e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Casey Green

  • Please Fill Out the Campus Computing Survey

    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.

  • Yummy, Yummy Data

    EDUCAUSE is just a few weeks away, which means that the release of the annual Campus Computing survey is also just a few weeks away. It’s pretty much the only decent source of data we have on LMS trends (among many other things) in higher education. Since we are arguably midway through a four-year LMS market transition as WebCT and ANGEL get end-of-lifed, I look forward to this year’s survey results with great anticipation. And, of course, we’ll analyze the implications of it here on e-Literate.

    In the meantime, if you are one of the people responsible for filling out the survey at your institution, make sure you get it done!

  • 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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  • 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.