Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

A Note on Data Used for LMS Market Analysis
Recently Martin Dougiamas of Moodle has questioned our data analysis for the LMS market. In some useful notes posted at Moodle.com on two recent Future Trends Forums hosted by Bryan Alexander:

Bryan finished the Future Trend Forum by asking for Martin’s thoughts on the recent article by Phil Hill titled: “Whither Moodle?” [edited] which speculated that Moodle’s growth is slowing down and hitting a plateau.

Martin commented that is not the case from what he is seeing and that a lot of the information contained in the article is US-based where there a lot of more LMS vendors and venture capitalists building learning platforms.

While this description from Martin is inaccurate, the issues raised are representative of some of the questions we occasionally get about our data for our LMS market analysis service. I think it would be useful to share a deeper description in public of how our partners at LISTedTECH collect and organize the underlying data.

What We Measure

The market data are organized in a dataset that captures system usage on a per higher education institution basis. For most schools, a campus is equivalent to an institution. But there are also cases where there multiple campuses per university (e.g. University of Minnesota system with five campuses, or DeVry University with dozens of campuses) and the LMS decision is made at the system level. In these situations, one decision will lead to multiple institutions listed in the data. In the US, the definition of an institution is guided by unique identifiers in the Department of Education’s IPEDS data, and each region or even country has its own way of defining institution.

The dataset goes beyond “school X uses system Y”, as it also includes dates of implementation and decommission, usage as primary or secondary system (there may be more than one system in use at a school), and hyperlinks to the public information documenting a system selection or usage. The definition of institutions includes information about its sector (public two-year, private non-profit four-year, etc) as well as student enrollments.

How We Measure

Looking deeper at LMS selection, there are multiple layers of data gathering at different intervals. Some of the sources:
- Extensive search engine notification such as Google Alerts on product keywords in multiple languages;
- URL and domain scrapers looking for system information at official school websites; and
- Targeted human-directed searches.
Each new data point is verified by someone using the associated hyperlinks tied to selection or usage data.

Our North American data is essentially saturated, in that we know the vast majority of degree-granting institutions based on US Department of Education data or Canadian provincial governmental data. We have well above 90% of all schools in the dataset.

For the global regions outside of North America, we are building up the dataset and do not have saturated coverage yet. For example, in Europe we estimate that we have 60 – 75% of institutions. We have less than that in Latin America and more than that in Oceania.

Where feasible, we include on-the-ground subjective coverage by visiting the global regions, testing theses, finding out unique context, and finding local sources who can provide QA to our data.

Besides our home base of North America, we have made multiple trips to Europe and Latin America thus far, and we are currently arguing about who gets to visit Australia and New Zealand.

We plan to expand coverage to additional regions as we develop at least 30% coverage of institutions and have time to do additional research to back up our analysis.

Degrees of Uncertainty

Because higher education data is lumpy and based on extended implementation times, we offer the following caveats:
- Market share information provided in percentages and trends are more reliable than absolute counts outside of North America. When we do provide absolute numbers, we advise caution for readers or subscribers to not over-interpret the absolute numbers, at least without us providing additional details to keep the data in context.
- We typically separate North American data from Rest of World data (Europe, Latin America, Oceania) to avoid problem of North America numbers dominating aggregates and obscuring important regional differences.
- When we have system usage information but do not have accurate implementation dates (per month or quarter), we assign these system records to June. Therefore the summer data for new systems will appear artificially high. We currently have implementation dates for approximately 75% of the listed LMS records.
- Put another way, annual data is more reliable (i.e. without additional data collection noise) than half-year or quarterly data. The more-granular data is provided to certain subscribers, but we take great care in attempting to describe sources of “lumpiness” in the data that should be understood for any analysis.
Overall, we have LMS data for 4,523 institutions in the US and Canada and 8,824 institutions worldwide.

Back to the Future (Trends)

To see these issues with an example, consider the updated chart of new implementations that led to the Future Trends Forum discussion described above.

