e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

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

  • Some big personnel changes in LMS market

    In just the past week we have had three fairly significant people depart higher ed LMS companies. This really is turning out to be a bumpy ride as the market changes.

    • Ray Henderson announced last night that he is leaving his operational role at Blackboard (President, Academic Platforms and CTO) and is moving into a role with the Board of Directors. More info from Jay Bhatt’s post here and Ray Henderson’s post here. Michael is working on an e-Literate post with more information soon. Bill Flook covered in an article here.
    • Devlin Daley, one of the two founders of Instructure, the company behind the Canvas LMS, is leaving the company as of today. I talked to Instructure rep today who indicated that Devlin is looking to get back in to startup ed tech mode, whereas Instructure is becoming a larger company. I’ll write more of an analysis on this move soon. For now I’ll just say that it is extremely rare for a tech founder to leave a company that might go public within a year or two.
    • Al Essa, the Director of Analytics Research and Strategy for Desire2Learn, has left the company to join McGraw-Hill based on his LinkedIn profile. This is curious timing, given Desire2Learn’s major focus on analytics and the Student Success System this year.

    More to come.

  • Moodle has quietly become the dominant LMS for online service providers

    One subject that we have not covered much at e-Literate lately is the market position of Moodle. Given the significant LMS market changes over the past two years, it might be worth considering how institutions are adopting and using Moodle. In the US at least, there has been a significant change – whereas in previous years Moodle growth came primarily from institutions moving away from Blackboard, today much of the growth appears to have shifted to online service providers.

    Traditional US Market

    From 2006 – 2011 Moodle grew quickly in the US, both in terms of the number of users (students, faculty) and in terms of the number of schools adopting Moodle. This growth appears to have slowed considerably since 2011, although the data can be difficult to interpret since the system is open source – anyone can download for free and run Moodle, without even notifying Moodle headquarters or often the institution.

    While the data is inconclusive, my assumption is that traditional Moodle growth – institutions adopting the LMS as the campus standard, typically moving away from Blackboard or WebCT – has significantly slowed from its peak growth in 2009 – 2011. I’ll write a separate post on this subject in the future.

    New Growth Model

    While the traditional growth may have slowed, there is a market segment in the US where Moodle is quietly dominating – as the preferred learning platform (or LMS) for online service providers.

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  • Yup, Something (Good) Is Up at Blackboard

    When a company the size of Blackboard makes substantial organizational changes, it can be difficult to assess what is really going on. In the beginning, the stories tend to look similar. The old CEO…decides he wants to “spend more time with his family.” ((Or “hikes the Appalachian trail.” Pick your favorite euphemism.)) Well-known long-time employees leave the company en masse, some of their own volition and others not. It’s a common enough story trope, but it comes with two distinctly different endings. In one version, the company accelerates its downward spiral until it crashes spectacularly. In the other version, everybody is amazed at the company’s revitalization and they live happily ever after. It is nearly impossible to tell from the beginning of the story how it will end. All of the people leaving the company are, of course, unhappy and are likely to have negative opinions of what’s going on. And often they have valid criticisms, even in the stories that later come to happy endings. When an executive is trying to turn around a billion-dollar company quickly, a scalpel won’t do it. Some meat cleaver work is necessary. Collateral damage is inevitable even in the best of cases. So reports from former employees are interesting but don’t tell the whole story. Customers won’t see the results of the changes for a while, so there will be few clues there. In fact, they may see things get worse before they get better due to the chaos of the reorganization. And even the employees who are on the inside often don’t know what to think in the early stages.

    And so it has been with Blackboard. Up until recently, it has been very hard to tell which way the story will go. But I agree with Phil that we’re beginning to see early signs that we may get the happy ending here. I had an opportunity to visit Blackboard this week, and what I heard is very consistent with Phil’s recent experiences with them.

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  • This is not your father’s Blackboard

    Thanks for inviting me to this conference in Las Vegas, but I couldn’t help notice there is no After Party. Could you point me to the BbWorld conference instead? . . . What’s that? . . . Really?? Because I just came out of a product roadmap presentation where people were clapping, and not just for improved customer service but actual product usability and features that people want. . . . OK, OK, maybe you’re right . . . But the ex-WebCT folks were actually clapping the loudest. . . . WTH?

    Blackboard’s user conference this year was unlike any previous BbWorld I’ve attended. After the WebCT acquisition in 2006, the user conferences tended to be love-hate events (love the show and good times, hate the acquisition of competitors and tin ear). After the 2009 acquisition of ANGEL and subsequent changes in the management team, the user conferences moderated to ambivalence. Many of the product announcements were exciting in the abstract, but it was not clear that product roadmaps and new features were directly addressing client concerns.

