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LMS Decommissions: A view of lost clients and campus closures

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One theme of our coverage of the academic LMS market over the past 1 – 2 years, both at e-Literate and in this blog, continues to be worth watching:

there are strong arguments that company financial health in 2018 / 19 for the providers will continue to have an outsized impact on the future of LMS offerings.

Both posts linked above described the overall market slowdown – where there has been a significantly lower number of LMS switches – that we first described to our LMS market analysis subscribers just over a year ago and in the blog starting this year. Our updated data over the summer shows no signs of the slowdown ending.

Another issue to consider is not just who is winning and how often, but from the opposite side. Who is losing LMS clients? Let’s first look at the US and Canada for LMS switches since the beginning of 2017, from our report this summer. The left side shows the previous campus LMS, measured by number of institutions, and the right side shows the new LMS.

LMS migrations in North American higher education from 2017 - mid 2019, showing the previous LMS on left side and new LMS on right.

Blackboard Learn lost the largest number of campuses, followed by Pearson LearningStudio and Moodle, then by D2L Brightspace and Homegrown and Sakai.

When looking at company finances, however, it is important to expand this view. One expansion is to look at global regions beyond North America. Another expansion is to include campus closures as a source of losses in addition to switches. The following chart shows the percentage of decommissions each calendar year in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania combined (but note that North American numbers are the largest portion of these numbers). Decommissions is a combination of switches and closures, and the percentage is calculated on a per-year basis.

LMS higher ed decommissions per year for combination of North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.

We see that two LMS end-of-life situations created by Blackboard acquisitions (where bought their competitor and eventually cut off the product line) were huge factors through 2015. WebCT was acquired in 2006 and shut down by 2013. ANGEL was acquired in 2009 and shut down in 2016.

Blackboard Learn has consistently lost customers since mid 2000s, with roughly 27 – 36% of decommissions each year coming from this solution recently. While Blackboard is the primary beneficiary of the LMS market slowdown, and its improved performance is clearly one of the causes of that trend, when looking at the data it is clear that they are still a big source of LMS losses. Consider their recent loss of long-time clients Purdue University and Princeton University. They also are at risk from several high-enrollment systems expected to complete LMS evaluation processes this year and next.

One of the most remarkable stories in EdTech is that Instructure has not lost a single Canvas higher education client due to an LMS switch. 1In terms of primary systems available campus-wide in higher ed. They have lost two K-12 clients to Schoology. But Instructure has lost clients due to campus closures, particularly from Education Corporation of America (two systems shut down) and secondarily from DeVry University (several campuses closed), mostly in 2018.

D2L Brightspace has lost a relatively small number of clients over the years, but their LMS decommissions ramped up in 2018 and 2019, largely due to campus closures. They were particularly hard hit by the closure of Dream Center systems (Art Institutes, South University, and Argosy University, all acquired from the for-profit EDMC).

Moodle has lost a consistent number of clients over the years, particularly in North America, despite it having the largest installed base worldwide. We documented a broader look at the overall changes in Open Source systems recently.

Pearson LearningStudio, formerly known as eCollege, was popular with for-profit chains and with some nonprofit fully-online programs, but Pearson shut down that system by the end of 2017.

Sakai has slowly but steadily lost clients for years, and it continues to do so with recent decisions at the University of Rhode Island and UC Davis, and potentially with several other decisions expected within the next year.

Every LMS provider loses clients, and these losses are important to understand in terms of the organization’s financial health. If you’re interested in seeing more information on the data behind these charts, we have them available with our LMS Market Analysis service.

Addressing the Decline of Open Source LMS for #altc Discussion

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There is an interesting discussion on Twitter #altc that is worth addressing, regarding the decline of open source solutions in EdTech, with LMS as a key example.

Laura Czerniewicz posted in reply:

Michael Feldstein and I have dealt with this subject at e-Literate and on this blog, as Laura references, but it might be worthwhile to update the data. I do not plan on address the “why” and “what can be done” questions in this post, instead focusing on hopefully more useful information as input to the discussion.

First a note on the data for context. Our data set and analysis behind our LMS Market Analysis service for higher education is in partnership with LISTedTECH. The data are very school or institution-centric. We do not look at how many implementations are claimed by LMS providers, rather we look at institutions and check which LMSs are their primary or secondary systems. We use the public data from LMS providers as quality checks on our data, not as the source. We have data on over 11,000 institutions worldwide, with roughly 4,500 in the US and Canada. The primary regions we cover are North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). We also have data for the Middle East, Africa, and various sub-regions of Asia, although we do not officially cover those in our market analysis. There is new data we plan to release soon on more than 3,000 K-12 institutions in the US and Canada.

In our Summer 2019 report, we showed the installed base in different global regions, based on number of institutions.

Global market share for LMS in higher education, broken out for Europe, North America, Latin America, and Oceania.

