e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LMS market

  • Movement of Canvas LMS to Global Markets

    Movement of Canvas LMS to Global Markets

    We’re coming up on our one-year anniversary of the e-Literate Big Picture: LMS market analysis service and getting our Spring 2017 report ready. One of the things that I love about working with LISTedTECH as our partners for this service is that their data goes beyond a snapshot in time and well beyond the North American market. Not to mention their skills with visualization of data.

    During a session today at the ASU/GSV Summit, Instructure CEO Josh Coates described how the company tests out new ideas – making bets and getting rapid feedback – and one example used was seeing if they could sell the Canvas LMS into a new country, Spain in this case. (more…)

  • Schoology Layoffs: Focusing on smaller higher ed opportunities

    Schoology Layoffs: Focusing on smaller higher ed opportunities

    We’ve noticed and had several people ask us about corporate changes at Schoology, the LMS vendor. More specifically, the questions have been based on whether they are laying off staff, and what that means for the higher ed LMS market. Short answers – yes to the layoffs, and the company will be more selective on which higher ed opportunities to pursue.

    Through phone and email interviews, I asked CEO Jeremy Friedman to respond to these questions.

    As you and I have talked about, operational efficiency is a strategic objective for Schoology in 2017. As we built our plan for the year we saw opportunities to focus our efforts and operate at a higher level. This meant that we decided to reduce our headcount by a little over 10%, primarily across sales and marketing. To be clear, we reduced how much we are going to spend in Sales and Marketing, and we increased how much we are going to spend in Research & Development and Customer Success. The net impact is a more efficient company that can invest more in product innovation and our customers.

    (more…)

  • New Release of European LMS Market Report

    New Release of European LMS Market Report

    Our Spring 2016 LMS Market Report from our new LMS subscription service focused mostly on the United States and Canada. The LMS market, however is increasingly global in nature. LMS suppliers rely on markets outside of US and Canada for growth, and Moodle in particular has a long history of global adoption. Maintaining a US/Canadian view without additional data can be misleading when forecasting the roadmaps and future states of various LMS solutions.

    What we haven’t had until now is a view of the LMS market in Europe. Thanks to our partnership with LISTedTECH, we can now share data from more than 1,600 higher education institutions throughout Europe and provide the first independent market analysis for this region. While this report and future analysis is part of the LMS subscription service, we are sharing the initial version freely with a CC-BY license. (more…)

  • Instructure’s Current Market Position

    With the proliferation of so many privately funded educational technology companies, the quarterly earnings call of a publicly traded company like Instructure is a rare opportunity to get a detailed look at company performance and hear directly from executive leadership as they respond to analysts’ questions. Sometimes those responses can be guarded, at other times very frank. Regardless of which, it’s almost always very revealing.

    During Monday’s third quarter earnings conference call with Instructure we saw the company showing considerable confidence in their current market position and trajectory for the next couple of years. Quarterly revenues of $30.1M are up 44% over Q3 last year. Of that $25.8M (86%) is recurring revenue from subscriptions, the remaining $4.3 is derived from professional services.  In the domestic higher education market, CFO Steve Kaminsky cited research from e-Literate and MindWires that attributes a win rate of 77% to the Canvas LMS when it comes to new implementations and said that he expects that number to remain consistent over the next few years. With a current market share of 17-20% in the U.S. and Canadian higher education markets, Instructure said that they are expecting Canvas to gain another 10-30% of the market over the next 2-3 years. See Instructure’s full third quarter financial report here.  (more…)

  • Exclusive: Worldwide LMS market size expected to triple in 5 years . . . or get cut in half

    Well these two reports will help us narrow down our estimates of the future LMS market size [emphasis added].

    According to a new market research report, “Learning Management System Market by Application, Delivery Mode (Distance Learning and Instructor-Led Training), Deployment (On-Premises and Cloud), User Type (Academic and Corporate), Vertical, and Region – Global Forecast to 2021”, published by MarketsandMarkets, the LMS market size is expected to grow from USD 5.22 Billion in 2016 to USD 15.72 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 24.7%.

    – MarketsandMarkets, Jul 2016

    The growth rate for Self-paced eLearning platforms is distinctly negative at -14.6% and the global platform market is in freefall. Revenues for platform will plummet by $3.8 billion over the forecast period. Essentially, the global LMS market is imploding. [snip]

    The worldwide growth rate for LMS products is very negative at -14.6% and revenues will plunge to $3.2 billion by 2021, down from $7.1 billion in 2016.

    – Ambient Insights, Aug 2016

    I’ll give this to them – I’m willing to bet that the five-year reality will lie somewhere between those two forecasts.

    Of course both market analyses make a fundamental flaw in combining all things labeled LMS as a single market. As Michael pointed out in his comment to my earlier post on the MarketsandMarkets report:

    Lumping higher ed, K12, and corporate LMSs into the same category is a little bit like lumping railroad cars together with automobiles because they are both called cars, have wheels, and carry things and/or people from one place to another. On top of that, nobody has decent data on the size of the global market, never mind the growth of it. MarketsandMarkets’ “analysis” effectively gives us made-up numbers about a mythical automobile/train car market.

  • Quick Update On LMS Subscription Service

    Our LMS Subscription Service has been out for more than three months now, and we’d like to give a quick update(see this page for details, pricing, online signup; or sign up on right column of blog site for listserv to find out more information).

    The e–Literate Big Picture subscription services are designed to help you track the changing landscape in important educational technology topics and make sure that the decisions you make today will still make sense tomorrow.

    Based on our joint research with LISTedTECH and market analysis, we just published an article in TechCrunch titled “The LMS Market Glacier Is Melting”. (more…)

  • Schoology: The strongest LMS you’ve never seen

    LMS evaluations are typically painful ordeals for not just committee members but also for the vendors. They have to provide multiple demos, have lots of Q&A, and write 100+ page proposals based on extensive feature requirements and perhaps even more painful terms and conditions. But there is one case that might be worse – not even getting to compete when your product appears to be an excellent fit. And that is the situation that Schoology finds it in for the majority of higher ed evaluations.

    Schoology’s original market was aimed US-based K-12 institutions, and for paying school or district LMS selections Schoology is probably one of the two strongest competitors, along with Canvas. Schoology does have an international presence and over the past year and a half have targeted an expansion into higher ed. Michael wrote a post after the company raised $32 million in new funding last fall, largely to fund this expansion. I described the institution-wide adoption by Wheaton College in Spring 2016, following the Colorado State University Global Campus adoption in early 2015. But what I don’t see is a real acceleration in the higher ed market yet. There are a few significant LMS active evaluations that include Schoology, but the majority of higher ed LMS evaluations over the past two years have not treated Schoology as a real competitor. Based on what I’ve seen, this lack of evaluation is not based on the product itself. (more…)