How Curtin University is accelerating skill-building at scale by personalising the LinkedIn Learning experience for its students

Curtin University is an innovative, global university known for its high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and commitment to preparing learners for jobs of the future. Ranked in the top one per cent of universities worldwide in the highly regarded Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2021, Curtin runs physical and virtual campuses across Australia, Dubai, Malaysia, Mauritius and Singapore.

The digitally-fluent university introduced LinkedIn Learning (then Lynda.com) in 2015 as a supplementary resource for its School of Design & Art students. Today, with LinkedIn Learning available to its staff, faculty and Department of Humanities students, Curtin is exploring new ways to personalise the learning experience even more — by co-creating content in partnership with LinkedIn Learning.

Timely, targeted and flexible for students

Curtin’s baseline use case for LinkedIn Learning is to provide flexible on-demand support to augment students’ diverse learning needs.

To illustrate, Joel Louie, Head of Digital Experience & Interaction Design, offered this example: “In the areas of Design & Art, students need to develop a variety of skills, which includes software proficiency, as well as other discipline-specific hard and soft skills. As lecturers, we leverage LinkedIn Learning to put together curated playlists that augment the learning done both inside and outside of class time, allowing students to extend their knowledge base at their own pace and with great flexibility.”

The success of this approach is based on an important premise: that both Curtin and its students are satisfied with the quality of LinkedIn Learning’s content — relevant to their needs, delivered by credible industry professionals, and regularly updated. In fact, as the university sees a greater shift to online learning, the number of students active on LinkedIn Learning has more than doubled in the past 12 months.

This widespread adoption of LinkedIn Learning within Curtin has enabled a paradigm shift in awareness — from LinkedIn Learning as a curated content library to a customised learning resource that carries Curtin’s unique voice. The partners did this in July 2021 when they co-created customised learning paths to support the university’s Creative Jam held in conjunction with NAIDOC Week 2021.

A creative collaboration for NAIDOC Week

The Curtin Creative Jam is an annual extra-curricular event at Curtin that engages students in a 5-day hackathon style event to leverage Design for Positive Social Change. In 2021, the Curtin Creative Jam ran in conjunction with NAIDOC Week to bring greater awareness and a wider design-based student/staff engagement towards the theme of “Heal Country!”.

In the 2021 Creative Jam, Curtin Global students from a range of disciplines were invited to embrace First Nations’ cultural knowledge and understanding of country. Working in teams, their challenge was to design digital interactive experiences that would help to build understanding between Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and those of other cultural backgrounds.

To provide guidance along the way, Curtin staff worked with Creative Jam industry partners LinkedIn Learning, Adobe and Unity Technologies to deliver tailored, synchronous workshops.

“We filmed each workshop in the Creative Jam and uploaded them to LinkedIn Learning. We then layered these recordings with curated LinkedIn Learning content to create customised learning paths. This provided participants with quick access to the resources that they needed to bring their creative ideas to life,” shared Joel.

"Throughout the 2021 Curtin Creative Jam, it was clear to us that in order to turn our best intentions into real impact, we needed to inspire our students with purpose and passion, while arming them with skills and knowledge. LinkedIn Learning was fantastic in supporting this goal - students were able to realise their creative solutions within a short timeframe through our support, and by leaning into LinkedIn Learning's skills training library.” - Matt Reed, Project Manager (Digital Projects), Humanities Faculty.

The success of this collaboration has opened the door for deeper conversations between Curtin and LinkedIn Learning on how the university can bring more proprietary content onto the platform and create a powerful and empowering learning experience for its students.

“When we started with LinkedIn Learning, we used its ready content primarily as a scaffolding to help our students build skills adjacent to our curriculum. Now, we want to personalise the experience more by weaving the Curtin voice directly into the platform. We test bedded this idea during our 2021 Creative Jam, collaborating with the LinkedIn Learning team to co-create customised learning paths for participants. The response was fantastic."