My Lynda.com experience

My God it’s been a long week.

But the weekend is almost upon us!

One of the things I’ll be doing this weekend, since I have shockingly little pocket money to spend in August (but I did get my Christmas ticket home, so I’d rather starve, totally worth it), is educating myself on Lynda.com 

I first heard of Lynda.com a couple of years ago through work as the University subscribed to it and all staff could use it for free. (if your employer/university does not offer free access to Lynda, you can have a free month trial and then pay a monthly or annual fee).

Lynda.com is an American online education company owned by LinkedIn and it’s been running since 1995.

I have to say I wasn’t that impressed back then as there was not much on what I was interested in. From what I can remember there were some courses on Photoshop, Photography, some generic managerial skills tutorials etc and basic Excel training type of courses.

I was recently browsing on Groupon’s training/online courses section but since I ran out of money I thought I’d give Lynda.com another go.

I was blown away by the sheer quantity and range of courses on offer from music writing, drawing, WordPress, advertising, singing, to more technical ones such as civil engineering and programming.

Courses can be filtered by authors, software used, subject, companies, duration, type but most importantly skill level. So is perfect for total beginners who want to learn a new skill or professionals who want to improve their existing knowledge or skills.

The course duration varies but most are between 3-5 hours. Each course consists of chapters and each chapter is broken down to video lessons that are about 2-10 minutes long.

All courses are run by industry experts and include demonstrations, exercise files and plenty of examples.

Every video lesson comes with a full transcript and there is a notes section where you can add your notes at any point of the lesson and is saved along the relevant part of the video so you can go back and re-watch it if you wish.

You also have the option to watch the lessons offline if you are on the go.

There was so much choice I didn’t know what to do first but I decided to start the series of vocal training run by the late Jeannie Deva, a famous LA celebrity vocal coach.

I have no aspirations to become a professional singer but I love singing along with my guitar and I always wanted to improve my voice but face to face singing lessons are painfully expensive for me so I was very excited when I found out that Lynda.com now offered vocal coaching courses!

I’ve completed the first series of lessons on Warm Ups and Cool Downs and I’m now on the second series learning how to sing songs better.

I absolutely love this lady from the way she talks, the techniques she invented, her intelligence and intuition  to her sense of humour.

In her first couple of lessons she demonstrates how to massage your neck and face to relax your singing/talking muscles-very useful-,she goes through a number of exercises on the piano with you and she often brings singers in to demonstrate the right way of performing each exercise.

I’ve learnt A LOT from her already, even basic physiology.

Did you know that the largest part of our lungs is actually on our back and not the front??? So if you want to fully fill your lungs with air when breathing pay attention to the movement of your ribs not your tummy/diaphragm.

And of course the infamous lip trills/lip bubbles came up.

Throughout the lessons she encourages you to send her videos with your progress which I was excited to do but unfortunately she died about 2 years ago. I would have loved to meet her…

But her legacy lives on through her incredible work and some of her lessons are also available on Youtube if you are interested.

After I complete the vocal training courses,  I’m starting a series of lessons on music theory, guitar playing (of course I can’t afford guitar lessons either!!) and also storytelling, that may be a great way to put my unlimited imagination to good use.

I’m well impressed with Lynda.com and I’m very happy I was given the opportunity to learn new skills for free through it.

LinkedIn you did well!

I’m super excited about my next post as it will all be about the 31 day Yoga Revolution programme I’m doing and the Yoga teacher running it, the incredibly funny and witty Adrienne.

Until next time!

Eleni