The LMS: The Moral of the Story
By: Andrew Chaifetz
Tags: Startup, Edtech, Education Technology

From researching this market for over 6 years, I’ve decided to put my thoughts on paper…I mean, today’s version of paper being an online blog. If you are interested in the future of education technology and how it will impact students, faculty and administration then you must be interested in where the Learning Management System market is going. I’ve decided to break it down by phases of the origins, to the future.

From paper to online: the early players

Early players in the LMS market created platforms that essentially brought courses from being completely offline with paper and pencil, to online. Resources were made available on a faculty site, grades were put online and announcements were possible. What the early players did best was make a file system that was secure for the faculty to upload resources.

The cons…

These systems evolved in a way that other similar technologies have evolved. They became loaded with features upon features upon features. And then that file system became loaded with folders, and folders. And then some more folders…

Faculty and student reactions to using this poor and ugly system

The system got so out of touch, slow, and tedious, that even for the most simple task of uploading a file or assignment became ridiculously time consuming. Wasn’t this system supposed to make it easer to access files instead of printing things out for classes to get? It was starting to not be as simple and for faculty, some decided enough was enough, and they moved to other platforms or got rid of the system entirely. This is where the market started to shift and a few new players arrived.

The incremental system

As a phase II of the LMS market, Canvas by Instructure has done good things but mainly has been incrementally better than the previous legacy systems. Canvas by Instructure is a cloud based learning management system with additional grading and analytics features.

The platform is in my opinion a little better face to what Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, or any of the other legacy players have created. What Canvas did best was bring the LMS to the Cloud. They tout about a better gradebook, but in actuality, it’s pretty much the same as any other legacy LMS. I call them the Blackboard 1.5.

What really differentiates Canvas from the other players is their marketing. They are good at selling and making things sound much better than they actually are in my opinion.

And with that marketing, they were able to do something no one thought was possible — take over Blackboard market share. From 2008 when they were founded to 2010, they had zero contracts. However, from 2010 in their first contract signing to 2015, they went from zero to over half a billion in value. Goes to show that you don’t have to do much to overtake the competitors in the market. If you have a slightly better product and good marketing, you can win.

The next generation is social

It’s clear with the technology we use like facebook, twitter and linkedin that social media has taken over the modern interface. Messaging apps and social media are norms in the real world but in education, it seems that we are still around 10 or 15 years behind the game.

What I expect is a move to social media, mobile and apps within the LMS. It’s normal for students and faculty who utilize these applications on a daily basis outside of education. Why not have them in our educational lives?

This is quite similar to a few revolutions in technology over the past decade. Here’s some examples that can show how markets have previously been disrupted and how it relates to education.

iPhone vs Blackberry

Blackberry was the market leader of the phone market at one time. What Blackberry did best was provide an all-in-one solution with a great keypad and messaging app. Problem was that they built everything in-house. Meaning, it was very difficult to integrate applications outside from Blackberry itself. And they had higher costs than new comers like Apple since they were the one’s developing all the apps rather than the community doing it for them.

The phone of apps

Apple revolutionized the market not with the best core applications but with the combination of the core applications it had (i.e. Phone, Messaging, Safari, Music, etc) + Touch Design + App Store. The App Store is really what took the iPhone to the next level and conquered the phone market. The App Store allowed for any individual to customize their phone with applications they wanted. It allowed for a community to develop and make the iPhone that much better, every time. And guess what, Apple didn’t have to pay for this to occur. They could literally sit and watch as their ecosystem grew like wildfire. Before you knew it, they had many more apps than Blackberry could ever have.

Apple created a new category. An app phone.

Airbnb vs Hotels

You’d think with an industry that has been around for a very long time, that it would be impossible to break into it. I mean, that’s what the investors say…

Your home, anywhere

But with Airbnb, what they did best was prove the naysayers wrong. Hotels are often expensive and do not showcase a local vibe that many want when they are traveling. Airbnb provided a low cost and fun experience to gain the local culture of a community.

For the first time in this market, a company quickly took over the traditionally stagnant. And by doing so, they created a new category. The sharable home.

Uber vs Taxi’s

Hailing a cab will soon be a thing of the past

Anyone 5 years ago would have said that Taxi’s were just annoying but we just ‘had to deal with them’. The guys at Uber thought differently and said why not shake this up and make it mobile. Basically what uber did was made the taxi go mobile and made it more comfortable and convenient for drivers and passengers to get together.

They created a new category. The mobile taxi.

Moral of the story

All of these markets are breakable. Just because a market has been around for awhile does not make it impossible to break into. I firmly believe that the LMS market will be disrupted as well with a new category. The social learning platform.

Where’s the community in online education today?

Some things yet to be done in this LMS market:

Connecting the campus community to the LMS

Opening up the community to create applications into a single platform

Having a mobile ready platform (*not just an app as a checkbox for an RFP)

And, a framework based on a social network (i.e. community)

These are the fundamental differences in the LMS of the future. Imagine a platform that can make that happen. It’s just a matter of when this happens, not if.