Updates to LMS News Around Educause 2022

Dear Market Analysis Subscribers,

We're approaching the end of the year and the annual LMS Market Analysis report, and the recent coverage of LMS vendor news around the Educause Conference has generated some useful conversation and feedback. Let's do some updates.

Correction - UNED Not On Moodle

In the public blog post I initially described the Open LMS win at UNED, the national distance education university in Spain with roughly 200k students, as a Moodle to Moodle transition. 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, however, is not self-hosted Moodle despite that being used in one program. The university LMS is aLF, based on dotLRN (I apologize for the mistake).Not that ALF, aLF. The significance here is that this does indirectly represent a new Moodle adoption.

Clarification - New Implementation is not Market Share

For our market analysis subscribers, this point is probably obvious, but I wanted to be clear about the chart that I shared in the public blog post.That chart takes each year and calculates the percentage of new implementations of a particular LMS (whether from a school adoption an LMS for the first time or whether from a migration from another LMS), and sums those percentages up to 100%. This removes the metric of the total activity per year.Market share by institution / district is a representation of the total installed base of the colleges and universities (or K-12 districts), with the % of schools on a particular LMS shown. From our year-end 2021 report showing market share for each global region we cover:We also show market share scaled by enrollment for those areas where we have sufficient enrollment data - primarily North America and Europe. This metric gives a more accurate view of how many students are on each LMS, as show in our year-end 2021 report graphic on Europe.The general idea of each metric and graphic type:

• New implementations is best at showing market momentum;

• Market share by institution / district is best at showing broad global market share, particularly for regions where there is not enough reliable total enrollment data, and it is best at showing historical trends;

• Market share scaled by enrollment is best at representing the relative number of students on each LMS, and therefore the closest to LMS revenue models that rely on institutional enrollment.

We're starting work on our Year-End 2022 LMS Market report for higher education (due in January), which will include updates to market share based on new activity this year, as well as expanded descriptions of vendors. Until then, thanks for the feedback and questions.