    BbWorld 2013 was the first time that I’ve seen customers have such a positive response to Blackboard presentations. At least from a short-term roadmap perspective, the product changes presented this year seemed to hit the sweet spot of what current customers have been requesting. There was a sense of appreciation and relief from customers that Blackboard was listening and reacting to them. And that is no small feat.

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  • Desire 2 Improve

    Phil and I spent some time at Desire2Learn’s FUSION conference the other week, and it was an interesting experience. D2L had a couple of first-ever “analyst days” in which we and a few others got some intensive briefings on their products and strategies. (D2L isn’t the only company that is doing this sort of thing, but they’ve gone significantly further with it than the other LMS companies have so far.) It was a useful complement to the information that we get from walking the floor and talking to customers. And, as I’m sure they intended, we walked away from the experience feeling somewhat more positive about the company than we did going in—not so much because of the dog-and-pony show but because we were able to ask some hard questions to senior managers and, more often than not, get reasonable answers.

    Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers. These factors contribute significantly to their very high customer retention rate, even relative to the other LMS providers which, as a group, generally have fairly high retention rates. On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on. CEO John Baker, whose deeply ingrained sense of optimism enabled him to face down a patent lawsuit against serious odds, can be the worst offender in this regard. He is chronically overly optimistic about the state of the company’s products and the seriousness of any bumps in the road.

    In the last year or two, D2L has begun hiring some outsiders to bolster their technical team. They have benefitted from the hot tech market in Kitchener in general and to the collapse of RIM in particular, snapping up relatively senior Blackberry technical people. But it’s fair to say that they have been actively recruiting tech talent, both inside and outside of Kitchener, for a while now. For example, they hired Al Essa, whom I have known for over a decade since his time as CEO of MIT’s Sloan School of Business and his leadership in the dotLRN open source LMS community, to head up their analytics product line.

    It’s hard to tell for certain whether this hiring trend has accelerated since D2L received their investment, but it certainly appears like that might be the case. I’ll call out the example of Nick Oddson, the new VP of Enterprise Product Engineering, who came from OpenText (a serious enterprise content management company that you probably have never heard of). Nick impressed both Phil and me as a guy who knows his stuff and is a straight shooter about what the company is doing well and what it is not doing well yet. At some point we expect to write more about what Nick in particular is up to, because we think it’s pretty pivotal for the future of the company. For now, the point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.

    I’ll have a follow-up post specifically on their analytics products fairly soon.

  • BREAKING: Blackboard Uses “MOOC” in a Sentence

    This week we heard the news that Blackboard…um…they are…well…something about MOOCs. They like them, I think. Or something.

    Look, I get it. The company has realized that they need to take more direct action in response to the MOOC trend and, while they are not yet in position to make a specific product announcements, they want to let their customers know of their intention to do so. I don’t have a problem with that. But let’s please all get with the fact that the real story at the moment is Blackboard’s recognition that they need to have a MOOC strategy and not anything that they have…you know…actually done. At least, not anything that they have shown us yet. As far as I can tell, what Blackboard has announced is that they have an announcement. A newsworthy announcement for sure, but still just words. There is nothing MOOCish they have shown us this week that we haven’t already seen. It is hard to tell that from a casual read of most of the coverage.

    This is more a criticism of the ed tech press and blogosphere than it is of Blackboard. Transparency is good. I like it when a company’s executives tell us what they are thinking about and planning. There also was some substance to the announcement at a business level. We now know that Blackboard’s MOOC platform will be free and that it will not be CourseSites. That is new information. Sure, they could have been a little less hype-y about it—their press release does read like a product announcement—but really, they are well within bounds of normal corporate PR puffery. If we can’t read between the lines correctly, then shame on us.

    As Phil has pointed out, the collision course between MOOC providers and LMS providers is becoming a clear and significant trend, and Blackboard’s announcement is one data point confirming that trend. But at this point I have no idea what they think it means for them to play in the MOOC space, how serious they are about it, or whether their product entry will be interesting. We will have to wait and see what they do.

  • Coursera Raises $43m, LMS and MOOC Collision In Learning Platform Market

    Today Coursera announced their new round of fund raising, as reported at GigaOm:

    Just last year, online education startup Coursera raised $22 million in venture funding, but the Mountain View-based company is topping up its coffers once again.

    On Wednesday, the startup said it had raised $43 million in a Series B round of financing from an impressive and interesting group of investors, including education-centric investors GSV Capital and Learn Capital, well-known Russian investor Yuri Milner, the International Finance Corporation (which is the investment arm of the World Bank) and Laureate Education, a for-profit higher education provider formerly known as Sylvan Learning.

    Besides the size of the funding, what strikes me is that one of the emerging trends is that MOOCs are becoming more and more of a learning platform, adding many of the basic features of an LMS.

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