What is relevant to the dataset for this chart:
- The data is based not on North American data – it is based on data from Europe, Latin America, and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding island countries).
- The data comes from public sources per institution as described above and does not come from vendors;
- The data is for primary systems – the official campus LMS; and
- The caveats listed above should apply. Note that we identified a new trend early in 2017 (collapse of Moodle new implementations) that we can update with data through 10 months of the year – the data today is more solid than it was in early summer.
I hope this description will answer some of the questions people have asked about our data.
November 4, 2017
State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Fall 2017 Edition
Now that we’re past the 2017 WCET conference and headed to the EDUCAUSE conference, let’s look at updates on the institutional LMS market for North America (US and Canada). Last year we started our LMS market analysis service, where we are working with LISTedTECH to provide market data and visualizations, and our fall report for subscribers will be released in about a month. Data for 2017 presented below goes through October 1 of this year.

We present the data “by institutions”, with market share as a percentage of the total number of institutions using each LMS as a primary system, and “by enrollments”, where we scale the institutions by their total enrollment. The latter better captures the business of the LMS market, since most licensing deals are based the number of students. We have also included data from Fall 2016 by institutions for comparison purposes.

Some notes on the market share as defined by percentage of institutions:
- In terms of new selections the market continues to be a two-horse race recently with Canvas by Instructure and Brightspace by D2L as the only two solutions with material gains in market share. Canvas grew from 17% to 21% , and Brightspace from 11% to 13%, of the market.
- Outside of the big four – Blackboard Learn, Canvas, D2L Brightspace, and Moodle – no other system has more than 3% of the market measured either by percentage of institutions or percentage of enrollments. Furthermore, the category of “Others”, capturing systems not listed above and having less than 1% market share, actually dropped from 4% to 2% of the market. This indicates that continued market consolidation.
- Schoology and BNED LoudCloud grew slightly, but not nearly to the degree of the Canvas and Brightspace.
- Blackboard Learn fell the farthest, from 31% to 28% of of the market. The second biggest drop was Pearson LearningStudio, from 4% to 2%, based on its end-of-life notice for December 2017.
- Moodle and Sakai both lost market share of just under 1%, not enough to show up in the rounded numbers in the table but enough to show up in our underlying data.
- The difference in Moodle’s market share by institutions at 25% and by enrollments at 12% really shows how concentrated their usage is for smaller schools.
- When viewing market share as defined by percentage of enrollments, Blackboard and Canvas are the most-used systems, at 37% and 27% of the market, followed by D2L at 15% and Moodle at 12%.
Stepping back from the immediate data, let’s look at an updated LMS market share graphic, commonly known as the squid graphic, for US and Canadian 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.

Some additional notes:
- Blackboard and Moodle have been the market leaders as number one and two in share as they have been for the past decade. However, Canvas is quickly approaching Moodle’s market share.
We’ll share any updates we discover at the conference this week.
October 31, 2017
Unizin Membership Now Set As Annual Fee Of Up To $427.5k

I’ve been meaning to provide an update on Unizin now that the consortium is three years old (started officially in July 2014). Thanks to public documents from the University of Minnesota, one of the 11 founding members, we now have additional clarity on the ongoing costs to remain a member of Unizin.

Membership Fees

For some background, Colorado State University staff back in April 2014 described the $1,050,000 initial fee in their meeting minutes for the University Technology Fee Advisory Board:

3. Will this decrease overall costs on our end through collaboration?
a. We are investing $1 million up front, but there is about a 7-year payback. We are investing in a $10 million product since the other 9 universities are putting their money in as we are too. This will absolutely decrease our costs.

One year later, when the Florida State University System joined Unizin as associate members, we noted this item from the University of Florida / Unizin Consortium Membership Agreement:

We noted at e-Literate in our article from 2015:

Does this mean that founding institutions that “invested” $1.050 million over three years will have to start paying annual fees of $100,000 starting in June 2017? That’s my assumption, but I’m checking to see what this clause means and will share at e-Literate.

Update (7/17): I talked to Amin Qazi today (CEO of Unizin) who let me know that the annual membership fee for institutional members (currently the 11 schools paying $1.050 million) has not be determined yet.

Fast forward to 2017 and we have an answer. The University of Minnesota has to submit purchases over $1 million to its board of regents for consent, and at the July 2017 meeting the new Unizin membership fees were presented:

To Unizin, Ltd. for $1,282,500 for a three-year renewal of membership in the higher education consortium for the Office of Information Technology (OIT) for the period July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2020. The annual payment of membership fees will be covered from OIT’s central O&M funds. The FY18 budget includes planning and funding for this expense.

