This is an incredible time of change in the United States higher education LMS market. Here are just some of the relevant developments that are driving big movements:
- WebCT is in its last year of Blackboard support, forcing many campuses to migrate either to Blackboard or to something else.
- Instructure is on an absolute tear, growing at an unprecedented rate.
- Blackboard acquired Moodlerooms, the best known Moodle support vendor in this market.
- Desire2Learn got a major infusion of cash, presumably based on their own market success.
- Recent turmoil in the Sakai OAE project is causing the Sakai community to go through a period of reflection and retrenchment.
- New LMS entrants are coming into the market right and left, including but not limited to MOOC platforms like Coursera.
We all have our observations and intuitions about what all of this adds up to in terms of the big picture. But if you really want to know what is going on, there is only one place to go to get reliable, solid, proven data: the Campus Computing Project. I know that campus folk get inundated with surveys on top of the increasingly onerous workloads. But if you want a clear picture of what is going on in the LMS market today, then I urge you to fill out the Campus Computing survey or, if you are not the person responsible for doing so, then let the person on your campus who is responsible know just how important you think the survey is. The survey closes on October 24th and goes public at EDUCAUSE on November 7th.
Please take this seriously.
From The 2010 Campus Computing Survey, it says,
So the person I would be looking for is probably the most senior IT person in the organization.
My thanks to Michael Feldstein for encouraging e-Literate readers to participate in the 2012 Campus Computing Survey. Launched in 1990, Campus Computing (campuscomputing.net) is the largest continuing study of the role of eLearning and information technology in American higher ed. Michael’s comments focused on LMS issues: the annual survey covers a range of IT planning and policy issues, including and well beyond LMS deployment. Please click here (http://www.campuscomputing.net/item/campus-computing-2011-big-gains-going-mobile) to access the summary materials for the 2012 survey.
If your interests focus on LMS issues, there are some posts of potential interest on my Digital Tweed blog, published by INSIDE HIGHER ED (http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed).
The survey respondents are typically the CIO/senior IT officer. Email invitations to the 2012 survey were sent late in September to the CIO/senior IT officer at some 2300 public and private four-year colleges and universities. Please feel free to contact me if you did not receive the email invitation, (which provides a hotlink to the online questionnaire).
Casey Green
Campus Computing
[email protected]
campuscomputing.net