This came across my feeds via Stephen Downes. Another good example of how “open” just means “open for business”:

It’s true that LinkedIn has been a learning platform for some time now, but open? It depends on how you define it – “it’s now announcing it has completely opened up its learning platform to external content partners.” That is, it is open in the sense that “customers who have purchased multiple content sources can offer their employees a single place to discover and access all of their organization’s learning content.” That puts LinkedIn (and by extension, Microsoft) squarely in the LMS and Learning platform marketplace. And it has a key advantage: data. “When your employees use LinkedIn Learning, the platform knows a lot about them that your typical LMS does not understand. It has their job history, their connections and their social profile and inferred skills.” But it is not in any sense that I would recognize “open”.

This announcement didn’t surprise me too much given the amount of spam that has been hitting my LinkedIn inbox recently. What has always dumbfounded me though, is that for all the talk of the data that LinkedIn has regarding users’ education history, employment history, “skills”/endorsements, etc. that their marketing is still so bad. I suppose the ads I receive for PhD programs (that are ridiculously expensive and based in other countries) makes some sense (I use the term ‘some’ loosely). But the elearning ads I get I just have to laugh at. Thank-you linked in for advertising services to me that I offer. Well done.

Hopefully this new program has real human inputs and that whatever comes of it works for those who use it. I won’t hold me breath though.