The NOSE

The Economics of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education - Part I

Imagine having purchased a new household product. Imagine relying on it more and more until it becomes a fixture and eventually your home can't be said to function at all without it. Imagine also that there have been no improvements to the base product, except at the margins and in ornament. Imagine finally that product cost soars, with no end in sight, while your total household budget declines. Would you have cause for alarm?

The California State University System and Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, recently concluded a landmark study of "The State of the Learning Management in Higher Education Systems". This is fine work and timely during these difficult economic times. The California State University System is to be commended for not only undertaking the study but sharing it with the world. (It will be worth your while to go through the admirable webinar discussion of the findings by Philip Hill, Molly Langstaff, and Kathy Fernandes.)

Let's start with the three basic trends identified in the study. We might classify these now as the "Known Knowns" regarding the enterprise LMS in higher education.

• Trend #1: The enterprise LMS market has settled around 5 products: Moodle, Sakai, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and eCollege. The first two are open source and the remaining three are proprietary. Blackboard is the dominant firm and enjoys approximately 75% of the market share. Moodle, as the next competitor, recently attained double digits at 10%.  
• Trend #2: There has been no innovation in the core LMS product since 2004. An academic Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in 2004 would not recognize any substantial difference between today's LMS and the LMS circa 2004. In Michael Feldstein's words, innovation in the LMS world has all but "flatlined" since 2004. 
• Trend #3: LMS costs have increased dramatically and will continue to increase. According to Phil Hill, one of the authors of the Cal State U/Delta Initiative Study, "the amount of dollars charged to each institution has risen dramatically, in some cases up to an order of magnitude (emphasis mine) just in the past seven to eight years. And that's a trend that's continuing at this point." In the webinar Hill makes the further point that the business model for LMS vendors is brutally simple: they need to be "able to charge more per customer moving forward."

In The Economics of LMS in Higher Education - Part II, I will examine Trend #1 in more detail.

Minnesota State Colleges & Universities LMS (D2L) System Statistics

Minnesota State Colleges & Universities, which comprises 32 public higher education institutions in the state of Minnesota, supports one of the largest Learning Management System (LMS) environments in higher education.

In enterprise IT-land Fall startup is an exciting and anxious time: we welcome a new class of eager students and put to the test our summer preparations.

Will our systems withstand peak load and continuing growth, particularly in e-Learning and e-Services?

Once again our Desire2Learn LMS held up to massive load during Fall Startup. As the chart above shows, during the first day of classes we had 284,600 logins, approximately a 38% increase from last year. Of the more than a quarter million logins, 86,511 were distinct users.

An important story behind the numbers is that despite continuing declamations that the LMS is "dead", our statistics show that increasingly faculty and students rely on the LMS as the basic electronic tool for teaching and learning.  What mainstream faculty and students seem to want above all else is stability, reliability, and predictability. On that front I am also pleased to report that for the past eighteen months our availability has held steady at about 99.98%, which translates into less than 2 hours of downtime per year.

Online Headcount Growth - Minnesota State Colleges & Universities

Here's a chart showing our growth (Minnesota State Colleges & Universities) in online headcount from FY'2004 to FY'2009 (projected). I am very proud of my team that supports the underlying enterprise technology and infrastructure, which at the core is the Desire2Learn Learning Management System.

Last calendar year our uptime for the system, which supports more than just online students, was 99.98%.