That equals $427,500 per year for the next three years for the 70,000+ enrollment university. What this now makes clear is that the up-front investment in Unizin was not a one-time fee broken up into three easy payments. Unizin member has an ongoing annual fee set in three-year periods.

I again asked Amin Qazi for clarification, including whether all Unizin members were now paying the higher fee ($427.5k vs. $350k for initial three years). Amin confirmed via email:

Unizin is a non-profit organization and seeks to cover its costs. We have found that our cost to provide our services and tools somewhat scale with the size of the institution. The Unizin Founding Member Fees have been adjusted after the initial three year period. So while larger institutions do pay more, smaller institutions pay less. We anticipate further adjustments as we grow and are able to recognize even greater economies of scale.

I would then assume that the University of Minnesota, along with University of Michigan and Penn State University, are paying at the highest level and more than $350k, and that smaller schools like the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska are paying less than $350k.

LMS Fees

The same University of Minnesota document also describes their costs for the Canvas ((Disclosure: Instructure is a subscriber to our market analysis service.)) LMS based on the Unizin agreement.

To Unizin, Ltd. for $5,023,000 for a purchase of Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) for the Office of Information Technology (OIT) for the period July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2022. [snip]

Unizen [sic], on behalf of its member institutions, conducted a competitive Request for Proposal followed by a detailed evaluation process. Through this process Canvas by Instructure was selected as a Learning Management System (LMS). The University then conducted a two year pilot of Canvas and a majority of the stakeholders preferred Canvas to the University’s current LMS, Moodle. Most of the Big Ten schools have adopted or are adopting Canvas.

The University receives an additional 30% discount by purchasing Canvas through Unizen [sic] rather than purchasing directly through Infrastructure [sic] and 3% caps on annual increases, rather than 5%, has been negotiated.

This five-year deal comes out to $12 – $14 per student per year. The document does not specify what level of support they have chosen, although they describe a “dedicated test server”.

New Associate Members

In other news, Unizin announced in July that the University of Nebraska system has joined as associate members.

The Unizin Consortium is thrilled to welcome the full University of Nebraska system, bringing the total number of institutions in the consortium to 25. With the addition, the University of Nebraska at Kearney, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and University of Nebraska Medical Center join Unizin Founding Member the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Note that associate members do not pay the same amount as full members. In Florida, the State University System deal costs each associate member $100k per year.

We’ll likely give updates at e-Literate after the EDUCAUSE conference on how Unizin has evolved in terms of services and potential new members. But for now we at least have more clarity on the financial terms of the consortium.

October 10, 2017
University of Wisconsin System to Migrate From D2L Brightspace to Canvas LMS

In one of the most significant LMS selection projects of the past few years, the University of Wisconsin System (UWS) has chosen to migrate from D2L’s Brightspace to Canvas as its centrally-supported Learning Management System (LMS). ((Disclosure: UWS, UW Madison, Instructure, and D2L are all subscribers to our market analysis service, and we aided UWS in the needs analysis portion of this project.)) UW Madison already moved to Canvas as part of its Unizin membership, but now the rest of the 180,000 student, 26 campus system will also make the change.

The decision was first noted on the UWS procurement portal and in a investor analysis note from Raymond James. A representative from UWS confirmed the news and added that “Canvas has been issued the Notice of Intent to Award and a final contract is going to the UW System Board of Regents for formal approval in October”.

The UWS project page describes the process leading up to the LMS selection, starting with needs analysis kickoff in 2015.

The Learning Environment Needs Analysis (LENA) project was undertaken as a continuation of a multi-year UW System effort to: 1) understand the current and future learning technology landscape, 2) uncover the wants and needs of UW System institutions with regard to academic technologies that support teaching and learning, and 3) identify gaps that exist in supporting teaching and learning through academic technology. The results of the LENA project were presented to the Learn@UW Executive Committee, along with a recommendation that the Committee charter the process for planning to move into a next generation learning environment for the UW System. The intention was that through this process, UW System would discover potential paths forward to support such an environment.

Last year UWS developed the request for proposal (RFP) requirements list, and the formal RFP was released in January of 2017.

Beyond the size of the system, UWS decision is significant due to it being the first major customer of Desire2Learn (as the company was known prior to 2014). Back in 2002 / 2003, most LMS decisions were framed as Blackboard vs. WebCT, and when UWS selected little-known D2L, it sent shock waves through the market. The decision really put D2L on the map as a true contender, and they followed up with wins at the University of Iowa ((Disclosure: In previous consulting company I advised U Iowa on their LMS selection.)), the Ohio State University, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, and the University System of Georgia.

