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Abstract: UK higher education aims to equip students with the knowledge and skills required for future employment. It also endeavours to stimulate lifelong learning which would transform learners' lives and contribute to their continuing success. The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed all UK universities to online learning and assessment since March 2020. Accordingly, elearning is becoming increasingly more important and is likely to maintain high levels of adoption in future. LinkedIn Learning (LiL), became a subsidiary of LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, after it acquired Lynda.com in 2016. It is an e-learning platform offering over 15,000 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) delivered by industry experts in 7 languages. It is accompanied by exercise files and assessments, and transcripts for the video. A completion certificate for a LiL course will be posted on the learner's LinkedIn profile if they or their institution have a subscription to LiL. Aligned with the aim of UK higher education, LiL is designed to help learners enrich their learning, better their careers and support lifelong learning. Accordingly, LiL has become a popular MOOCs e-learning portal and been widely adopted by UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This paper reports ten 2nd year Master's students LiL experiences on an Advanced Business Research module in a UK HEI. LiL was used as a blended learning tool and formed part of the module's summative assessment. The embedded LiL courses corresponded to the module content and focused on technical tools and software applications widely applied in business research. They include Endnote reference management software, Survey Monkey and Microsoft Forms for online survey design, SPSS for quantitative data analysis and NVivo for qualitative data analysis. In this paper, 10 students' reflective portfolios on their completed LiL courses were analysed within NVivo. Constant comparative analysis was employed within a three-stage coding process in order to generate grounded theories. Results demonstrate students' positive e-learning experience and perceived LiL benefits in enhancing their research skills and employability. This research implies that LiL MOOCs could be used as an effective e-learning educational platform and blended learning pedagogy under the current Covid-19 pandemic situation and in the future.
Keywords: e-learning, blended learning, LinkedIn, LinkedIn learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), student learning experience
1.Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic has made a significant...