Productive Scholar: PULSe and Lynda.com

PULSe and Lynda.com

PULSe – the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Learn­ing Series is a new IT learn­ing oppor­tu­nity that sup­ports many of the tech­nolo­gies OIT makes avail­able.  Fac­ulty, staff, and stu­dents – any­one with a Prince­ton netID – can par­tic­i­pate in the live Fri­day after­noon webi­nars or access recorded tuto­ri­als on avail­able ser­vices such as Share­Point, Roxen, and Web­Space. PULSe main­tains a pres­ence on Twit­ter and Face­book where addi­tional resources are shared. In this Pro­duc­tive Scholar ses­sion, you will be intro­duced to the site, its fea­tures, and the iLinc web con­fer­enc­ing sys­tem that is used to present the weekly webinars.

Lynda.com is a California-based com­pany that offers online train­ing mate­ri­als on pop­u­lar soft­ware plat­forms, web appli­ca­tions, and con­sumer tech­nol­ogy. Some are short intro­duc­tions to a new tech­nol­ogy or soft­ware pack­age. Oth­ers are in-depth instruc­tions on soft­ware appli­ca­tions or suites.

PULSe

Lorene Lavora said that PULSe, an on-demand train­ing pro­gram and series, is made pos­si­ble because of an amaz­ing team of peo­ple with a deep knowl­edge of appli­ca­tions, and that her main goal in the series is to “push the enve­lope” of how tech­nol­ogy train­ing is done at Princeton. The series of tech­nol­ogy webi­nars, which focus on Microsoft Office prod­ucts, Share­point. and other Prince­ton University-supported prod­ucts. are short, to the point, and easy to digest, accord­ing to Lavora.

The sem­i­nars are avail­able to Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity com­mu­nity mem­bers, mean­ing that any­one with a NetID can watch pre­re­corded sem­i­nars. You can get to the PULSe site by vis­it­ing http://www.princeton.edu/pulse and log­ging in. Live PULSe sem­i­nars take place on Fri­days at 2 pm. You do need to have an iLinc account in order to see live sem­i­nars. You can get access to iLinc by vis­it­ing http://ilinc.princeton.edu and fol­low­ing the instruc­tions to gain access to the system. All con­ver­sa­tion between instruc­tors and par­tic­i­pants is cur­rently done by chat in iLinc. Instruc­tors also share video and other mate­ri­als related to the fea­tured soft­ware in each ses­sion via iLinc.

Accord­ing to Lavora, PULSe’s Face­book and Twit­ter accounts are a great way to start a con­ver­sa­tion about train­ing. She says that you can find out what PULSe sem­i­nars are com­ing up, ask a ques­tion about the soft­ware that the sem­i­nars sup­port, and get answers from the peo­ple who teach them.

Lynda.com

Janet Temos explained that Lynda.com, a pre­mium tech­nol­ogy train­ing site with videos and other resources, cur­rently has over 1000 courses and offers new courses every week. On Lynda.com, there are courses cov­er­ing a wide vari­ety of soft­ware includ­ing design appli­ca­tions from Adobe, pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware from Microsoft, cloud appli­ca­tions from Google, social sites such as Flickr & Face­book, and 3D appli­ca­tions such as Blender and 3DS Max.

You can see an exten­sive list of all sup­ported soft­ware at: http://www.lynda.com/software/all

Courses offered at Lynda.com

Prince­ton recently pur­chased a site license, and any­one with a valid Prince­ton Net ID can take part in the on-demand train­ing. Users are authen­ti­cated via CAS, the same sys­tem that allows access to Prince­ton ser­vices like Black­board. If you have a valid netid, sim­ply log in to Lynda at http://lynda.princeton.edu

Some things to note about Lynda:

In order to use the site, cook­ies are required. The cook­ies track your activ­ity and progress so that you can go into the site, do some train­ing, leave the site, and get right back to where you left off. If you add your cus­tomized user infor­ma­tion (name, etc.) you can get your own name on cer­tifi­cates of com­ple­tion, but your per­sonal infor­ma­tion is not required to use the ser­vice or to track your indi­vid­ual progress.

If you are not a Prince­ton NetID holder, it costs $25 per month to sign up as an indi­vid­ual user. This monthly fee will allow indi­vid­ual users to have unlim­ited access to train­ing mate­ri­als and videos.

Inter­net Explorer 8 users some­times have an issue with the browser cor­rectly ren­der­ing menu drop-downs. If this hap­pens to you, look for the compatibility-mode icon in the address bar, and click it. (Addi­tional infor­ma­tion about this issue can be found in the forth­com­ing Knowl­edge Base arti­cle on lynda.com)

Also note that if you log out from Lynda, you can­not log back in at lynda.com — you must use http://lynda.princeton.edu in order to take advan­tage of Princeton’s site license.

You can also set site pref­er­ences, such as whether you want to use Flash, Quick­time, or Win­dows Media, etc. to view movies.

Lynda.com media preferences

With Quick­time, for instance, you can increase the speed of the play­back in order to learn more quickly, as long as you don’t mind lis­ten­ing to the voice at a higher speed.

Other fea­tures of Lynda videos include closed cap­tion­ing, exer­cise files, and rec­om­mended pre­req­ui­sites. Lynda.com has a very active social media pres­ence on Face­book, YouTube and Twit­ter. You can also use your iPhone or iPad in order to access Lynda con­tent with the lynda.com App, avail­able in Apple’s App Store. Lynda also offers the Lynda Office rib­bon, which adds a Lynda tab to Microsoft Office appli­ca­tions. By installing this rib­bon, you get a new side­bar that offers application-contextual train­ing from Lynda.com.

If you would like more infor­ma­tion about Lynda at Prince­ton, or if you have ques­tions, please con­tact

Here is the link to the pre­sen­ta­tion for Lynda at Princeton.