As a follow-up to my two–part series on LMS market share, I am tracking news development about adoption announcements, particularly of Vista schools. Today brings word that CSU Chico is moving from Vista to Blackboard 9.1.
Tag: Blackboard-Inc.
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Duke Moving from Blackboard Enterprise to Sakai
As I wrote in an earlier post, defections of Blackboard Enterprise customers to other LMS platforms might be an indicator of a greater market share movement that we’ve seen in the past because, absent any forced migration, schools just don’t change LMSs very often. Well, Duke has announced that they are moving from Blackboard Enterprise to Sakai. Particularly interesting is their reasoning for undertaking an LMS evaluation in the first place:
Since future versions of Blackboard are significantly different than the current Blackboard 8, any upgrade would necessitate a fair amount of change for users. [Emphasis added.] On top of that, Duke’s needs and priorities have shifted in the 10+ years since we first adopted Blackboard as the campus LMS. This plus the fact that our Blackboard license is up for renewal in July 2012 suggests that it is a good time to review the LMS “landscape” and determine if Blackboard is still the best system to meet Duke faculty, student and strategic needs.
It sounds as though the Duke folks thought that the changes from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9 were large enough that they amounted to a forced migration. They passed the threshold of user retraining beyond which you might as well look at all options.
This is always a tough dilemma for developers of software with a significant installed base. You need to evolve your software to keep up with the competition, but in doing so, you force your users to deal with change, when not requiring them to change has been one of your competitive advantages. The challenge for Blackboard is that they face this dilemma at a time when they are also putting their WebCT and ANGEL customers through a forced migration. So if the move to Blackboard 9 from Blackboard 8 is also perceived as, effectively, a forced migration, then that means an alarmingly high percentage of their LMS customers might be looking around at alternatives.
I’m interested in hearing from people who have experience with both Blackboard 9.x and 8.x. In your opinion, is it really a big change? How much user retraining does it require?
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A Big Vista to Blackboard 9.1 Win
Following up on my two-part series on the changing LMS market, I am going to write short posts noting LMS evaluation decisions of Vista, Blackboard Enterprise, and select ANGEL customers (as well as any others that seem noteworthy) when I hear of them. Today, via Ray Henderson’s tweet, I note that the San Diego Community College District (131,403 students) has chosen to migrate from Vista to Blackboard 9.1.
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The Evolving LMS Market, Part II
I have gotten a lot of very nice compliments in the last 24 hours about the first post in this two-part series. I do want to emphasize that a huge portion of the value in that post comes from the great survey work that Casey Green does. All I did was tease out a few implications and make a few new graphs (which, I admit, were very pretty). If you want to see analysis like this continue in future years, then support the Campus Computing Project.
In this next part, we’re going to go “off-road” a little and see what we can figure out in areas where we don’t have quantitative data that is as solid as Casey’s. As I wrote in the previous post in this series, there are roughly 875 WebCT and ANGEL customers who will have to migrate to a new LMS in the next few years, in an environment of strong budget pressures. This creates an atmosphere in which more and different schools may be in play than has typically been the case. But evaluating options and choosing to move are two different things. What happens in the next few years is likely to shape the LMS landscape for years to come, at least in North America.
Let’s see if we can read the tea leaves.
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The Evolving LMS Market, Part I
As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a “market in transition.” In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what’s happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and “open source.” Has “open source” (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market? If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts ((Sell-side analysts are financial analysts who work for major brokerage houses and provide stock analysis to retail investors. Comments by analysts that you read in business news articles are typically from sell-side analysts.)) are writing, you may see the claim that “open source” is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what’s happening in the market, so I’m going to try to explain what we know about what’s really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I’ll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate their options. In the second post, I’ll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break.
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Blackboard, Ray Henderson, and Progress
When Blackboard acquired ANGEL back in May of 2009, there was a lot of noise about how the acquisition was going to change the company. I wrote a post then called Three Tests for the ‘New’ Blackboard, which outlined some indications I was going to be looking for to see whether there was substance behind the hype. The first sign I got that something was changing happened within days (hours?) of my publication of that post, when Ray Henderson publicly accepted my challenge on Twitter. How well have he and Blackboard done since then?
Really well, actually:
- Challenge 1, drop the patent suit: Done. To be honest, I did not expect this to be the first one ticked off the list. But it was. Blackboard and Desire2Learn settled in December of 2009.
- Challenge 2, support IMS Common Cartridge, including export: Done. I wasn’t following this too closely, so I don’t know exactly when this was released, but some time this year Blackboard provided full support for IMS Common Cartridge, including export.
- Challenge 3, support IMS Learning Information Services: In Progress. Yesterday, Ray Henderson declared in a blog post that Blackboard is “committed to supporting” LIS. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Blackboard has made an unequivocal, public commitment in writing to implement the standard. This declaration has been backed up by activity in the LIS working group that indicates Blackboard is actually taking steps to implement the specification.
If Blackboard succeeds in implementing LIS by the 2011 IMS Learning Impact conference, then Ray will have met all three challenges within 24 months of coming to Blackboard. That’s pretty impressive.
Update: I received an email response to this post from Ray (who is at an IMS meeting today), which I reprint in part here with his permission:
- Common Cartridge: we actually have NOT shipped this, just demo’d it. My public statement was to show progress at the 2 IMS meetings this year, and ship by end of year. We’re on target for that.
- IMS Basic LTI: this was another area I clarified earlier–that we’d ship LTI. We got conformance cert at this meeting. And so we’ll ship that too, by end of year.
Related story: I mentioned in my blog a mega relationship between Bb and McGraw. We really are using basic LTI as a production technology — and one for a major strategic partner — in 2011. Adoption is key, and I’m delighted to see it brewing up.
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Interview With Casey Green
The 2010 Campus Computing survey is out, and it’s chock full of interesting information. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Casey Green, the Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, and talk about some of the highlights and a few related topics. I apologize for the abrupt ending; my camera ran out of disk space in the middle of Casey’s last answer. In any event, there’s good stuff here about the transition happening in the LMS market, the challenges of getting good survey data, ((Many thanks to the ever-thoughtful Scott Siddall for suggesting this line of inquiry.)) and more.
You should definitely also read the survey report. It covers a lot of topics that we didn’t even touch on in the interview.