New LMS Market Data: Edutechnica provides one-year update

In Fall 2013 we saw a rich source of LMS market data emerge.

George Kroner, a former engineer at Blackboard who now works for University of Maryland University College (UMUC), has developed what may be the most thorough measurement of LMS adoption in higher education at Edutechnica (OK, he’s better at coding and analysis than site naming). This side project (not affiliated with UMUC) started two months ago based on George’s ambition to unite various learning communities with better data. He said that he was inspired by the Campus Computing Project (CCP) and that Edutechnica should be seen as complementary to the CCP.

The project is based on a web crawler that checks against national databases as a starting point to identify the higher education institution, then goes out to the official school web site to find the official LMS (or multiple LMSs officially used). The initial data is all based on the Anglosphere (US, UK, Canada, Australia), but there is no reason this data could not expand.

There is new data available in Edutechnica’s one-year update, with year-over-year comparisons available as well as improvements to the methodology. Note that the methodology has improved both in terms of setting the denominator and in terms of how many schools are included in the data collection.

The Fall 2014 data which now includes all schools with more than 800 enrollments:

There’s more data available on the site, including measures of the Anglosphere (combining US, UK, Canada and Australia data) as well as comparison tables for 2013 to 2014. Go read the whole post.

In the meantime, here are some initial notes on this data. Given the change in methodology, I will focus on major changes.

• Blackboard’s BbLearn and ANGEL continue to lose market share in US -^[1] Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), BbLearn has dropped from 848 to 817 institutions and ANGEL has dropped from 162 to 123. Using the revised methodology, Blackboard market share for > 800 enrollments now stands at 33.5% of institutions and 43.5% of total enrollments.
• Moodle, D2L, and Sakai have no changes in US - Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), D2L has added only 2 schools, Moodle none, and Sakai 2 schools.
• Canvas is the fasted growing LMS and has overtaken D2L - Using the 2013 to 2014 tables (> 2000 enrollments), Canvas grew ~40% in one year (from 166 to 232 institutions). For the first time, Canvas appears to have have larger US market share than D2L (13.7% to 12.2% of total enrollments using table above).
• BbLearn is popular in the UK while Moodle is largest provider in Canada and Australia - The non-US numbers are worth reviewing, even without the same amount of detail as we have for US numbers.

While this data is very useful, I will again point out that no one to my knowledge has independently verified the accuracy of the data at this site. I have done sanity checks against Campus Computing and ITC data, but I do not have access to the Edutechnica specific mechanism for counting systems. In order to gain longer-term acceptance of these data sets, we will need some method to provide some level of verification.

In the meantime, enjoy the new market data.

1. Disclosure: Blackboard is a client of MindWires Consulting.

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