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.
One of the big findings of the report is that we are seeing signs that the LMS market may be leaving a decade-long period of relative stasis and entering a period of rapid change. Since we are mindful of the perennial predictions of the imminent death of the LMS, we try to be cautious and data-driven in our analysis. But it sure looks like the market could be very different a few years from now than it is today, and there are several different ways that the trend could break.
The subscription, which provides an annual, institution-wide update, will provide regular updates on these trends that will be helpful to schools making (or thinking about making) adoption decisions (as well as to vendors and investors who are trying to understand how campus needs and decisions are evolving). We will be adding various levels of available additional support to schools going forward.
Because we want this support to be available and useful to all schools that want it, we have kept the price low and have allowed the report to be shared within organizations under fairly generous terms relative to other subscriptions we have seen.
More information is available on the subscription page.