We have noted several times at e-Literate and as part of the e-Literate Big Picture: LMS market analysis service that D2L has an impressive record of client retention. The company has been a fierce competitor in keeping customers, as seen when the Colorado Community College System recently chose to remain on D2L Brightspace after their LMS selection process. ((Disclosure: CCCS is a subscriber to our market analysis service. I also advised CCCS when they originally chose D2L in 2008.)) This loss of UWS is the biggest setback for the company in terms of losing clients, and it is a major win for Instructure’s Canvas system.

Expect more market news to come out in the next month based on WCET and ECUCAUSE conferences.

October 2, 2017
Response on LMS Market Size Analysis
Josh Kim wrote a post yesterday at Inside Higher Ed questioning some claims about the LMS market size.

The first result that comes up in Google is from Zion Market Research. Their estimate is that the global LMS market is valued at $5.19 billion in 2016, and expected to reach $19 billion by 2022.

According to Statista, the LMS market in 2016 was valued at $3.21 billion. CNBC claims that the learning management system market is worth $5.2 billion today, and will grow to $16 billion in four years.

Can these numbers be right?

Josh then did a quick analysis based on Instructure’s revenue and came up with much smaller numbers.

If we assume that the cost of Canvas is about average for LMS companies, we can get an estimate of the total market size by multiplying Instructure’s revenues by five. This gives us an estimate for the total size of the LMS market $555 million.

He extended this by 50% based on Instructure growth to give an estimate of $555 – $832 million, which is way below the big numbers claimed by Zion, MarketsandMarkets, and other market analysts.

The biggest difference here is that all of these analysts combine corporate learning markets with academic LMS usage, and corporate learning platforms account for somewhere between $2 – $4 billion, with best estimates (although outdated) coming from Bersin. This point has already been pointed out in the comments at IHE.

tl;dr – the ~$5 billion number is reasonable if you combine academic and corporate LMS markets.

There are two caveats, however.
- First, the market growth claims are marketing fluff to generate interest in buying the reports, as companies love to show growth potential to investors. Anything close to $20 billion in a few years is ludicrous.
- Second, as Michael commented on this approach based on a post I wrote criticizing MarketsandMarkets:
If anything, my Phil understates the case here. Lumping higher ed, K12, and corporate LMSs into the same category is a little bit like lumping railroad cars together with automobiles because they are both called cars, have wheels, and carry things and/or people from one place to another. On top of that, nobody has decent data on the size of the global market, never mind the growth of it. MarketsandMarkets’ “analysis” effectively gives us made-up numbers about a mythical automobile/train car market.

So a better question is what is the size of the global academic LMS markets, combining K-12 and postsecondary?

One issue from the IHE post is that Josh used our 20% market share as basis for extrapolating Instructure’s market share, but that number is only for North American higher education. Globally, Instructure’s market share is much smaller as shown in our recent analysis (data provided by our partners LISTedTECH).

Furthermore, while Canvas by Instructure and Schoology seem to be leading vendors for new adoptions in the K-12 market, at least in the US, no one has reasonable measures of market share in this area. Long and short – we need a different approach than extrapolation from Instructure alone.

LISTedTECH estimated the global LMS market just in higher education as $1.7 billion based on (# of students) * (average cost of LMS per student) = annual spending approach. In the US, the best estimates I’ve seen in that K-12 learning platform markets are worth 30 – 40% of higher ed market. This likely is smaller globally, as anecdotally there is not a big emphasis on LMS usage outside North American and Northern Europe. So one very rough estimate is that academic LMS market is worth approximately $2 billion per year.

If you want to use the company revenue method, then I would use additional data. Blackboard’s LMS revenue is likely $450 – $550 million per year based on reviews of corporate debt filings and extrapolation from their time as a public company. D2L’s revenue is smaller than Instructure’s, so let’s assume the two companies combined have $200 million revenue. Note that in all of these companies this is global revenue for K-12 and higher ed combined. The question is how to scale this $700 million combined revenue from all three companies. Is it reasonable that global spending for academic LMS could be 2 – 3x larger than this number? When you add in all of the Moodle hosting – both Moodle Partners and unofficial Moodle hosting – as well as Chinese market adoption, European providers, and K-12 players like Schoology and Powerschool/Haiku, this seems at least believable.

