This is now our third annual update of LMS market share data for higher education institutions in the US. (We’ll also update some global numbers below.) At a high level over the past year, we saw:

• Healthy movement of schools among different LMS products as switching costs continue to decrease;
• Changes in vendor hosting patterns: while the two most popular LMS configurations continue to be self-hosted, proprietary and vendor-hosted, proprietary, the fastest-growing is vendor-hosted, open source;
• A stronger commitment by schools to maintain and update their LMSs to more-current versions;
• A continued consolidation onto these 6 major LMS platforms: Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace, Instructure Canvas, Moodle, Pearson’s Learning Studio, and Sakai; and, related
• Fewer schools appear to be using “other” LMSs though usage of “other” LMSs continues to be more-highly associated with smaller school sizes.

This year’s US data includes all schools with greater than 700 FTE students as determined by the US Department of Education’s IPEDS data source. If an individual institution, as listed in this data source, is known to use a particular LMS, this is reflected in the graphic below.  A single institution can use more than one LMS, which is why the percentages add up to over 100. (Some institutions for whatever reason host multiples of the same LMS – these only count once.)

Some LMS-specific highlights include:

ANGEL

• A quickening pace of institutions moving away from ANGEL, which reaches its end-of-life in October 2016. This product is now clearly experiencing a steady decline.

Blackboard Learn

• While it is encouraging that two-thirds of Blackboard Learn installations are now on the 2014 releases (there is not a 2015 release available yet at the time of this writing), an estimated 10.5% of Blackboard Learn customers currently run unsupported versions. This is expected to soon rise to as high as 19.9% in December 2015 when 9.1 SP14 falls into unsupported status.
• At the time of our data compilation, no Blackboard Learn installations in this data set were known to be using the new SaaS/Ultra configuration.

D2L Brightspace

• The D2L organization has now moved roughly one-fifth of its US customer base to its continuous delivery version with automatic monthly updates; however the vast majority of those running this new version are institutions who host with the vendor.

Instructure Canvas

• Canvas continues to experience significant uptake at a pace of around 2 new higher education institutions per week on average.
• New Canvas institutions have come from almost all other flavors of LMSs, but it is not always guaranteed that Canvas is selected following a pilot or evaluation.
• Update: Due to the questions we’ve received about Canvas, it’s important to remember our original methodology. The number of all Canvas environments reflects the total that could be materially connected back to a university and does include known pilot installations. Historical trends show a high correlation between piloting Canvas and switching to Canvas. We QA our data set with each post and remove both pilot and legacy LMSs when they are no longer in use.

Moodle

• Moodle continues to be an extremely popular LMS choice, and there are no indications that this will soon change.
• To Blackboard’s credit, the organization continues its commitment to keeping its Moodlerooms Joule customers up-to-date. Blackboard became the single largest source of institutions running Moodle 2.8 during the past quarter. (Update: We previously incorrectly listed these installations as version 2.9 due to a scripting error.)
• Additional Moodle hosting organizations appear to be gaining traction by successfully competing with the incumbents.

Sakai

• Of the remaining Sakai institutions, a larger number have been staying up-to-date on more-recent versions of Sakai.
• Though institutions are still switching from other LMS solutions to Sakai, Sakai’s institution-base continues to show signs of overall weakening with more than one-quarter of remaining institutions exploring or actively running an alternate LMS.

An interesting challenge for us during the past year has been how to account for those institutions who are ceasing operations due to financial pressure, or as is the case with Corinthian, government intervention. Some of these schools, for example Heald, have web sites that no longer load and phone numbers that ring busy, but their zombie LMSs live on. Can students still log into and retrieve materials from these LMSs? We don’t know. In cases where these LMSs still exist, we include them in this report. Pearson’s Learning Studio, because of this organization’s higher concentration of for-profit universities as customers, is disproportionately impacted.

Trends

To make a fair comparison of how this data set has changed over the past 3 years, we consider only the data available for the same set of schools greater than 2000 FTE in size available for each year of our collection.  (See the 2014 yearly update for more details on how to compare the 2014 and 2013 data.)

When doing so, one can make the following observations about US higher education institutions of 2000+ FTE in size:

• Usage of Blackboard Learn, though down in 2014, has returned to its 2013 level driven primarily by conversion of schools previously using ANGEL.
• There are significant decreases in schools of this size using ANGEL and “other” LMSs. (“Other” LMSs have often been used in tandem with another LMS, so there is not always a +1 gain elsewhere when an “other” LMS is decommissioned.)
• Moodle at this size level is down slightly while D2L Brightspace is up slightly.
• Canvas has experienced significant growth and has overtaken Moodle in market share when considering only schools of this size – in effect taking second place to Blackboard Learn earlier in 2015.

Despite its US growth, Canvas, has not yet experienced significant growth globally, at least at the university level. The next chart shows LMS usage only for higher educational institutions officially recognized by their respective federal departments of education as “universities” however defined by local laws and regulations as linked below.

