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Tag: Instructional Technology Council

  • ITC Survey: Four trends to watch in LMS market for community colleges

    The Instructional Technology Council (ITC), an affiliated council of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), has conducted a distance education survey since 2004 focusing on online education trends among community colleges in the US and Canada. With this focus, the member colleges tend to be those with a stronger interest in online education programs and therefore are more progressive in technology usage than the general community college population. One part of the ITC survey is on general LMS usage at member schools, and this provides another source of data on the higher ed LMS market.

    The survey this year was based on 142 responses out of the 375 member institutions (39%), and there are a few caveats that should be noted:

    • Prior to 2012 the survey was emailed to all AACC colleges, but due to uneven responses the survey changed to just survey ITC colleges; and
    • “No answer” responses are not listed in percentages, thus totals will not always equal 100%.

    Despite those caveats, “70 percent of the annual submissions have come from the same campuses during the nine years of the survey”, which means that it is worth exploring some broad trends for the LMS market for community colleges. Here is the data presented on LMS usage this year on page 15 (April 2014 report of Fall 2013 survey data):

    Table 3

     

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  • Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for ANGEL

    This is another one I’ve been meaning to post for some time. Last year, I wrote a post called Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle that talked about changes in LMS market share among American community colleges according to a survey done by the Instructional Technology Council. The headline number was that Blackboard’s market share in this customer group was declining rapidly, with Moodle being the primary beneficiary and ANGEL being the secondary beneficiary.

    Blackboard’s downward trend continues. According to this year’s study, Blackboard’s market share among ITC’s constituents is 59%, down from 77% percent the previous year. There was a slight drop in market share for the Blackboard platform, but most of it was for WebCT. It looks like Blackboard is failing to hold on to the community colleges that are being forced to migrate off WebCT as it approaches its end of life. 

    This year is something of a mirror image of last year’s results in the race for the #2 spot. ANGEL zoomed to the top, more than doubling their market share to over 20%. (It’s hard to tell the exact number from the graph in the report.) This is the first time I’m aware of that any non-Blackboard LMS has achieved market share in any U.S. segment that pushed so far into the double digits. The third place, Moodle, is up to about 11%, making ANGEL the clear front runner as the replacement for WebCT, particularly Campus Edition, which has had a lot of market share in the community colleges. (It looks like something close to two thirds of community colleges in the survey who left WebCT in the last year moved to ANGEL.) All the other entrants are at 5% or below.