e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.

  • No, Blackboard Report Did Not Conclude That Online Classes Are “A Poorer Experience”

    I’m seeing a lot of chatter online about the recently-released Blackboard report and this slide in particular:

    Bb Insights

    Foundational Insights

    1. When students take a class online, they make a tacit agreement to a poorer experience which undermines their educational self worth.
    2. Students perceive online classes as a loophole they can exploit that also shortcuts the “real” college experience.
    3. Online classes don’t have the familiar reference points of in-person classes which can make the courses feel like a minefield of unexpected difficulties.
    4. Online students don’t experience social recognition or mutual accountability, so online classes end up low priority by default.
    5. Students take more pride in the skills they develop to cope with an online class than what they learn from it.
    6. Online classes neglect the aspects of college that create a lasting perception of value.

    To make matters more interesting, the next slide elaborated on insight 1), stating:

    Most students who enroll in an online class recognize and express that they are agreeing to a lesser experience.

    Did Blackboard just commit an act of unintentional honesty acknowledging that students don’t like online courses in general? That would be quite the headline. But it would not be accurate. (more…)

  • Previous LMS For Schools Moving to Canvas in US and Canada

    During the most recent quarterly earnings call for Instructure, an analyst asked an interesting question (despite starting off from the Chris Farley Show format).

    Corey Greendale (First Analysis Securities Corporation):  Awesome. A couple of other things on the, primarily on the Higher Ed space but I guess on education space, there’s a whole lot of couple questions about the competitive environment. When you’re and I don’t know if you will ever get into this level of granularity but when you got competitive wins against the Blackboard, are those predominantly from legacy ANGEL, are you getting those wins as much from Learn as well.

    Josh Coates (CEO of Instructure):  A lot of them are from Learn. Most, you know I don’t have the stats right off the top of my head. A lot of the ANGEL and WebCT stuff is been mopped up in the previous years and so, what’s left the majority of what’s left is Learn and our win rate against Blackboard it continues to be incredibly high, not just domestically but internationally as well.

    In fact, I think most of three out of the four international schools that we announced in this earnings where Blackboard Learn replacements, so yes Learn’s getting it.

    The question gets to the issue of whether Canvas is just picking up higher education clients coming off of discontinued LMSs (Angel, WebCT, etc) or if they are picking up clients from ongoing platforms such as Blackboard Learn. Beyond the obvious interest of investors and other ed tech vendors, this issue in general affects higher education institutions going through a vendor selection – for the system in consideration, are there many other schools considering the same migration path?

    Thanks to the work we’ve been doing with LISTedTECH and our new subscription service, we can answer this question in a little more detail. One of the charts we share shows higher education migrations over the past five years in the US and Canada. (more…)

  • Our LMS Subscription is Available Today

    Today we are pleased to announce that our LMS subscription service is available for purchase. As promised, we have kept the promotion on the blog to a minimum, providing details instead to people who specifically sign up for the mailing list. But since today is the big unveiling, it seems appropriate to tell you all a little bit about it and what it means for where we are going with the blog and our work.

    The subscription is called “e-Literate Big Picture: LMS.” As you might guess from the title, there will be other “e-Literate Big Picture” subscriptions. Each of these will provide regular updates and in-depth analysis that go beyond the free analysis that we will continue to provide here on the blog, focused particularly on helping campuses make good decisions about how to evaluate, acquire, implement, and support educational technology in ways that will have the most positive impact for students and faculty. They will extend the work of the blog with analysis that is more actionable.

    In the case of this first subscription, we have been able to augment our analysis of the LMS  market with data and analytics support from our partner LISTedTECH. Their database contains information on LMS selections of more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, plus thousands of more worldwide. The database goes well beyond who is using which LMS today, as it also contains information on LMS migrations (decommission, implementations, pilots, etc) over the last 15 years. This information has given us an unprecedented chance to both test hypotheses we’ve had about the LMS market as well as form new ones. The bottom line is that we have gained insights into how the LMS market is changing that we believe are new. (more…)

  • A Retrospective on Implementing Common Course Management Systems

    At e-Literate we mostly avoid blogging about our consulting work through MindWires Consulting, but we have an opportunity with our work for California’s Online Education Initiative (OEI) to share information with the higher education community on a topic of growing importance. The OEI is California Community College System’s approach to help individual colleges collaborate with their online courses and programs, including a OEI Course Exchange to be launched this Fall in pilot mode that will “allow students to register for online courses across participating colleges without requiring students to complete separate application and matriculation processes”.