So my highly-researched, thoroughly-documented estimate of the global academic LMS market is $1.5 – 2.0 billion per year. And it is forecast to grow to $8.2134526 billion by June 3, 2022.

Note to investors – ignore that forecast.
September 20, 2017
Some Ed Tech Perspective on UC’s Billion-Dollar Payroll System Fiasco
In 2011 the University of California laid out plans for a new payroll system called UCPath (for Payroll, Academic Personnel, Timekeeping, and Human Resources). The goal of the $170 million project was to save a reported $100 million per year eventually and to replace a 30-year-old Payroll Personnel System (PPS) that runs separately for each of the 11 UC locations with Oracle’s PeopleSoft payroll and HR systems. All systems were planned to be live by the end of 2014 and run centrally in a new UCPath processing center.

In 2014 we described how the project had grown from $170 and 36 months to $220 million and 72 months. In spring of this year we described how the project was planned to cost $504 million and take 93 months (almost five years longer than originally planned).

A few weeks ago the state auditor released a report claiming that the project would really cost $942 million. The $942 million does not mean that the $504 million estimate has changed since spring, but the auditor does claim that UC is not reporting the full costs of the implementation. From the audit summary on page 1:

The Office of the President currently projects the implementation cost of UCPath to be $504 million—$334 million over its original estimate of $170 million—and it has delayed the date of UCPath’s implementation by nearly five years, to June 2019. Moreover, the $504 million estimate does not represent the full cost of the project because it includes just a fraction of the cost associated with the campuses’ implementation efforts and a shared services center, known as the UCPath Center. The full cost to the university of adopting UCPath is likely to be at least $942 million.

Most of this information was available in the spring, but the state auditor makes a compelling, well-documented argument.

The Worse Part

However, this is not the big news from the audit. In my 2014 post I commented on Christopher Newfield’s analysis at Remaking the University on the claimed benefits from the project:

What about the current estimate of benefits – is it $30 million per year as Chris described or closer to $100 million per year? One big concern I have is that the information on project benefits was not updated, presented to the regents, or asked by the regents.

Well it turns out that was exactly the problem based on this finding from the audit:

The Office of the President’s initial business case in 2011 asserted that UCPath would result in $753 million in cost savings, primarily from staffing reductions at the campuses. However, the UCPath project director told us that the Office of the President no longer expects to realize those projected savings. Several campuses also reported to us that they do not anticipate the staff reductions that the 2011 business case promised. In fact, in a status update to the University of California Board of Regents (regents) in July 2017, the Office of the President did not discuss any offsetting savings but rather discussed creating efficiencies and avoiding costs.

You read that right. The $753 million in savings that was the basis for the project is not going to materialize. There clearly was a need to replace 30 year old systems, but the justification for the UCPath project and its specific approach was based on large staff cuts to be achieved by centralizing payroll for all 10 universities in the system. To get the true scale of the cost impacts of this project, look at this helpful chart from page 16 of the audit (note the $504 million in top right – that is the cost claimed by UC):

What this means is that the net savings / cost have changed by almost $1.4 billion. Let that sink in. Billion with a ‘b’.

UC Response

The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) responded to the audit both formally in the audit report itself and informally through media statements. The official UCOP statement starting on page 35 of the audit mostly notes that President Napolitano was not at UC when UCPath started, that this is a necessary and complex project, claims they have already made improvements, and it disputes some of the specific recommendations as being heavy-handed. But at no point does UCOP dispute the findings. What is most problematic is the emphatic claim at the end:

I have complete confidence in UC’s ability to continue successful implementation of UCPath, a necessary project with significant, expansive, and long-term benefits to the University.

There is no serious re-questioning of assumptions or of UC’s ability to finish the job, despite plenty of evidence pointing to fundamental problems in the project.

The UC response in the UCLA paper is even more problematic, as it mostly argues that the implementation only costs $504 million many other items are operational in nature.

Claire Doan, a UC Office of the President spokesperson, said the state audit includes additional costs that should not contribute to the overall cost estimate. [snip]

The UCPath Center will assume all payroll and human resources functions systemwide, according to the state audit. Doan added the UC believes the $130 million the state audit cited for the center’s operating cost should be included in the project’s operations budget, rather than its implementation budget, because the UC does not typically include operating expenses in project implementation costs.

