e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LMS

  • 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…)

  • Instructurecon 2016: Why This Company is Still Formidable (and Misunderstood)

    When I talk to Instructure competitors or critics, I usually hear two complaints about them:

    1. They “open wash” or are “fauxpen.”
    2. They have no vision.

    Having attended Instructurecon 2016 a couple of weeks ago, my answer to the first complaint is that the critics don’t understand what Instructure and their customers mean by “openness.” In some respects, Canvas is the most open ed tech project I know of in ways that strongly differentiate it from its competitors. Full stop. The second complaint is more plausible. But if I were competing against Instructure, I wouldn’t take too much comfort in that.

    (more…)

  • MoodleMoot US 16: Playing small-ball

    At the MoodleMoot in late June in Los Angeles, which serves as close to a users conference for the open source Moodle LMS community as any other event, there was a strong sense of continuity and general improvements. Rather than aggressive rearchitectures and product lineup changes, the Moodle roadmap is based on hitting singles and running the bases and not worrying about getting the big hits.

    In an interview with Moodle HQ founder and CEO Martin Dougiamas last fall, I asked him to respond to my observation that Moodle is at an inflection point based on Blackboard acquisitions of Moodle Partners, the creation of the Moodle Association, and Remote Learner leaving the Moodle Partner program. Martin’s response was interesting and is consistent with the message at the conference this summer. (more…)

  • MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong

    New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up.

    Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently attended. We already covered Sakai and Blackboard, and we will have commentary on Moodle, Schoology, D2L, and Canvas soon. But before we do so, I wanted to call out the recent analysis by MarketsandMarkets, which requires some commentary as it is leading to some media coverage that could misinform those trying to understand the LMS market. The headline of their recent market report:

    Learning Management System (LMS) Market Worth 15.72 Billion USD by 2021

    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%.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not?

    At this year’s BbWorld16 users conference, Blackboard’s new executive team demonstrated their ability to deliver a much tighter, more coherent message of what they are learning from talking to customers and what the focus of the company will be in the next few years. The “1 Learn, 2 Experiences (Original and Ultra), and 3 Deployments (Self-Hosted, Managed-Hosted, and SaaS)” meme is an example. Words are easy to come by, however, and Blackboard leadership needs to back up their claims, particularly with the Learn LMS and particularly with the long-delayed Learn Ultra.

    Michael described the challenges that Blackboard and its new CEO Bill Ballhaus face back in January, with this comment about Learn Ultra [emphasis added]:

    Prove that Ultra is real: While there are customers who will not be quick to move off of 9.x (for a variety of reasons), nobody believes that the current platform represents a compelling future for digital learning environments. It is long in the tooth. But schools evaluating LMSs have largely discounted Ultra because they don’t think it’s real and they’re not convinced that it ever will be. Now that the product is a year late, they have increased reason to be skeptical. We have heard that there are schools piloting Ultra, but I am not aware of any public information about how these pilots are going or even which schools are participating. Blackboard needs to ship Ultra and trot out some customers who are willing to speak publicly about their experiences with it. If they fail, they will not get a do-over.

    While this inaccurate claim came from the previous executive team, and while I have heard nothing but positive reviews from Blackboard staff about the new CEO, this does not mean that previous claims are irrelevant. And the issue is not what Blackboard told us at e-Literate, it is more what they have told or not told the higher education (and K-12) communities. (more…)

  • About The Blackboard Partnership With IBM And Amazon Web Services

    Leading into BbWorld16, Blackboard’s annual users conference in the air conditioned bunker of The Venetian in Las Vegas, the company announced that they were partnering with IBM.

    Blackboard Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a collaborative agreement for IBM to manage Blackboard’s datacenters and cloud infrastructure. The two companies will also work together to develop innovative educational solutions, taking advantage of IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology and Blackboard’s broad capabilities suite.

    Under the agreement, IBM will manage much of Blackboard’s technology infrastructure, including the company’s 28 global data centers and its existing public cloud footprint. IBM will also provide support for Blackboard’s expanding use of the public cloud. Blackboard will leverage IBM’s expertise and software to offer customers some of the most flexible, reliable, security-rich and resilient environments available.

    What the initial press release did not capture, and what has become quite apparent at BbWorld16, is that this is really a three-way partnership between Blackboard, IBM, and Amazon (for Amazon Web Services, or AWS). Peter George, Blackboard’s SVP of Products, noted this critical distinction in his blog post “Partnering with AWS and IBM for cloud services and infrastructure management”. (more…)

  • UC Davis Lessons: Open is as open does

    It’s interesting how one phrase can cause such a reaction.

    There is an interesting angle here in that Sakai is open source yet data is not easily recoverable.

    This comment came from the original post discussing UC Davis’ SmartSite disaster when their Sakai hosting partner Scriba botched a data center move, leading to a university of 32,000+ students going without a fully-functional LMS for the last three weeks of a term, including finals week. If you want the full run-down, read that linked post then look at additional posts in this list for the basics. ((SmartSite is the UC Davis branding for their LMS, which was hosted at the time by Scriba, a Sakai Commercial Affiliate.))

    What did I mean with this comment?

    Simply that this outage would give us a chance in reality to get a better understanding of the dynamics of open source solutions and whether the university in question would actually have achieved the ability to “control its destiny”. The early indications at the time were that UC Davis would not be able to make the course data from their LMS fully available to faculty and students before the end of the term. A full analysis of the causes and implications of the situation needed more information on what led to the outage, what UC Davis had in their contract with Scriba, and how the end of the term would play out. But even before that analysis, the comment was also based on the likely market perceptions.

    What did I not mean? (more…)