This is another one I’ve been meaning to post for some time. Last year, I wrote a post called Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle that talked about changes in LMS market share among American community colleges according to a survey done by the Instructional Technology Council. The headline number was that Blackboard’s market share in this customer group was declining rapidly, with Moodle being the primary beneficiary and ANGEL being the secondary beneficiary.
Blackboard’s downward trend continues. According to this year’s study, Blackboard’s market share among ITC’s constituents is 59%, down from 77% percent the previous year. There was a slight drop in market share for the Blackboard platform, but most of it was for WebCT. It looks like Blackboard is failing to hold on to the community colleges that are being forced to migrate off WebCT as it approaches its end of life.
This year is something of a mirror image of last year’s results in the race for the #2 spot. ANGEL zoomed to the top, more than doubling their market share to over 20%. (It’s hard to tell the exact number from the graph in the report.) This is the first time I’m aware of that any non-Blackboard LMS has achieved market share in any U.S. segment that pushed so far into the double digits. The third place, Moodle, is up to about 11%, making ANGEL the clear front runner as the replacement for WebCT, particularly Campus Edition, which has had a lot of market share in the community colleges. (It looks like something close to two thirds of community colleges in the survey who left WebCT in the last year moved to ANGEL.) All the other entrants are at 5% or below.
Out of curiosity, how is it that Blackboard can sue Desire2Learn but not a company like Angel? What is preventing Blackboard from attacking all other corporate competitors?
As far as I know, nothing prevents them on a legal basis. For whatever reason, Blackboard have decided that it is in their interest to go after Desire2Learn and not the others.
My observation is that Bb is going after D2L because D2L represents the biggest threat in the large school / state consortium segment of the market. Losing share at the low end of the market (to Angel or Moodle) is OK as long as they can hold onto the lucrative upper end of the market. I believe Michael reported here that Bb even indicated part of their strategy is to focus on larger accounts and increase spend (and penetration of their full suite of software) at those accounts. D2L was having success with state-wide deals and securing business with many large institutions. Hence the attacks. It will be interesting to see who is next. For instance, what happens when a system like Sakai gains even more inroads into these large institutions? How will Bb react when their bread-and-butter accounts start falling to the competition?
John, I think Blackboard just answered your question today.
Bb may be able to offer real value items to this merger, but price, legal battles, and customer support will not be among those positive assets. ANGELS beware.
Bob
Bb will run itself out of the market soon enough. Schools are getting tighter budgets and soon LMSs will be free software populated by teacher generated content and the market will disappear. It’s like the font market from the 1980’s. fonts were 100s of dollars apiece now there are sites that give them away. Same will be true for LMSs. Give it a while and colleges will cut their spending so close to the bone that Sakai and Moodle will look like luxuries. Bb is basically walking the plank. They just want to get as much market share as possible to translate into dollars before the lank runs out.