Serendipity35

In 2015, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com and last fall they launched LinkedIn Learning which offers training in an online platform that was mostly based on content from Lynda.com.
If you use LinkedIn Learning, it is connected to your LinkedIn account. Therefore, it is not surprising that recently recommended courses from LinkedIn Learning have started to appear on the sidebar of all LinkedIn members pages. Like Facebook ads in the sidebar, the selections are based on your profile - this the case of LinkedIn, it is using the skills you have listed.
On my profile today under the heading "Add new skills with these courses," three suggestions which were all related to teaching online. That is an accurate area to suggest for me, though the "courses" listed were not appropriate to my current work or my current skill levels. I'm sure they are refining their recommendation engine daily.
LinkedIn Learning is priced similarily to what Lynda.com charged ($24.99/month if paid annually).
LinkedIn announced that it has reached 500 million members, so that potential audience and the personal/professional data users generally give LinkedIn is a valuable combination.

The new Secretary of Education, Betsy de Vos, was viewed with trepidation by many educators. They see her as an advocate of charter schools and not a champion of K-12 public schools. In higher education, it was unclear what her focus would be because she had no experience in that area.
In her first speeches, community colleges may have felt some relief as she praised community colleges noting their importance to President Trump’s plan of expanding vocational and technical education. While community colleges do provide career and technical education, most also have a mission to provide the foundation for students to transfer to four-year colleges. The views of de Vos and the administration on that are still unclear.
Career and Technical Education (CTE) is designed to equip students with skills to prepare them for viable careers in high-growth industries. According to the association for Career and Technical education (ACTE), the top 10 hardest to fill jobs include skilled trade positions. Healthcare occupations make up 12 of the 20 fastest growing occupations. There are one million jobs open in trade, transportation and utilities sectors and more than 300,000 jobs in manufacturing.
Middle-skill jobs that require education and training beyond high school but less than a bachelor's degree make up a significant part of the economy and workforce. 
But not all of that training requires a college. Career training centers and for-profit groups have taken on many of these skill areas, and that is why college educators fear that de Vos, as with public schools, will be more in favor of that private and for-profit approach rather than colleges.
In her speeches, de Vos did not touch on issues involving transfer students, although many enroll at community colleges planning to eventually transfer to a four-year institution. The themes of her comments match the priorities talked about by the administration and Republican lawmakers (like North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx, the chairwoman of the House education and the work force committee) which focus on facilitating vocational education, expanding the number of certificates awarded to students, and putting a greater emphasis on alternatives to the traditional model of a four-year college education.
De Vos noted that President Trump's 100-day action plan includes a call to expand vocational and technical education, and that he has called multiple paths for postsecondary education "an absolute priority" for his Administration.
Those multiple paths are unclear right now, and that uncertainty concerns many educators.

I keep getting emails from course and training providers (most are what we can call MOOCs) like edX and Coursera, and also from job sites like Glassdoor telling me about the most popular courses and skills on their sites.

Without comment, here is a partial list of ones that have been sent to me. I leave it up to you to draw conclusions about what this says about current learning trends.

The Science of Happiness

Conversational English Skills

Introduction to Project Management

Introduction to Linux

Introduction to Java Programming

The Science of Everyday Thinking

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

TOEFL® Test Preparation: The Insider’s Guide

Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel

Introduction to Computer Science

Python for Everybody

Python Programming  

Data Science

R Programming

Introduction to Project Management

Project Management

Analytics Management

TESOL Certificate: Teach English Now!

English Instruction

Business Analytics

Software Product Management

Product Management

Big Data

Hadoop

Digital Marketing

SEO Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social Media

Social Marketing

Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence   

Business Foundations

Harvard Square: Harvard University, Johnston Gate by Wally Gobetz on Flickr



Last fall, Anuar Lequerica, who has been writing about MOOC trends, wrote about "Harvard and the Rise of a Digital Ivy League" on class-central.com. It was apparent in 2011/2012 when the MOOC exploded into a much wider view that many of the "elite" universities were going to be the boldest experimenters. That's still true.

The "digital Ivy League" includes schools such as MIT, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan. Not sticking to the traditional American Ivy League list, you can include Delft University of Technology and some Australian universities.

And then there is Harvard. The Harvard name still carries a lot of weight and they have been very active in MOOCs. They have 80+ MOOCs taught by more than 120 faculty, with over 4.5 million enrollments from over 1.5 million unique course participants in 193 countries.

Harvard was a  co-founder the MOOC platform edX.

I found it very interesting that about a third of HarvardX MOOC learners self-identify as teachers. Teacher-as-student has been a trend since those early MOOC days. My first looks into MOOCs was to see what other professors teaching courses similar to my own were doing online.  Harvard has recognized that audience and has been developing tools to help teachers incorporate and effectively use MOOC content in their classrooms.

Harvard is also experimenting with offering their MOOCs along with support in community centers.

There are still many people, including myself, taking free or paid MOOCs as students in order to learn something new either to further our professional skills or just for personal interest in growth. This past month I have taken a course on building digital dashboards on the professional side, and a course on Scandinavian cinema for the personal side.

The MOOC has matured.