e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LINKEDIN CORPORATION

  • Why LinkedIn Matters

    A few folks have asked me to elaborate on why I think LinkedIn is the most interesting—and possibly the most consequential—company in ed tech.

    Imagine that you wanted to do a longitudinal study of how students from a particular college do in their careers, or the effect of social media for brick and mortar in a particular local geographical location for strategic placement of services that local market is lacking. In other words, you want to study long-term outcomes. How did going to that college affect their careers? Do some majors do better than others? And how do alumni fare when compared to their peers who went to other schools? Think about how you would get the data. The college could ask alumni, but it would be very hard to get a good response rate, and even then, the data would go stale pretty quickly. There are governmental data sources you could look at, but there are all kinds of thorny privacy and regulatory issues.

    There is only one place in the world I know of where bazillions of people voluntarily enter their longitudinal college and career information, keep it up-to-date, and actually want it to be public.

    LinkedIn. (more…)

  • LinkedIn: I Told You So (Sorta)

    In December 2012, I tweeted:

    https://twitter.com/mfeldstein67/status/276406235564220416

    At the time, Coursera was the darling of online ed startups. Since then, it has lost its way somewhat, while Lynda.com has taken off like a rocket. Which is probably one big reason why LinkedIn chose to acquire Lynda.com (rather than Coursera) for $1.5 billion. I still think it’s possible that they could acquire a MOOC provider as well, but Udacity seems like a better fit than Coursera at this point.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: LinkedIn is the most interesting company in ed tech.

  • LinkedIn Releases College Ranking Service

    I have long thought that LinkedIn has the potential to be one of the most transformative companies in ed tech for one simple reason: They have far more cross-institutional longitudinal outcomes data than anybody else—including government agencies. Just about anybody else who wants access to career path information of graduates across universities would face major privacy and data gathering hurdles. But LinkedIn has somehow convinced hundreds of millions of users to voluntarily enter that information and make it available for public consumption. The company clearly knows this and has been working behind the scenes to make use of this advantage. I have been waiting to see what they will come up with.

    I have to say that I’m disappointed with their decision that their first foray would be a college ranking system. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these sorts of things have zero utility, they suffer from two big and unavoidable problems. First, like any standardized test—and I mean this explicitly in the academic meaning of the term “test”—they are prone to abuse through oversimplification of their meaning and overemphasis on their significance. (It’s not obvious to me that they would be subject to manipulation by colleges the way other surveys are, given LinkedIn’s ranking method, so at least there’s that.) Second and more importantly, they are not very useful even when designed well and interpreted properly. Many students change their majors and career goals between when they choose their college and when they graduate. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 80% of undergraduates change their majors at least once, and the average student changes majors three times. Therefore, telling high schools students applying to college which school is ranked best for, say, a career in accounting has less potential impact on the students’ long-term success and happiness than one might think.

    It would be more interesting and useful to have LinkedIn tackle cross-institutional questions that could help students make better decisions once they are in a particular college. What are the top majors for any given career? For example, if I want to be a bond trader on Wall Street, do I have to major in finance? (My guess is that the answer to this question is “no,” but I would love to see real data on it.) Or how about the other way around: What are the top careers for people in my major? My guess is that LinkedIn wanted to start off with something that (a) they had a lot of data on (which means something coarse-grained) and (b) was relatively simple to correlate. The questions I’m suggesting here would fit that bill while being more useful than a college ranking system (and less likely to generate institutional blow-back).