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.

Looking at the bottom right of the chart, you can see that Canvas has picked up clients previously using WebCT, Learn, ANGEL, Moodle, LearningStudio, Sakai, Homegrown, and Brightspace (from D2L).

Josh could have answered that Canvas actually has picked up more clients formerly using Learn than those using ANGEL, but a small portion of Learn includes those using the discontinued Basic edition. Nevertheless, there are quite a few wins coming from systems that have not been discontinued, which I think was the main point of the question.

As you can see, there is interesting data on other systems as well. Some notes from this view:

• Blackboard Learn new implementation have mostly come from the company’s own discontinued WebCT and ANGEL platforms, with some small contributions from LearningStudio and Moodle.

• D2L Brightspace has an impressive client retention rate, with very few clients migrating off of their system.

What other trends do you see in this data?