In other words, UCOP is complaining about accounting methods while not disputing the findings. UCOP wants to just look at IT implementation costs, while the state auditor is looking at “the full cost to the university of adopting UCPath”.

Some Perspective

We here at e-Literate are focused more on ed tech – the impact of changes to teaching and learning enabled by technology. So it might help to add some ed tech perspective on this story.

Taking the well-grounded assumption that the project, or some form of it, was necessary, and making the assumption that UC’s original plan made some sense ($170 million for IT implementation), let’s look just at the impact of cost overruns.
- Using the UCOP argument, the IT implementation cost overrun is currently $334 million
- Using the state auditor argument, the total UCPath cost overrun is currently $636 million
- Adding in the disappearance of planned savings, the change in savings / cost is almost $1.4 billion
Keep in mind that much of the project is funded by a 20-year bond. Some comparisons using that time frame (we’ll factor in inflation and cost increases by adding 1.5x for a range):
- Based on typical UC campus costs and extrapolating, the cost of providing an LMS for every UC campus for 20 years is likely $66 – $99 million
- Using EDUCAUSE Core Data of $96 – $110 per student median spend in the US, the costs of centralized instructional technology support of all applications and services for every UC campus for 20 years is likely $500 – $850 million
The fallout from UCPath’s cost overruns and loss of planned savings likely exceeds the entire combined instructional technology budget for all 10 UC campuses. This project matters.
September 10, 2017
InstructureCon 2017: Culture as a competitive weapon
In our recent coverage of BbWorld and D2L Fusion, Michael and I came away impressed. Both companies are improving and doing so in ways showing them listening to customers, empathizing, and developing product enhancements with more engaging user experiences. Both companies are doing so by attempting to change their company cultures to support these behaviors. Their challenge, however, is that Instructure is already there – their company culture has supported simplicity, customer-centric empathy, and openness from day one. And what struck me (again) at this year’s InstructureCon was how well the company is managed and how consistent is their approach, over time and throughout the organization.

Instructure launched its Canvas LMS back in 2010, and it is remarkable how Michael’s description from June 2010 could still be applied today.

If I had to summarize Instructure’s strategy in one sentence, it would be “They use the lessons learned by consumer web companies to clear the clutter out of LMS software design and business model.” They’re not focusing particularly on open education or analytics or any other hot topics in online education, although they are aware of these and do pay some attention to them. Rather, they are looking at core use cases and trying to make them as simple as possible, throwing out some outdated LMS design assumptions in the process.

From the early days when they had dozens of employees to today, when they have over 1,100 employees, the strategy is the same and the company culture is the same. This despite the departure of both founders and the 2015 IPO and all the resultant pressure from investors.

This is Instructure’s secret. They continue to manage the company to support the strategy of clearing the clutter out of LMS software design and business models.

Product News

The biggest product news at InstructureCon this year:
- Release of Gauge, an assessment management platform for K-12 usage, which might impact higher ed in the future
- Redesigned Quiz engine and Gradebook, leading to what we saw as the biggest interest from conference attendees
- Release of blueprint courses
- Investment in back-end platform design (e.g. microservices) to increase speed of design improvements
- Reintroduction of analytics – visualizations initially targeted at faculty usage
- Introduction of Alexa integration
The focus on assessments, quizzes and grade books is both problematic and encouraging. Problematic for the industry as we spend too much time on measurements and grading and accountability and too little time on learning and continuous formative assessment. Yes, the quizzing engine can be used for formative assessment, but in most cases the usage is for summative assessment. But even with this viewpoint, it is encouraging that the primary focus of these product enhancements to Canvas is on reducing the time spent on the grading activities. It is a fact of life that an enormous amount of effort is spent by faculty, particularly in the US, on managing grades. It is good to see tools that directly reduce the pain in this area.

In a standing-room only session, Instructure’s Christi Wruck explained the initial phase of a multi-year effort to redesign and improve the grade book. Most features shown were of the nature of reducing the number of clicks or simplifying the navigation of grading activities. I won’t go into the minutiae here, but this session seemed to generate the most excitement at the conference.

