Blackboard Wins in Alabama, Remarkable Canvas Streak Is Over

Author

Phil Hill
November 10, 2020

In 1978 I was at the Atlanta Braves game when they ended Pete Rose’s 44-game hitting streak. The Braves finished 6th place in the NL West that year, but game was fun to attend. It was probably the most exciting game of that decade in Atlanta and had the feel of a Game 7 in the playoffs. What was great was that the Atlanta fans gave Pete Rose a standing ovation throughout his game-ending last at bat, both thrilled to have this achievement but also respectful of Rose’s hitting streak.

Today’s news of Blackboard winning the Alabama Community College system’s LMS evaluation reminds me of that game. On one hand, this is the most exciting win for Blackboard since 2015’s win with the University of Phoenix. On the other hand, thus ends the Canvas streak of not losing any higher education clients. 1 2

The News

Blackboard Inc., a leading EdTech software and solutions company, today announced that the Alabama Community College System (ACCS) is migrating all of its colleges to the company’s next-generation cloud learning management system (LMS), Blackboard Learn Ultra, and Blackboard’s holistic EdTech ecosystem including analytics, virtual classroom, accessibility, IT help desk, retention coaching and professional development software and solutions. With the multi-year system-wide agreement, ACCS will migrate 12 colleges from the Canvas LMS and another three colleges from Moodle, giving its 170,000 students at 24 colleges a single LMS experience. [snip]

“At the Alabama Community College System, student success comes first and implementing a system-wide learning management system will help us ensure the student experience is consistent across the state,” said Jimmy H. Baker, Chancellor at the Alabama Community College System. “Integrating Blackboard’s services at our 24 colleges will raise the bar on the student experience and provide additional tools for our faculty to improve student outcomes.”

Assuming this selection and subsequent implementation succeeds, this is big news indeed for the two reasons mentioned above.

Blackboard’s Biggest Win in North America Since 2015

Within ACCS, there are 8 Blackboard campuses representing 49% of student full time equivalents (FTE, using Fall 2018 IPEDS data), 12 Canvas campuses with 44% of FTE, 3 Moodle (or OpenLMS) campuses with 6% of FTE, and 1 campus with no official LMS and 1% of FTE.

In 2015 Blackboard had its biggest win of the decade, picking up the University of Phoenix and replacing its homegrown LMS with Learn Ultra (although the implementation was not complete at all campuses until 2019). Outside of that win, Blackboard has only picked up a small handful of wins in North American higher ed, mostly individual campuses coming off of Moodle, as seen in our most recent LMS Market Analysis report showing LMS migrations from 2018 – mid 2020.

North American higher ed LMS migrations 2018 - 2020

Blackboard has publicly committed to migrating all clients to a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), by the end of 2023, and the company is strongly pushing the Ultra user experience as the default LMS for new implementations. While the University of Phoenix win was significant, that system is highly-centralized in its course design. A public system like ACCS is more challenging for Learn Ultra, with thousands of faculty and hundreds of staff at two dozen schools making the migration. Picking up 16 new campuses with more than 30,000 FTEs is a big win for Blackboard, particularly with an entire statewide system planning to move to Learn Ultra.

I should note that Blackboard has picked up a number of new K-12 customers this year, in a market that pre-pandemic had nearly 40% of North American school districts without an official LMS. Like their competitors, Blackboard has done well in K-12 due to the transition to remote teaching.

The End of the Canvas Streak

Canvas was fully introduced to the LMS market one decade ago with the December 2010 systemwide selection by the Utah Education Network, which at the time represented more than 100,000 higher ed and 40,000 K-12 students. Since that time and until today, we have not detected a single instance of a college or university – worldwide – leaving Canvas as its primary LMS for a competitive system. 10 years and more than 1,800 institutional clients. There have been a handful of K-12 clients who have or will be migrating from Canvas to Schoology, but prior to ACCS there have been none in higher ed.

That is a remarkable streak in EdTech that has now ended.

Instructure provided the following statement via email.

We’re grateful for the opportunity we had to show the value of Canvas to schools across the ACCS and for the strong support we received across the selection committee. And of course we still believe Canvas would offer the best experience for students, educators, and administrators going forward. We’ve been there for ACCS before, and we’ll be there for them again in the future when they’re ready.

What to Watch

There is more to explore here, such as why the system made this selection. The short answer is about centralization, and despite Canvas coming ahead in all the product evaluations by faculty and staff, Blackboard won with a full bundle of products (Learn Ultra, SafeAssign, Ally, Collaborate, Retention Center, Analytics, etc) priced well below Instructure’s Canvas LMS and Canvas Studio offering. The longer answer deserves more research and a separate post.

For now, I’ll note that this is a high risk move by ACCS. This selection is predicated on full Learn Ultra usage – not just Base Navigation – which has not been done across a statewide system before. See this post on e-Literate for a description of the Learn Ultra terminology. And this is the first time we’ll have any higher education migration not just from Canvas to Blackboard Learn, but from Canvas to Blackboard Learn Ultra. And note the timetable from the press release.

ACCS will migrate all colleges to Blackboard Learn for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Congratulations to Blackboard on the big win, and congratulations to Instructure for the Canvas streak. If you want to see how well Learn Ultra holds up as a full-fledged LMS, replacing the market leader, this is the system to watch. We will also track whether Blackboard can build on this momentum and pick up other new clients in higher ed.

Disclosure: Both Blackboard and Instructure are subscribers to our EdTech Market Analysis service.

1 I am referring to a school switching off of Canvas as its primary, institution-wide LMS, and not the termination of a pilot or secondary system usage.

2 Disclosure: Both Blackboard and Instructure are subscribers to our EdTech Market Analysis service.