Blackboard Learn and Moodle continue to dominate LMS usage for universities across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. In Canada, D2L’s Brightspace takes second place behind Moodle and above Blackboard.

For additional information, please visit this site. Edutechnica thanks Client Stat for their continued support of this project.

For this spring’s update (though, can we really call it spring yet?), the Edutechnica team has increased our data set to include all US higher education institutions with more than 700 students, improved our ability to detect pilot and co-production LMSs, and improved our ability to categorize “other” LMSs.  This is what we’ve found:

• Uptake of the latest version of Moodle (2.8) is steady and in-line with historical trends. Blackboard upgraded its Moodlerooms Joule product to Moodle 2.7 giving this more-recent Moodle version a bump this quarter as well.
• Several D2L institutions appear to be running Brightspace version 10.4. This version has been rumored to be D2L’s continuous delivery release featuring automatic monthly updates. This is an encouraging sign of progress for the company which first announced the new model in summer of 2013.
• The share of Blackboard Learn has increased slightly, driven primarily by institutions converting from ANGEL. Almost half of Blackboard’s Learn customers are on the April or October 2014 releases at this time. The other half appears to be using a long-tail of older versions with a handful still running Blackboard Academic Suite version 8. At long last, no school appears to still be running WebCT as their only  production LMS.
• Uptake of Sakai 10 is minimal, although it is (in our opinion) the most game-changing release for this LMS to-date. About one third of the Sakai client base appears to be actively pursuing an alternate LMS at this time.
• Instructure Canvas usage has soared to over 400 institutions. The company has still retained its ability to keep every one of its hosted customers in lock-step on the most recent release of Canvas.
• The top “other” LMSs are: custom, Jenzabar, ed2go, Campus Cruiser, and WebStudy. Of custom LMSs, PlumTree and SharePoint appear to be the top 2 identifiable CMS platforms on top of which LMS-like capabilities have been developed.

Blackboard is an interesting case study for this update given its most recent M&A activities. By considering unique ANGEL, Blackboard Learn, and Moodlerooms installations and then de-duplicating institutions, Blackboard’s overall LMS market share has dropped to 44.1% of institutions from an estimated 80-90% following the WebCT acquisition in 2006. Of the remaining ANGEL installations, fewer than one third are currently investigating Blackboard Learn (more than one third but less than half are exploring non-Blackboard solutions; the final third has until October 2016 to migrate to another LMS). The US higher education market for LMS products has clearly become very saturated.  Blackboard must know this, as it has been taking significant actions to more rapidly build a K12 presence, first by its merging with Edline during the private equity takeover and most recently by its acquisitions of ParentLink and Schoolwires.  When a market becomes saturated, dominant companies need to choose from a variety of alternative strategies to sustain growth.  During the past decade, the company has employed many strategies to do so including:

• Forward integration, or gaining ownership of distributors, as evidenced by the the acquisition of NetSpot, a Blackboard Collaborate re-seller
• Backward integration, or gaining ownership of suppliers, as evidenced by the acquisitions of  Xythos, the underlying CMS technology for Blackboard Learn, and Requestec, a supplier of WebRTC technology, presumably to be used for Blackboard Collaborate
• Horizontal integration, or gaining ownership of competitors, such as the acquisitions of ANGEL, WebCT, and Moodlerooms
• Market development, or introducing current products into new geographic areas, as evidenced by ramping up international expansion
• Product development, or the improvement of existing products such as the new UX in-development, or the development of new products such as xpLor
• Related diversification, or adding new but related products, such as SafeAssign plagiarism detection or the mobile campus app product that is now called Blackboard Mosaic
• Unrelated diversification, or adding new but unrelated products, such as the acquisition of NTI Group which provides a product that allows for mass text and voice notifications typically used in emergency situations. Another example of this which straddles the line of related/unrelated is the acquisition of Presidium which gave the organization a leg up in building a new student services line of business.
• Retrenchment, or regrouping through cost and asset reduction to reverse declining sales and profit, as evidenced by several recent rounds of layoffs.

It is with good reason, though, that Blackboard is actively expanding into K12 given the waning presence of its cash-cow LMS product at the university level. The K12 market is significantly bigger, representing almost 100,000 individual US schools compared to higher education’s roughly 7000, and presents greater opportunities for continued growth. The biggest challenge for Blackboard is that procurement processes and preferences for K12 schools vary widely down to the local level.  And keeping many focuses within a single company could prove to be challenging to coordinate. Acquiring companies who specialize in K12 needs and who have gone through the tremendous legal, contractual, and procedural efforts required to be added to each school district’s approved vendor list is a smart move.

Anyhow, apologies for meandering down business school lane. But we believe that the data this quarter provides an artifact to a case study of how a market-leading company has needed to change and evolve over time. Here are your spring 2015 US higher education LMS stats.

This post written by the Edutechnica team and sponsored by Client Stat.