Learning Management System - Learning Management Industry

Learning Management Industry

In the relatively new LMS market, commercial vendors for corporate and education applications range from new entrants to those that entered the market in the nineties. In addition to commercial packages, many open source solutions are available.

In the higher education market as of fall 2011, Blackboard is the leading provider with 51% market share, with Moodle (19%) and Desire2Learn (11%) being the next two largest providers. Many online colleges and universities are eCollege customers. In the corporate market, the six largest LMS providers constitute approximately 50% of the market, with SuccessFactors Learning and Sumtotal Systems being the two largest providers.

In addition to the remaining smaller LMS product vendors, training outsourcing firms, enterprise resource planning vendors, and consulting firms all compete for part of the learning management market. Approximately 40 percent of US training organizations reported that they have an LMS installed, a figure that has not changed significantly over the past two years.

Most buyers of LMSs utilize an authoring tool to create their e-learning content, which is then hosted on an LMS. In many cases LMSs include a primitive authoring tool for basic content manipulation. For advanced content creation buyers must choose an authoring software that integrates with their LMS in order for their content to be hosted. There are authoring tools on the market, which meet AICC and SCORM standards and therefore content created in tools such as these can be hosted on an AICC or SCORM certified LMS. By May 2010, ADL had validated 301 SCORM-certified products while 329 products were compliant.

Evaluation of LMSs is a complex task and significant research supports different forms of evaluation, including iterative processess where students’ experiences and approaches to learning are evaluated.