• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, April 10, 2015

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that online learning has huge potential, but it does take gumption, persistence and execution. Those qualities paid off big time yesterday for Lynda Weinman and her husband, Bruce Heavin, when LinkedIn acquired lynda.com, the online learning site they founded 20 years ago, for $1.5 billion.

It is the business social networking site’s “largest acquisition to date,” CEO Jeff Weiner says in a video posted on Slideshare, and “incredibly important in realizing our vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. The way we are going to do that is by developing the world’s first Economic Graph — which means that we’re going to digitally map the global economy.”

See the video for Weiner’s rather ambitious specifics, starting with its having “a profile for every member of the global workforce.”

As for Weinman, who writes that she secured the domain lynda.com in 1995 “as a sandbox from which to teach web publishing,” the story is “one only possible in the Internet age” and the acquisition “proves just how much people have come to value and embrace new ways to learn new skills.

“Today, Lynda.com focuses on a number of subjects, like management skills, programming and video. It sells subscriptions that start at $25 a month,” report Michael J. de la Merced and  Mike Isaac in the New York Times. “The company collected more than $150 million in revenue last year and has turned a profit since 1997.”

Two-thirds of that revenue comes from individual subscriptions and one-third from enterprise customers, report the Financial Times’ Hannah Kuchler and Murad Ahmed, and the company, with about 500 employees, has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of about 40% since 2001.

“More than 5 million licenses have been sold to enterprise and professional users with customers including more than half of the Fortune 50, all of the U.S. military and all of the Ivy League colleges,” Kuchler and Ahmed write.

Re/code’s Kurt Wagner expands on three of the “many” reasons why LinkedIn “broke the bank” for Lynda.com. In short:

·      LinkedIn aims to connect people with job opportunities; Lynda.com aims to connect people with an education about those jobs. 

·      LinkedIn is keen on getting college students onto its platform,

·      It gives people yet another reason to spend time on LinkedIn. 

Wagner’s piece includes an embedded interview that Re/code co-executive editor Kara Swisher conducted with Weinman — “a phenomena 18 years in the making” — soon after the company had gotten its first big chunk of VC funding in 2013.

In a feel-good profile on the Wall Street Journal site, Rachel Emma Silverman and Nikki Waller write that Weinman and Heavin first taught courses and filmed videos on Web development at a continuing education school they started in the resort town of Ojai, Calif., with Weinman having been heavily influenced by the writing of alternative educator A.S. Neill.

“When rainstorms would wash out the road to Ojai, she would put up stranded vendors, teachers and employees at funky local inns, ensuring they had meals and were comfortable,” Mike Descher, who helped equip their classroom with Apple computers and later consulted for the company, tells the reporters.

“She just treated everybody like family,” says Descher — a quality he says enabled her to attract talent from cutting-edge companies such as Apple and Adobe.  

Meanwhile, Coursera — the online education company that instantly exploded in popularity when it launched free college courses in August 2012 — has experimented with several ways to balance its books even as it has proven to be a master of its own advice in raising venture capital.

Coursera announced in February that it was partnering with the likes of Google, Instagram and Shazam to design special projects for students pursuing its Specializations — which “are like mini-majors” and “comprise several courses within a given subject, such as data science,” as Issie Lapowsky reported at the time for Wired.com.

“Is Coursera profitable? Probably not,” Dhawal Shah concluded last October on EdSurge.com in a detailed examination of different revenue streams it has experimented with. “But with decent revenues and plenty of money in the bank, Coursera has plenty of breathing room to continue growing its existing business models and trying out different ones to bring returns to the VCs who have invested so heavily in it.”

All it takes is gumption, persistence and execution — and a willingness to share the knowledge (for free … on a 10-day trial).