 and 120 minutes. By setting and sticking to a weekly goal, you create a habit of learning that fits into your routine. This habit helps you stay consistent, improve your skills, and makes learning feel more manageable.
Whether you’re a student or staff member, setting a weekly learning goal can lead to steady progress and personal growth over time. If you're new to LinkedIn Learning or feeling overwhelmed by the start of term busyness, try starting small with a target of around 15/30 minutes. This will help make learning manageable and before you know it, you'll want to set a new target.
Try setting yourself a learning target today from within the Weekly Goal section of My Library (Me > My Library > Weekly Goal).
Join our community user group
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new LinkedIn Learning Community User Group events. These 45-minute webinars are open to University staff and students and will be held quarterly. The events will include product updates, live demonstrations of key features, guest presentations, and case studies. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions and share your thoughts and opinions about LinkedIn Learning.
Our second webinar is scheduled for Monday, September 30th, 2024, from 13:30 to 14:15. To attend, please book through the Event Booking platform using the link below.
We're here to support your learning journey
If you need help using LinkedIn Learning to improve your skills, your team's skills, or your students' skills, please reach out to us. We'd be happy to talk with you about incorporating LinkedIn Learning materials into your staff's professional development or taught courses.