The (re)introduction of analytics surprised me, as I had seen most public efforts in Canvas lately focusing on getting data out to let customers do their own analytics. The initial analytics in Canvas were introduced in 2012, and there were and are a few cool visualizations for faculty mostly, but there is little meat on the bones. There never seemed to be a real product strategy on the developing role of analytics within an LMS nor a full team to work on this challenge. In the meantime they rolled out Canvas Data, which we have talked to staff from several colleges and universities who are actively playing with and exploring the data. But this year Instructure described how they’ve been hiring a new analytics team and working on new visualizations. As with the previous effort, the initial focus is on helping faculty get a better view of how students are performing. We will have to watch this current focus on analytics to see if a real strategy develops.

Blueprint Courses is a overdue features set to allow course design templates or components across courses or shared between instructors. This capability finally provides direct support for centralized course design models involving master courses and multiple course shells as typically used in large online programs. While this capability could be considered late, conference attendees seemed to be quite impressed with the design of the new features.

Market News

I shared in my post on D2L’s Fusion conference how their Brightspace LMS has made impressive wins recently, particularly for schools with large online programs. Canvas continues to gain market share and lead all competitors in new implementations (schools choosing a new LMS), but over the past 12 months they’ve allowed D2L to at least become a clear competitor.

Michael also shared a view from the North American (US and Canada) market for higher education showing that most of Blackboard’s “wins” over the past few years have come from ANGEL end-of-life migrations. Looking at that same image, however, it becomes even more obvious just how well Canvas has performed for new implementations. It is not just that Canvas has the lion’s share of new implementations, it’s also the breadth of migrations coming from Blackboard Learn, Moodle, ANGEL, LearningStudio, Sakai, and even several from D2L Brightspace.

Instructure has recorded strong international grown in just the past two years, and this interest was evident at the conference. The most notable difference between the early users conferences and this year’s event was the expansion of the customer base. There must be similar numbers of K-12 attendees as there are higher education attendees, and we’re now seeing clients from Europe, Latin America, and Australia & New Zealand.

Just 2-3 years ago Canvas as an LMS brand was virtually unknown outside of the US and Canada, but now Canvas is winning more than any others in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.

Challenges

Instructure certainly has challenges to face. In terms of market share, it will be very interesting to look at data for the end of 2017 to see if D2L has maintained its momentum in new implementations. And being a publicly-traded company, investors care not just that Instructure is growing but also whether Instructure is growing fast enough in multiple markets. That’s a lot of pressure.

On the product front, Canvas was late to the game in terms of supporting mastery learning and associated competency-based education initiatives, although their introduction of MasteryPaths is showing some ability to catch up. Likewise, they certainly are behind their competitors in terms of learning analytics and associated research. And I would even say that they are late in supporting centralized course design models. In all three areas, there are initiatives introduced over the past 12 months to address these product needs. The challenge is for the company to catch up with competitors not necessarily in terms of full feature sets, but more in terms of supporting basic use cases and doing it well.

When I asked various Instructure management at the conference whom they saw as their greatest competitor, the most common answer was themselves. The company knows they have work to do, and there is a real sense of “we have to do better” that permeates the company. For Instructure’s competitors, the good news is that Canvas has weaknesses. The bad news is that the company knows it.

Back to Culture

But the real event of InstructureCon is not really based on product news or market share. As Michael noted last year:

Throughout the conference, I asked a number of attendees what percentage of their motivation for coming was to find out what the company was planning to develop in the next year. The range of answers averaged between 10% and 20%. They all told me that, while they were looking forward to the roadmap sessions later in the week, they didn’t expect any big surprises and weren’t all that focused on finding out what the developers had been doing. I have never been at an LMS conference where that was true, including Sakai conferences and Moodle Moots.

Consider the Instructure company profile at Glassdoor. Last year the company was rated #4 best place to work for all small and medium-sized businesses, and Josh Coates was rated #15 for all CEOs in the same category. But also look at the video that Instructure management chose to include in the “Why Work For Us?” section. Other companies tend to put up platitude-filled dreck that tells you very little about their company. But Instructure puts up a 7+ minute video where they talk primarily about company values. In the video, they talk about the behavior the company does and doesn’t want – and even nods that they’ll get rid of people who have have these behaviors – and they avoid all the pseudo-inspirational messages.

While Canvas is a market-changing platform, that is not really Instructure’s primary strength. Instructure as a company is the real strength.
August 21, 2017