ITS Offers Campus Community Access to Online Training Library

All Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff now have access to lynda.com, an online subscription library that teaches the latest software tools and skills through high-quality instructional videos taught by recognized industry experts.

Using your Wesleyan username and password, (see instructions for accessing Lynda.com) the campus community can access more than 1,400 training videos on a broad range of subjects, including photography, design, music and video, home computing, animation, and web design and development. Acquire comprehensive training in popular applications such as Microsoft Office for both PC and Mac and Adobe Acrobat Professional. New courses are added every week.

Wesleyan students, staff and faculty can access the lynda.com library 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week — even from an iPhone, iPad, Android device, or mobile phone—and watch entire courses or single tutorial videos when needed. Exercise files let users follow along with the instruction as they learn, and bookmarks help users keep track of what they’d like to watch.

Karen Warren, director of user and technical services, said Wesleyan has struggled with providing training to help staff stay current on their skills without requiring time away from the office. Students, she explained, have asked for resources to expand their own knowledge and ways to get additional hard skills training to augment their liberal arts education while here at Wesleyan. And faculty have been seeking to reduce instruction time on software skills.

“Lynda.com seemed to be the perfect solution by giving us a way to offer all of these things to our community,” Warren said. “We were able to integrate a single sign on so that the community can access from anywhere using their Wesleyan username and password.”

In addition, ITS is working on Moodle integration so faculty can easily assign specific units for their classes. The students would complete those units outside of class time reducing the amount of instruction time lost to teaching software.

Dave Baird, vice president for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, committed ITS funds for the effort. The Office of Human Resources provided additional funding to broaden opportunities for professional development.

“The investment is expected to pay back on numerous fronts – satisfied students better prepared for the job market, faculty who can maximize instruction time, and staff who can acquire skills to be more productive,” Warren said.