ANOTHER VIEW OF MARKET DOMINANCE: Blackboard still owns a dominant share of the higher-ed LMS market, but its hold on the crown is slipping. This is illustrated rather clearly by Canadian company LISTedTECH, which has tracked how LMS providers are wooing—or losing—new customers. Based on a database of more than 4,000 implementations, the graph below shows the percentage of new LMS implementations in North America captured by different companies each year.
Blackboard was once responsible for roughly 57 percent of all new LMS installations in 2001, a figure that dipped to 16 percent in 2014. Instructure—the talk of the town after its recent IPO—now claims nearly half of all new implementations. Its LMS, Canvas, “has more North American new implementations that Blackboard, Moodle, and [Desire2Learn] combined,” notes Phil Hill of e-Literate.
