Contextual Analysis
Our contextual inquiry into the subject of UMD students’ low participation in LinkedIn Learning has provided us with enough data to conduct comprehensive evaluation. The results of this analysis enabled us to arrive at the conclusion that the main reason why UMD students don’t fully utilize the benefit of free access to LinkedIn Learning is not that they don’t find it useful, but rather because the majority of students simply are not aware of it. Thus, the access to information about it is a clear underlying problem which we want to find a solution for. In the context of different channels that students use to conduct information seeking (work activities) our observation led us to believe that the most effective influence towards solving the problem at hand would need to come from UMD as a multilayered institutional client, which would include administration directed engagement of faculty (for example, in routine inclusion of LinkedIn Learning related information in class Syllabus material), as well as, UMD’s Career Center, each UMD school’s student advisory staff and IT division personnel collectively contributing towards student-center information campaign on the benefits of free LinkedIn Learning.
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Our end users are UMD Students, faculty and non- faculty members. LinkedIn Learning will provide them with broader access to on-demand learning videos and resources to help build and improve their professional skills. Access to LinkedIn Learning is available for free for our end users. With LinkedIn Learning, our end users get unlimited access to choose from more than 5,000 video tutorials covering business, creative and technology topics, personalized recommendations to explore the most in-demand skills based on experience, expert instructors to learn from industry leaders, all in one place, convenient learning to access courses when it’s convenient, from any desktop or mobile device, and helpful resources to reinforce new knowledge with quizzes, exercise files and coding practice windows. When logging in to LinkedIn Learning for the first time, our end users will use their UMD login information signup and have the option to integrate with a LinkedIn social network account. All other functionality should be transparent to end users.
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Right now, we are starting to develop a higher level mission for our LinkedIn Learning project. We want to tell UMD Students, faculty and non- faculty members that LinkedIn Learning is free for everyone. We are looking for time options to schedule an appointment with the Director of the Center at the UMD Career Office. We need their help to introduce the benefits of LinkedIn Learning for all UMD Students, faculty and non- faculty members. Based on our data collection, many students value the benefits of taking online courses and are not aware that LinkedIn Learning courses are included in UMD. We also plan to make a school originated email announcements on either Testudo or ELMS main page to convey to UMD faculty and students the information about the LinkedIn Learning being available to them.
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LinkedIn Learning provides many benefits to the users one of the greatest benefits is that users can gain knowledge about what they want to learn more about through courses made from professionals and instructors. LinkedIn Learning services offer more than five thousand courses about advanced topics from different topics. And while in a university, students have free access to the services so that they can take these courses at no additional cost. After completing courses on LinkedIn Learning, students get a LinkedIn certificate that they can put on their LinkedIn profile. This brings you an advantage when you apply for jobs on LinkedIn.
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Our project is a journey, and we will want our client to see that journey with us. So for the project we clearly know who our clients are which are UMD Students, faculty and non- faculty members. LinkedIn Learning will provide them with broader access to on-demand learning videos and resources to help build and improve their professional skills. Access to LinkedIn Learning is available for free for our clients, Clients are the driving force behind any project. Clients are the ones who define the project specifications and analyze the finished product for meeting the defined specifications. This is why we will be needing their feedback as we finish this project, so we don’t have any shocks during the end of the project. Some ways our team will approach our clients for feedback throughout the project, make clients understand why they need to share feedback. We will explain to them that their feedback will be important, so we save time, and help to prioritize features and tasks better. Another way is discussing features with clients before starting to work on them, we will need to decide on what features the project would include and is greatly done when project scope is being defined. Share client feedback with the entire team. We should share the issues reported by clients with the entire team and see how we can resolve them.
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By clearly defining the part that is causing the problem for our project, it was not hard for us to choose this particular group from all the possible ones. As the problem includes people not knowing the existence of LinkedIn Learning services, and that it is included in the university tuition, the problem is clear that people need to be informed about this service. Other parts such as “School” or “LinkedIn Learning” might be not doing enough action to inform students about it, but that is not the core so we went with students.