I spoke with Lynda Weinman today, and I knew she would have a good story to tell.

She is the Lynda of Lynda.com, an online digital library of educational videos and other training materials on tech topics such as Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and digital photography. Lynda.com grew out of a personal web site Weinman started as an art teacher so her students could check on her assignments. 

Around the same time, she wanted to teach her Art Center College of Design students how to publish their portfolios online. When she searched for information and books on how to do that, she couldn't find any. So she wrote one of the first books on web design in 1995: Designing Web Graphics (New Riders Press), which is in its fourth edition printing.

The book was a hit, and she was in demand for speaking and teaching, which took her away from home and her young daughter more than she wanted. So her husband asked: "Won't they come to you?" They rented a school computer lab over a spring break and held their first class, and they came. One student traveled from as far away as Vienna, Austria.

"That's when we realized the reach of our web site and the reach of the web," Weinman says.   

She moved the classes solely online in February 2002. Since then, the course catalog has grown from ten videos to more than 14,000, and the number of customers is in the tens of thousands. She helps craft course content. "We're not aggregators, we're content creators," Weinman says. One of the newest teachers (there are nearly 70) to come on board is Deke McClelland, a well-known author of books on Photoshop.  

Lynda.com's pricing is designed to be affordable to college students as well as long-time professionals. Weinman calls it the all-you-can-learn model, $25 a month for unlimited classes with no contract or $250 for a year subscription.

The company added closed captioning to some of its videos this year, and it will provide the in-the-box training disc with the next generation Adobe line of products. The company already is Quark's in-the-box training materials provider.

Weinman told me how hard it was to have her career unexpectedly take off when her daughter was young. But what strikes me about Lynda.com is the opportunity it affords parents today to take classes they need to move ahead in their work, or even change careers—all from home, on their own schedules, and at their own pace. It's a good deal.