LMS Buying Trends in Higher Education

Eduventures released a comprehensive report on Learning Management Systems this month, covering 20 LMS platforms. Approximately 900 institutions have been migrating or consolidating systems in the past 5 years, but most importantly, schools that were replacing an old LMS chose to switch to Blackboard products over 90% of the time. In the realm of entirely new implementations the playing field is much more even. Blackboard still holds the biggest piece of the pie at ~30%, but the other competitors are not very far behind, with Canvas holding ~25%, Brightspace/Desire2Learn holding ~15% and Moodle also holding ~15% of the new implementations.

Eduventures also went on to note some specifics regarding these companies:
•Instructure, D2L and Blackboard all had the most holistic LMS platforms
•Moodle remains the strongest choice for open source software
•Sakai, while not a valid option for most institutions, fits the bill for the need for incredibly complex and customized platforms
•Canvas and D2L focused on supporting comprehensive course content authoring and importing complete courses from older platforms.

All of this information was happily taken in at the ProctorFree office, as we are currently focused on the “Big 4” current LMS platforms. We are currently fully integrated with Blackboard, and that has been utilized when working with our current partners. We are also bringing full support for Canvas, Desire2Learn, and Moodle all within the year.

Read more about Eduventures findings in their post: What’s driving LMS buying behavior?