Regarding open source LMS:

  • Moodle is dominant, both as an open source LMS solution and globally as the most-implemented LMS solution.
  • The adoption of Moodle in the North America (25%) is different and much lower than other global regions (67 – 76%).
  • As seen in our previous post, if you scale by enrollment in North America, Moodle has even lower (12%) market share in North America.

The question in the #altc discussion, however, seems to be more about the historical trends, not the installed base. And the question also seems to focus on the markets outside of North America. Laura referenced this post which shows the clear decline of Moodle and Sakai in North America, but what about other regions? The following chart shows LMS market share by institution for all of our higher education data outside of North America (including areas in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia that we do not officially cover yet).

Historical higher ed LMS market share for commercial and open source providers.

Some notes:

  • The data set is more complete in recent years, and open source implementations at smaller schools are difficult to find. Therefore there is likely a bias with more Moodle schools in recent years. In other words, there may be somewhat more of a decline that the data initially shows.
  • The majority of “open source” usage is from Moodle, but this category also includes Sakai, Blackboard OpenLMS, and other open source solutions. This category does not include Canvas.
  • Outside of North America there is a slight decline in open source LMS since 2015, or at least a plateau.
  • I don’t have time this morning to create a separate chart, but in general open source LMS tends to drop off for more mature markets (in terms of higher LMS adoption within a region). One way to read this is that open source LMS markets are shifting over time towards developing regions.

I look forward to the continued #altc discussion, but hopefully this data will help with context.

State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: 2019 Mid-Year Edition

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It has been nearly a dozen years of sharing the LMS Market share graphic, commonly known as the squid diagram. This past year we at MindWires shifted our LMS Market Analysis reports from Spring / Fall to Mid-Year / End-of-Year to better allow analysis of entire years. With the release of our mid-year 2019 report this week to subscribers, it’s time for us to look at updates on the institutional LMS market for North America (US and Canada) higher education. Note that our coverage for the market analysis includes Europe, Latin America, Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding island countries) as well as emerging coverage of the Middle East.

We present the following data “by institutions”, with market share as a percentage of the total number of institutions using each LMS as a primary system, and “by enrollments”, where we scale the institutions by its total enrollment. The latter better captures the business of the LMS market, since most licensing deals are based the number of students.

But first, let’s look at an updated LMS market share graphic for US and Canadian higher education. The original idea remains – to give a picture of the LMS market in one page, highlighting the story of the market over time. The key to the graphic is that the width of each band represents the percentage of institutions using a particular LMS as its primary system.

North American Higher Ed LMS Market share for mid 2019, based on number of institutions using each solution as primary system.

In the past five years, the LMS Market for North American higher education has become increasingly dominated by “the Big Four” (Instructure Canvas, Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace, Moodle) 2Disclosure: Instructure, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, and Schoology are all subscribers to our LMS Market Analysis service. for institution-wide adoptions; the aggregate market share of year’s top four systems moving from 80% to 95% in past five years. Beyond North America, we are seeing the same trends in Europe, Latin America, and Australia / New Zealand.

Consolidation of North American Higher Ed LMS Market in Big Four of Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, and Moodle, moving from 76% combined share in 2012 to 95% today.

We recently described the overall market activity slowdown in that there are fewer LMS formal evaluations taking place since mid 2018, with data pointing to a 20 – 25% drop from a year earlier. This slowdown seems to be a type of plateau rather than a continuing trend, and we are watching to see if it is temporary or not. We have seen some increased activity this summer, but we are not ready yet to say if the trend has reversed.

In addition, last summer we shared the symbolic passing of the torch where Canvas surpassed Blackboard in US market share, which was the first time Blackboard was not the top system since the market emerged two decades ago. Despite several counter-forces (the market slowdown, University of Phoenix finishing its Learn Ultra implementation, and closure of for-profit chain and dozens of campuses using Canvas), Canvas has extended its North American lead – 28% vs. 27% based on count of institutions, and 35% vs. 31% in terms of student enrollments at those schools.

North American Higher Ed LMS market share by enrollment, with Canvas at 35%, Blackboard at 31%, Brightspace at 14%, and Moodle at 12%.

While D2L’s market share with Brightspace actually decreased slightly largely due to the closure of for-profit clients, they have picked up some impressive wins lately, including Purdue University, the University of the Sciences, University of Rhode Island, and nearly a dozen others (not all of which are publicly announced yet).

Moodle declined slightly – less than 1% in terms of institutions – over the past year. We have added Jenzabar to our main graphic, based on its somewhat persistent market share.

We have a broader set of data as part of our LMS Market Analysis service, and we will share more information on regions outside of North America this fall.

Update 8/16: Adding Disclosure – Instructure, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, and Schoology are all subscribers to our LMS Market Analysis service.