LMS Vendor Notes From Educause 2022

I recently attended both the WCET and Educause conference in subsequent weeks in Denver, which was nice given that my youngest daughter lives there. Honey, pack the dog - we're going on a road trip!

Jeanette joined me for Educause, which used to be THE EdTech conference, and the LMS market news tended to coincide with the fall event. The conference competition has heated up and Educause is now one among several EdTech conferences, but it does tend to remain the premier event in terms of exhibitor booths and is worth exploring further. Read soon before Educause serves a cease & desist letter for daring to share non-official photos from the event.

The following are presented in rough order of presence - the size and placement of the company booths. There are some surprises.

1. Google Classroom

Google continues to treat Classroom as an LMS in the K-12 market context but not for higher ed. Google had a large booth at the conference, with many groups represented who don't appear to talk to each other much, and with no real LMS presence.

2. Anthology (Blackboard Learn)

What was most obvious with the Anthology booth was that it was large, yet there was no Blackboard branding or messaging (Anthology is the company, Blackboard Learn is the product line now). Yes, you could go to the booth and ask for a demo, but the unified message of 'we are Anthology with a suite of tools' was quite clear.

News:

• Anthology promoted that Learn Ultra adoption is "building momentum", but that is comparing previous rate of Learn Original to Learn Ultra course conversions to current rates, and not overall market growth. Good for them but not really newsworthy.

• While this news has not been publicized, per se, at Anthology Together Middle East earlier in the month, the company announced enhanced data insights with the LMS data being tied to the CRM, allowing targeted communications with student groups based on their academic activity. This type of enhanced functionality from combining the SIS, CRM, and LMS into one company is worth watching further.

3. Cypher Learning

Wait, what? Yes, the company behind the NEO LMS, that has several dozen higher education institution clients in the Philippines and Latin America, had the third biggest presence at Educause. Their management has previously told us that they plan to enter the competitive North American LMS market, backed partially by their $40 million funding round from last year, and I guess Educause could be seen as their coming out party. Not that many people noticed - there was no real news tied to the event other than the large spend. But Cypher Learning might be worth watching to see if they can make it into any upcoming LMS evaluation processes.

4. Instructure Canvas

Instructure's booth represented the company well at this stage in its life. Solid booth design, good placement, good messaging, but nothing too fancy.

News:

• While not directly tied to the conference, Instructure held its earnings call yesterday and reported solid performance, beating estimates for top-line revenue and earnings in 2022. The stock price went down, which baffles me, but I guess this newsletter is not where you go to get financial market analysis.

• After a listening tour, Instructure announced changes to their transition plan for New Quizzes, removing the deadline to move on from Classic Quizzes.

• Canvas will be the LMS underlying ASU Thunderbird's Francis and Dionne Najafi 100 Million Learners Global Initiative. While I remain deeply skeptical about the initiative's goals, this is an important win for Canvas.

5. Open LMS

The former Moodlerooms, Open LMS, has grown outside of North America, mostly from migrating locally-hosted Moodle instances to a cloud environment, and their presence at Educause indicates a potential to increase their presence in North American higher ed LMS evaluations.

A recent Open LMS win of significance was at UNED, the national distance education university in Spain with roughly 200k students. Open LMS as you recall is the rebranded Moodlerooms that Blackboard sold to LTG in early 2020, augmented by subsequent purchases of eThink and eCreators. Their base LMS is Moodle, even though they are not a Certified Moodle Partners and cannot use the Moodle name. What UNED is transitioning from is aLF, based on dotLRN.

Not that ALF, aLF. The significance here is that this does indirectly represent a new Moodle adoption.

6. D2L Brightspace

Besides being relatively small, D2L's booth was just hard to find. For a company whose main challenge is a lack of market awareness, this marketing decision was surprising to me - D2L needs to be investing in awareness. The booth seemed to be quite busy, however, at least for people who sought them out.

News:

• While not directly tied to the Educause event, it has become public (see page 20) that D2L Brightspace won the LMS evaluation to replace Blackboard Learn at the City University of New York (CUNY), with its 273,000 students. This is another big win, coming a year after their big SUNY win.

7. Sakai

While Sakai came in last place with the smallest booth, they get extra credit for the prominent banner ad at the entrance to the conference, and the fact that they showed up at all. I have been told that Chuck Severance has a new company aimed at promoting Sakai, which we will research further.

Overall

It was a good conference with much more excitement than last year (earthshaking, I know), and the vendor exhibit hall remained the highlight of the conference. But I was surprised at having seven LMS booths this year. It's too early to tell if the marketing spend of Cypher Learning and Open LMS and Sakai will change their competitive position in North American higher ed, but we will do follow-up research.