e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LMS

  • 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…)

  • From Cockroaches To Miniature Elephants: Webinars on Not Your Mother’s Old LMS

    We just finished the third of our three-part webinar series on“The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”, hosted by our friends at NobleStream. In the first discussion, Michael and I laid out our vision for why we are analysts for the LMS market and what we hope to achieve, capped off by Michael’s comment “Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS.”  In the second discussion, we took the institutional view and had Pat James and Anna Stirling, from the California Community Colleges, talking about how they approached LMS selection and in particular how they focused on the academic and strategic needs first, treating the LMS as plumbing to enable the house to be built. In the third discussion, we took the vendor view and had legendary Ray Henderson take a break from his well-deserved steelhead fishing excursions and describe how vendors understand and manage the LMS vendor selection process. This conversation was capped off by my mention of “the miniature elephant in the room”, where strategically-beneficial LMS decisions are typically made in spite of the RFP process, not because of it.

    Michael and I thoroughly enjoyed these discussions and we hope you will, too.

  • Webinars: California OEI on institutional view of LMS decisions, Ray Henderson on vendor view

    We have now had 2 of our 3 webinars (or colloquiums) with NobleStream organized around “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”. In our first webinar, Howard Weiner from NobleStream interviewed Michael and me about the work we do as consultants and market analysts. Video available here. In the second webinar, we had Pat James, executive director of OEI, and Anna Stirling, director of @ONE training and professional development. OEI is the Online Education Initiative from the California Community Colleges, and @ONE is providing key elements of OEI’s faculty and student support services. This Wednesday (Nov 16th), we have Ray Henderson to discuss the vendor perspective, but more on that at the bottom of this post.

    This was a fun discussion with Pat and Anna, as we discussed the LMS decision in context of overall academic strategy, using OEI as a case study. We seemed to end on the metaphor of the LMS as plumbing that needs to be in place to build the house you need. For OEI, the house is the course exchange as well as a shared set of services to help faculty develop online courses throughout the system. Resources, quality rubrics and design support, professional development, support students, etc.

    Coming next: we have Ray Henderson as our guest on Wednesday, Nov 16th, at 2pm EST to discuss the vendor perspective. Ray has a long history on the vendor side, working with eCollege, ANGEL, and Blackboard as a top executive, and he current sits on the board of several ed tech companies. This should be a great discussion. Sign up here for the third webinar.

  • Update: LMS Usage In Large Online Programs (Top 50 in US)

    By: Phil Hill and Justin Menard. Cross-posted at LISTedTECH

    Three and a half years ago Phil wrote a post “Snapshot of LMS Market for Large Online Programs in the US” giving a view into this growing segment of higher education.  Large online enrollment institutions typically mean a centrally-coordinated provision of online courses, often with duplicate course sections, and these programs tend to use more of the LMS than ad hoc online courses or blended courses. Further, these programs are dynamic – they are far more likely to grow significantly or shrink significantly than face-to-face or blended programs. As such, this segment can have different usage patterns than the broader market. Thanks to the partnership between e-Literate and LISTedTECH for our LMS subscription service, we have a much richer data set now. One of our subscribers asked a question over the weekend about this subject, so it seemed time to update this view.

    What we are showing below are the 50 institutions with the greatest number of students taking at least one online class based on the IPEDS database, for graduate and undergraduate combined. The most recent enrollment data set was for Fall 2014, so the enrollment data is slightly out of date. But the LMS listings should be up-to-date. In fact, we are showing some leading data, such as the University of Phoenix usage of Blackboard Learn and Kaplan University usage of D2L Brightspace – neither school has fully transitioned to the new LMS, but they have made official decisions and begun deployment. We have grouped the schools by sector, as well. (more…)

  • Webinars: When Cockroaches and the LMS Rule the Earth

    Thanks to the good folks at NobleStream, Michael and I are participating in a series of three colloquiums (or colloquia or webinars, you choose) hosted by Howard Weiner. This past Wednesday, the three of us discussed the vision that Michael and I have for e-Literate and our consulting practice with a focus on learning platforms. In fact, the title of the series is “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”.

    At one point Howard asked us about why the LMS is so important and why we started our subscription service around the LMS, to which Michael responded in Feldstein fashion (question starting at 39:00):

    Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS. It’s just this durable category. People talk about it dying or disappearing or morphing, and what happens is that it slowly evolves. It’s become this critical piece of infrastructure.

    (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.

  • Changes at D2L: A second-hand view from users conference

    As I have described to several executives at D2L, there is an interesting gap between the progress we have seen with the company’s product improvements and the reaction we hear from many of their customers. With the tighter integration with LeaP and the improved usability, particularly in content authoring, I would have expected to hear more customers react to the changes. But when talking directly to many of the institutions using the Brightspace LMS, staff describe D2L as if the company and product line had not changed in several years. What is not clear is whether this gap is due the company missing the mark (and my judgement of improvements not aligning with what colleges and universities want) or whether there is just a lag where it will take time for most customers to believe in and take advantage the new product designs and features.

    2016 has been an eventful year for D2L. COO Cheryl Ainoa, a longtime veteran of Yahoo! and most recently Intuit, joined the company in April. Although this move was not advertised through press releases or even blog posts, I believe this is a significant change to how the company operates. This is not the first time that D2L has reached outside the industry for a top executive, as they employed Dennis Kavelman from RIM / Blackberry as COO from 2012 – 2014 (the period where D2L raised $165 million in two mammoth funding rounds). But I have heard that the addition of Ainoa has already seen results internally. And in the ‘keeping work in perspective’ category, founder and CEO John Baker and his wife had their first child right before the Fusion Users Conference. (more…)