The Report of the LMS's Death is an Exaggeration

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The following is a joint post by Glenda Morgan and Phil Hill

Al Essa wrote a newsletter post yesterday titled “The LMS is Dead. What Will Replace It?” Setting the stage (accurately, in our opinion) that higher education is facing structural rather than cyclical challenges, Essa then gets to his thesis.

In our role as both consultants and market analysts, we run into this thesis fairly often, and it is interesting that just last week there was an Op-Ed at Inside Higher Ed making related arguments, titled “The LMS Is Dead; Long Live Online Teaching.”

Essa’s is the stronger of the two articles, and this provides an opportunity for us to lay out in public what we frequently describe to clients. And while we disagree with the core thesis, this is a valuable debate to have. In short, we believe the LMS is not dead or even dying; it is as crucial as ever, even if the product category needs to improve and better serve colleges and universities.

We should also point out that Essa’s post is the first in a series leading to a demonstration project for a CoreLMS product idea. Our analysis is limited to the assumptions raised about the LMS product category, not a critique of the demonstration project.

Counter Argument

Essa makes several supporting arguments, both explicit and implicit, that are not always consistent with one another. At various points in his post he describes the LMS as necessary but unaffordable, central but undifferentiated, indispensable yet strategically hollow. We want to take these claims in turn, because where we disagree is less about whether learning happens in an LMS and more about what it means to support learning at institutional scale.

Learning

At the core of Essa’s argument is the claim that the LMS does not contribute to learning. On this point, we are in broad agreement. Learning happens through practice, feedback, struggle, insight, and interaction. It happens through the work of faculty and learning designers, not because a platform exists. Furthermore, much of the platform support for learning activities comes in publisher courseware or other discipline-specific content systems, although those are often accessed through the LMS.

This is precisely why we have long pushed back on claims that one LMS or another directly produces learning gains, and why terms like course management system (CMS) or virtual learning environment (VLE) are more analytically honest descriptions.

Where we part company is in what follows from that observation. Essa dismisses the LMS as a system that merely manages the “flow” of learning, as if that flow were incidental.

But once we move beyond the level of an individual learner and start talking about courses, programs, and entire universities, separating learning from the conditions that make it possible becomes untenable.

The LMS is not a learning tool. It is an environment. It is the place where instructors organize content, structure activities, coordinate interactions, and create coherence for students navigating complex academic work. In a largely digital world, learning happens through engagement with materials, instructors, and peers. The LMS is what pulls those elements together, or at least provides a stable point from which other specialized tools can be accessed.

This role should not be underestimated. Coherence matters. Without it, students spend more time hunting for materials, juggling logins, and trying to reconstruct how the pieces fit together, and less time engaging with the substance of a course. At scale, coherence is not a convenience. It is a prerequisite for learning to occur at all.

By Essa’s logic, classrooms would also fail the test. Classrooms do not cause learning either. They simply organize space, time, access, and interaction. Yet we understand intuitively that without that organization, learning quickly degrades. In an increasingly digital environment, the LMS provides the sense of place and access that physical classrooms provide on campus. What humans do inside that space creates the magic. The space itself still matters.

LMSs are too expensive

Essa argues that LMSs are expensive once total cost of ownership is considered. This is true in a narrow sense, but it is a curious argument given the broader economics of higher education. Even accounting for implementation, integration, training, and support, LMS spending typically represents a small fraction of IT budgets which are themselves a tiny component of institutional budgets, often in the range of three to seven percent. The vast majority of university spending happens elsewhere, largely on personnel.

More importantly, the LMS is not competing with faculty, curriculum, or pedagogy for resources. It is competing with other enterprise systems. By that standard, the LMS is not expensive. It is cheap, especially given how central it is to the daily work of most faculty and students. Cutting or destabilizing an enterprise system used by nearly every instructor is unlikely to produce meaningful savings, and far more likely to introduce friction and hidden costs across the institution.

Essa is right to note that once an LMS is embedded, institutions often purchase additional tools and extensions. But these costs are trivial compared to the costs of physical classrooms, major administrative systems, or the faculty themselves, whom he rightly identifies as central to learning. Framing LMS spending as crowding out learning investment misidentifies both the scale of the spending and the nature of the tradeoff.

The academic LMS may actually be the most underpriced enterprise system in higher education. At roughly $20 per student per year, it is the digital front door to the university - supporting every course, every term, across an entire academic career - for about the cost of three iced lattes. Framed as a campus-wide contract, the total can look large in absolute dollars. But in enterprise terms, this is remarkably cheap: a mission-critical, always-on platform operating at massive scale, embedded in daily teaching and learning, priced closer to a commodity than a core system.

Courseware (think McGraw-Hill Connect or Pearson MyLab or Revel) or related tools (think Packback, for example) often cost $30 - $70 per course per semester, meaning spending in the multiple hundreds per student per year range.

Paradoxically, the low price of the LMS has become an anchor that depresses innovation elsewhere in the EdTech ecosystem. Many institutions implicitly treat LMS pricing as a baseline and resist paying more for newer tools, including AI‑native learning systems. But the creators of those tools cannot build sustainable businesses at LMS price points. Unlike the old joke attributed to Lee Iacocca, they cannot lose money on every sale and make it up in volume.

Essa suggests that learning technologies are getting cheaper in an era defined by AI.

We see little evidence for this. Tools that are more tightly coupled to learning, such as adaptive systems or AI‑enabled tutoring platforms, typically cost more than the LMS, not less. As large AI providers face increasing pressure to demonstrate profitability rather than subsidized growth, those costs are more likely to rise than fall.

Essa goes on to argue above that the expertise required to apply new learning tools already exists on campus, in the faculty. This is an appealing idea, but it is not borne out by experience. Even when faculty are enthusiastic adopters, institutions incur significant costs supporting the effective use of technology at scale. Faculty time is not free, and institutional support is not optional.

LMSs as commodities

Essa makes the claim that all LMSs are alike.

The key issue here is fungibility - whether the products are undifferentiated or not, whether the supplier matters or not. There is a difference between interchangeable commodities and differentiated products that have the same feature lists.

If you define the LMS by a checkmark process on feature lists, as is too often the case in procurement rhetoric, then you might view the product category as a commodity. But in reality, which LMS a college or university chooses can have a dramatic impact on faculty adoption and depth of usage, on the level of support for evolving pedagogical and curriculum designs (competency-based education or mastery learning, for example). Even further, simply the ease-of-use and intuitive design can impact real usage. Or the customization capabilities to enable specialized program design.

Further, we observe that the primary LMS vendors are taking very different approaches to AI capabilities. The roadmaps are diverging, not converging.

Parting thoughts

Like Essa, we agree that higher education is facing structural change, not a temporary downturn. Institutions are under real pressure and will need to make difficult strategic choices and significant shifts. But abandoning the LMS is not one of the productive ones in our opinion.

The LMS may move into a new generation (possibly driven by AI enabling a change in user interaction assumptions), and it may look quite different in 5+ years. And the product category needs more innovation and even more competition. But it is not going away, mostly because the problem is not going away.

The real question is not what replaces the LMS. It is how institutions find new ways to create learning that meets the needs of a changing world all while keeping a wide range of stakeholders working in unison. The LMS has never been the source of learning innovation, and no serious observer believes it should be. But burying a workhorse system that underpins coherence, access, and scale would not free institutions to innovate. It would distract them from the harder work of aligning technology, labor, and pedagogy in a rapidly changing environment.

We appreciate the opportunity to comment on these questions raised by Essa’s post, and we look forward to reading his series on the CoreLMS.

The LMS is not dead. The framing is.

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