LinkedIn is bringing Lynda.com courses to its news feed and building a messaging bot

LinkedIn is finally bringing Lynda.com — the online education company it bought 18 months ago for $1.5 billion — into its news feed.

Beginning Thursday, LinkedIn will start recommending online courses for its members based on things like their jobs and their listed skills, and recommended courses shared by friends of colleagues. Users can take the course on LinkedIn, then add completed courses and new skills to their profiles after completion.

It’s the first time Lynda’s library of online courses has made its way into user feeds, but it doesn’t mean Lynda.com is going away; the site will stick around “for the foreseeable future,” said Tanya Staples, a senior director of content and production at LinkedIn, who joined the company via the acquisition.

LinkedIn announced the change Thursday at a press event at its new San Francisco high-rise, where the company and CEO Jeff Weiner also teased out a number of upcoming products. Among them: A new LinkedIn messaging bot that will help LinkedIn users schedule and arrange meetings.

The bot will pull info from users’ calendars to help find time for people to meet, then suggest physical meeting locations based on where the two people have met in the past.

It’s the first such messaging bot from LinkedIn, which is not known for having an advanced messaging product. (It didn’t even announce a text-like messaging feature until a year ago.)

But Weiner says that while LinkedIn isn’t going to build bots for the sake of building bots, there are more opportunities for the company around bots given LinkedIn’s recent sale to Microsoft.

“This is an area where we’re going to be able to do some really interesting things with Microsoft,” Weiner said. “Microsoft has been making some very significant investments in conversational computing, and bots are one of the elements of that that really bring it to life.”

What those bots will look like, or when you’ll actually see them, is still a mystery. LinkedIn didn’t share a launch date for its scheduling bot, but is already testing it internally.

LinkedIn Learning, on the other hand, is available and live starting Thursday. If you have a premium LinkedIn account, the new integration, called LinkedIn Learning, is included in your subscription. If you don’t, it’ll cost $29.99 a month.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via