    Last year we at MindWires helped OEI select a Common Course Management System (yes, they use the CMS language instead of LMS) by providing market analysis and facilitating the group decision-making process. This year they asked us to review similar efforts at other consortia in the US and Canada. The point of a CCMS is not the technology platform itself but rather what the common e-learning infrastructure could allow a consortium to do – address issues such as course redesign, professional development, student support, etc. Even though the OEI was based on selecting a common system from the beginning and has experienced significant adoption already, there is still a great deal of value in learning from others that have gone before. We are releasing the result of this work with the report – “A Retrospective on Implementing Course Management Systems: Motivations, Benefits, Drawbacks and Recommendations“. (more…)

  • Blackboard CEO’s First 100 Days: Reorganization and Learn Ultra Updates

    Just over four years after Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company hired Bill Ballhaus as its new CEO at the beginning of January. 100 days in, Ballhaus is starting to make changes to the organization and providing some insights into future corporate directions.

    The most significant change is a reorganization that combines strategy, product management and marketing in one group under Katie Blot. In an interview Michael and I had with Ballhaus and Blot earlier this week, they described the primary motivation for the organizational change as the need to more tightly align those functions. Also significant is that this change means the departure of Mark Strassman, SVP Product Marketing & Management, and Tracey Stout, SVP of Marketing & Sales Effectiveness. Blackboard provided the following statement. (more…)

  • State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Spring 2016 Edition

    This is the eighth year I have shared the LMS market share graphic, commonly known as the squid graphic, for (mostly) US higher education. The original idea remains – to give a picture of the LMS market in one page, highlighting the story of the market over time. The key to the graphic is that the width of each band represents the percentage of institutions using a particular LMS as its primary system.

    This year marks a significant change based on our upcoming LMS subscription service. We are working with LISTedTECH to provide market data and visualizations. This data source provides historical and current measures of institutional adoptions, allowing new insights into how the market has worked and current trends. This current graphic gets all of its data from LISTedTECH. Where previous versions of the graphic used an anchoring technique, combining data from different sources in different years, with interpolation where the data was unavailable. Now, every year’s data is based on this single data source.

    This graphic has been in the public domain for years, however, and we think it best to keep it that way. In this way we hope that the new service will provide valuable insight for subscribers but also improve what we continue to share here on the e-Literate blog.

    Since we have data over time now and not just snapshots, we have picked the end of each year for that data. For this reason, the data goes through the end of 2015. We have 2016 data but chose not to share partial-year results in an effort to avoid confusion.

    LMS_MarketShare_20160316

    A few items to note:

    • As noted in previous years, the fastest-growing LMS is Canvas. There is no other solution close in terms of matching the Canvas growth.
    • Blackboard continues to lose market share, although the vast majority of that reduction over the past two years has been from customers leaving ANGEL. Blackboard Learn lost only a handful of clients in the past year.
    • While the end-of-life occurs next year, Pearson’s has announced LearningStudio’s end-of-life for the end of 2017.
    • With the new data set, the rapid rise and market strength of WebCT becomes much more apparent than previous graphics.
    • There is a growing line for “Other”, capturing the growth of those systems with less than 50 active implementations as primary systems; systems like Jenzabar, Edvance360, LoudCloud Systems, WebStudy, Schoology, and CampusCruiser.
    • While we continue to show Canvas in the Open Source area, we have noted a more precise description as an Open Core model.

    For a better description of the upcoming LMS subscription service, read this post and / or sign up for more information here.

  • Signup For More Information On LMS Subscription Service

    As we roll out our upcoming LMS subscription service here at e-Literate (see Michael’s post for initial description), we suspect that many of the e-Literate readers will be interested, but not all. We value the community here at e-Literate and want to ensure that the blog site itself remains as it’s always been – ad free, uncluttered, and with the same rough amount and breadth of content and discussions.

    To help maintain the blog site’s feel, we have created a second email subscription for those people who would like more information on the LMS subscription service – when it’s going to be available, what the reports will look like, summaries of LMS analysis from the report and curated from the blog site, etc. You should see this new signup on the top of the right column in the desktop view, right under the signup for e-Literate posts. We will also include the form within posts that are relevant to analysis of the LMS market.

    We are not going to automatically add current e-Literate subscribers to this new list, so if you’re interested in learning more on the service and getting content updates, sign up for the new subscription at this link.

    Update: I apologize for any confusion as we test the signup button. The fields embedded in the post were not working in all cases, so we have replaced with a link to a web signup page. Thank you for your patience as we fix any remaining issues.