e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Helix

  • State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2014 Edition

    I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in November 2013, and thanks to new data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal data provides an anchor for the summary.

    The primary data source for 2013 – 2014 is Edutechnica, which not only does a more direct measurement of a larger number of schools (viewing all schools in IPEDS database with more than 800 FTE enrollments), but it also allows scaling based on enrollment per institution. This means that the latter years now more accurately represent how many students use a particular LMS.

    A few items to note:

    • Despite the addition of the new data source and its inclusion of enrollment measures, the basic shape and story of the graphic have not changed. My confidence has gone up in the past few years, but the heuristics were not far off.
    • The 2013 inclusion of Anglosphere (US, UK, Canada, Australia) numbers caused more confusion and questions than clarity, so this version goes back to being US only.
    • The Desire2Learn branding has been changed to Brightspace by D2L.
    • The eCollege branding has been changed to Pearson LearningStudio.
    • There is a growing area of “Alternative Learning Platforms” that includes University of Phoenix, Coursera, edX and OpenEdX, 2U, Helix and Motivis (the newly commercialized learning platform from College for America).
    • While the data is more solid than 2012 and prior years, keep in mind that you should treat the graphic as telling a story of the market rather than being a chart of exact data.

    LMS_MarketShare_20141107

    Some observations of the new data taken from the post on Edutechnica from September:

    • Blackboard’s BbLearn and ANGEL continue to lose market share in US -[1] Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), BbLearn has dropped from 848 to 817 institutions and ANGEL has dropped from 162 to 123. Using the revised methodology, Blackboard market share for > 800 enrollments now stands at 33.5% of institutions and 43.5% of total enrollments.
    • Moodle, D2L, and Sakai have no changes in US – Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), D2L has added only 2 schools, Moodle none, and Sakai 2 schools.
    • Canvas is the fasted growing LMS and has overtaken D2L – Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), Canvas grew ~40% in one year (from 166 to 232 institutions). For the first time, Canvas appears to have have larger US market share than D2L (13.7% to 12.2% of total enrollments using table above).

  • Helix: View of an LMS designed for competency-based education

    Within higher education, we tend to talk about LMS solutions based on an institutional perspective – which systems can serve as the official LMS for an entire institution. While this view is important and forms the basis for my LMS graphics, the emergence of new educational delivery models has led to the development of some interesting program-specific LMS models. One example that I have already written about is 2U’s platform (built on top of Moodle and Adobe Connect) for their specific Online Service Provider (OSP) business.

    One educational model that is becoming more and more important is competency-based education (CBE). One of the challenges for this model is that the traditional LMS – based on a traditional model using grades, seat time and synchronous cohort of students – is not easily adapted to serve CBE needs. As described in this CBE primer:

    OBE [Outcome-based education] can be implemented in various modalities, including face-to-face, online and hybrid models.

    Competency-based education (CBE) is a narrower concept, a subset or instance of OBE, where the outcomes are more closely tied to job skills or employment needs, and the methods are typically self-paced. Again based on the Malan article, the six critical components of CBE are as follows:

    1. Explicit learning outcomes with respect to the required skills and concomitant proficiency (standards for assessment)
    2. A flexible time frame to master these skills
    3. A variety of instructional activities to facilitate learning
    4. Criterion-referenced testing of the required outcomes
    5. Certification based on demonstrated learning outcomes
    6. Adaptable programs to ensure optimum learner guidance

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  • The Resilient Higher Ed LMS: Canvas is the only fully-established recent market entry

    For a few years starting in 2009, it seemed one of the best ways to raise VC funds or corporate internal investment was to say “we can beat Blackboard with a new cloud-based platform”. Witness Coursekit / Lore, Instructure / Canvas, OpenClass, LoudCloud Systems, Helix, and even more recently MOOC platforms. There were many articles written as these new systems entered the market, but what if we look back and ask whether the LMS market has actually changed recently? The picture that emerges is one of surprising resiliency by the established LMS providers.

    In fact, I would argue that in the past eight years (at least in North America) the only new system that has fully established itself in the LMS market is Canvas. Note that I have combined WebCT and ANGEL within the Blackboard umbrella, but even these systems established themselves more than a decade ago.

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