Tag Archives: Pearson

6th Annual LMS Data Update

For the 6th year, Client Stat is pleased to announce the findings of our analysis of  institutional Learning Management System (LMS) usage in US higher education. As in the past, our methodology begins with the current list of institutions provided by the US Department of Education with more than 500 full time equivalent students and counts all LMSs in active, production use at an institution including pilot LMSs and co-production LMSs when used at a department-level scale or larger. Our QA process removes any LMS that is determined to be used by only a single professor, for a single course, or that only exists for sales or demonstration purposes. 

Hundreds of universities have closed, merged, or changed ownership

The most recent list of universities recognized by the US Department of Education has shrunk from a high of 7,643 institutions in 2013 to only 6,910 this past year. For-profit institutions in particular have changed in structure dramatically over the past 1-2 years as they’ve changed ownership and consolidated. Smaller colleges are another segment affected by closures and mergers. Because of this, it has caused significant, though artificial (that is, not intentional), shifts in LMS usage across all types of LMSs. It has also resulted in a growing number of phantom LMSs that technically exist but are no longer in use.

Vendor-hosted, SaaS delivery is the default LMS architecture

When implementing a new or replacement LMS, almost no school has chosen a configuration that is not hosted by the LMS provider and delivered in a SaaS manner. It is exceedingly rare that any school chooses to do otherwise.

Instructure continues to narrow Blackboard’s lead

While other sources of LMS market share information assert that Instructure has passed Blackboard in terms of market share, we disagree. Especially when considering the Blackboard-owned Moodlerooms LMS (recently rebranded as Blackboard Open LMS), Blackboard still maintains a significant lead. Instructure Canvas has, however, surpassed Blackboard Learn in terms of FTE student enrollments over the past year. If Instructure maintains its current pace, Instructure Canvas will also surpass Blackboard Learn by number of institutions in early-to-mid 2019.

Blackboard is in a much healthier place

Blackboard continues to make significant progress converting Blackboard Managed-Hosted and self-hosted installations to Blackboard Learn SaaS. This reduces the complexity that the organization faces by keeping a growing number of institutions on the same, up-to-date version of Blackboard Learn. There is a narrowed spread of product versions in use, significantly fewer institutions running an unsupported product version, and based on historical leading indicators fewer institutions than ever are actively pursuing LMS migrations away from Blackboard Learn.

Moodle and Sakai continue a protracted decline

While new institutions continue to adopt Moodle, its losses continue to outpace its growth. However, remaining Moodle institutions have made significant progress over the summer upgrading their LMS environments to a supported version. Sakai also continues to experience ongoing decline with more than one-third of the Sakai installed-base actively investigating a replacement LMS (with most expected to migrate to either Blackboard Learn or Instructure Canvas during the next 2 years).

D2L continues to make significant progress moving to Amazon for hosting

In late 2016, D2L announced that it was moving to Amazon Web Services to host its Brightspace LMS infrastructure. More than half of D2L’s customers are now running in this configuration, and the organization has been tremendously successful moving forward from a legacy product architecture.

ANGEL and Pearson LearningStudio (eCollege) have been phased out

Years after the end-of-life was announced for each of these products, not a single remaining institution is using either of these LMSs in an exclusive manner to actively teach online classes (though some of these LMS environments are still running in an archive-like state).

Finally, fewer institutions are choosing “Other” LMSs

While Schoology and Jenzebar’s bundled LMS continue to see success, the market continues to consolidate largely on Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace, Instructure Canvas, and Moodle. Most related success in this space can be found with LMS-like products that plug into the existing dominant LMSs to provide learning paths/adaptivity and Competency-Based Education (CBE)-like capabilities.

For inquiries, please contact marketdata@clientstat.com

 

 

LMS Data – Spring 2018 Updates

Each spring and fall, one of our longest-running projects has been to take a periodic look at the LMSs used by higher education institutions in the US. Generally speaking, the fall results highlight LMS migrations made over the summer as schools roll out new systems in advance of each new school year. The spring results tend to show the decommissioning of legacy LMSs and surface pilots of new LMS systems.

This spring’s results highlight a continued trend towards market consolidation among Blackboard Learn, Instructure Canvas, Moodle, and D2L Brightspace. This data aligns with the conclusions of another recent report from the Instructional Technology Councils’s Distance Learning Survey which also discusses some of the underlying drivers of this trend. Similar to the results discussed in this report, our data also shows a decline in the number of institutions that we forecast are going to change LMSs during the next year. In other words, as a result of the significant shifts we’ve seen in previous years, the rate of change in US higher education LMS usage appears to be slowing as this market stabilizes.

Even given these conditions, the only clear winner this spring appears to be Instructure Canvas. Canvas continues to draw new customers away from every other major LMS. Though schools continue to adopt new installations of Blackboard Learn, Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, and some smaller “other” LMSs, for the very first time only Canvas has experienced a net increase in installations. Every other major LMS experienced a net decline in its US higher education installed base. 

By the numbers, we continue to count institutions as reported in the US Department of Education’s IPEDS data source and consider each institution having more than 500 FTEs. We continue to remove institutions that have closed or ceased operations, a number that has now climbed past 150. The ANGEL LMS continues to be used by 3 lagging holdouts. Pearson LearningStudio, another LMS that has passed its end-of-life, continues to be used by a declining number of for-profit institutions. Sakai has continued to slowly fade, while Moodle’s decline appears to be slightly accelerating. D2L lost a few Brightspace institutions even as it gained a few new ones. And Blackboard still retains the top spot by a shrinking margin.