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.
Tag: Instructure
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Instructure Canvas: A New LMS Entrant
We’re making progress on getting the Sakai conference keynote videos online, but while we wait for those to be ready for the kick-off to the conference post series, I’d like to take advantage of the unexpected lull to write a bit about a new LMS entrant that I had an opportunity to learn about recently. Instructure‘s Canvas product is one of a new generation of LMS’s being created by start-ups that seem to be suddenly popping up everywhere. It has some of the Web 2.0 features that you would expect, like easy personal profile integration with external social networking sites and easy video embedding. But unlike, say, NIXTY—another start-up that really emphasizes open education—Instructure’s big theme seems to be getting back to basics—in a good way.