Education Week - October 1, 2014 - Special Report - S3

EDUCATION WEEK

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Kitchener, Ontario. Moodle, based in Perth, Australia,
is the largest open-source learning management system on the market.
But newer companies such as Instructure, an education software company based in Salt Lake City that
makes the popular Canvas lms, are quickly gaining
K-12 market share, Mr. McIntosh said.
And a host of newer products-including Classroom,
a free tool from Mountain View, Calif.-based onlineservices giant Google, and itslearning, an lms from
a Norwegian company of the same name-are also
increasingly popping up on educators' radar screens.
"One reason is cost," Mr. McIntosh said. "Blackboard,
for example, has gotten very expensive over the years."
Another reason many educators are looking for new
products, he said, is their perception that the established players are not as user-friendly as they should
be, both in terms of their products' interface and their
responsiveness to individual clients.
Reliable data on the K-12 market share of learning
management systems are hard to come by. But one
thing is clear, according to the siia: The makers of lms
software are competing for slices of a shrinking overall
pie.
According to the group's most recent market survey,
"U.S. Education Technology Market: PreK-12 Survey," the amount spent by K-12 school systems in the

United States on lms software and related instructional-management tools has declined precipitously,
likely due to some combination of tough economic
times for districts, the emergence of free cloud-based
products, and the hesitance of district officials to purchase new systems whose very identity and functioning is in such flux.
In 2010-11, the group projected a total of $400 million in revenue from sales of lms software to K-12
schools. By 2011-12, the last year for which data are
available, that figure had dropped to $182 million.

'Legacy' Companies Adjust
Despite the tough market, large "legacy" lms companies, many of which also have huge footprints in higher
education, insist they continue to grow.
In August, for example, D2L announced
that it had raised $85 million from investors,
resources the company said it intended to use to grow
its workforce, ramp up research and development,
and expand its integrations with other software and
apps.
Blackboard also announced this summer that it
would combine various disparate offerings-including
its lms, a digital content library, mobile learning apps,
a parent-messaging service, and more-into a single
package rather than attempt to sell each to districts

as standalone products.
"Instead of saying, 'Here's a bunch of parts, figure out
what to do with them,' we've bundled them into true
solutions," said Mark Strassman, the company's senior
vice president of industry and product management,
in an interview.
The company is also rolling out a public cloud-based
option for its lms-a service that is increasingly of
interest to districts looking to avoid the expense and
hassle of maintaining software themselves.
And Blackboard has also invested heavily in completely redesigning what users see and experience
when they log in to its products. The goal, said Mr.
Strassman, is a "delightful" experience that "offers
access to what people want in dramatically fewer
clicks"-a change that he acknowledged was driven
in large part by the competitive forces at work in the
crowded K-12 lms marketplace.
"Canvas and [D2L] and those sorts of vendors drove
us to have a better user interface," Mr. Strassman said.
"I think there's a recognition that as a company with
a 15-year history ... we have an opportunity to reinvent how customers use [our technologies] and launch
something that is completely new."
Although many educators and industry officials
consider the evolution of K-12 learning management systems to be dramatic, Mr. McIntosh of
Trimeritus e-Learning Solutions described

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Education Week - October 1, 2014 - Special Report

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