The internet has changed the way the physical world functions. Nowadays, everyone who is connected to it is granted access to countless services and opportunities.

The educational sphere is the one that has undergone the most qualitative changes since any type of educational course, workshop, and schooling can be easily accessed through any type of connected device.

If you are willing to join the team of online educators and spread your knowledge worldwide, follow our guide to learn all the main steps to perform and understand how eLearning is tightened to E-commerce website design and development.

Why Create an Online Course?

There are several benefits to online education, including:

• It enlightens people regardless of age, location, and capabilities.
• Its efficiency is 60% higher than traditional approaches.
• Due to a more targeted approach, students learn the material faster by 30-40%.

The overall E-learning audience coverage is expected to reach 57 million by 2027, with the profitability reaching $370 billion by 2026. Therefore, while being the primary tool for education nowadays, eLearning is also a profitable venture for its creators.

How to Create an Online Course?

The success of the course depends on the level of its proficiency, the functionality of digital solutions, and marketing.

Choose the topic

Udemy, Coursera, Moodle, EdX, MasterClass – these are trailblazers of global educational content, which cover all the possible topics to learn. Therefore, when getting down to course creation, it is important to be ready for a high level of competition, and a rather tough way toward top searches and wide audience coverage.

When considering ideas for course creation, make sure they will have distinctive features compared to already existing ones, and meet the current demand of a certain industry.

Type of the course

Online courses are available in different forms and formats. The most typical division is a mini-course, a multi-day course, and a long-term course.

A mini-course targets one specific skill and can consist of up to 10 videos, lectures, or e-mails. The overall duration of the course shouldn’t exceed a few hours. Oftentimes, mini-courses serve as the introduction to the main course and a great tool to attract new learners. The price doesn’t go over $100, or it can be offered as a free course.

A multi-day course targets a bigger area of knowledge and requires up to seven days for completion. The materials include a video list, worksheets, checklists, quizzes, and any other type of supplementary tools. The price range gets higher, starting from $250.

A long-term course is a series of educational materials that can last more than a few months. It provides the students with extensive knowledge and expertise in certain areas. The pricing starts from $300. A long-term course requires decent skills in course creation to build a system of knowledge, break down the topics, categorize the knowledge, etc.

It is best to start with mini-courses and learn how everything works, and then gradually move on to more extensive forms. Besides, when starting with a mini-course, you have better chances to attract new learners and introduce them to your product.

Content creation

Educational content can be presented in the form of videos, lectures, presentations, photos, e-mails, quizzes, etc. While all the types possess different characteristics, there is one thing that should unite all of them – quality.

Considering the high level of expectations from users, the quality of all the materials should be beyond reproach.

Digital tools

Once the content is created it is time to share it online and organize the whole learning process.

The first step is to adopt a learning management system (LMS) – a type of software that helps with the administration, delivery, tracking, and reporting of educational materials. The most recognizable are LearnUpon, iSpring, Absorb, Talent LMS, etc. While sharing the same purpose – learning management – they offer different solutions to the way the course is presented to the customer.

The second step is the integration of your course and LMS with leading eCommerce platforms, like Shopify, to make the product accessible for purchasing. The integration can be performed with the help Shopify web development services, which will ensure the seamless performance of your eLearning store.

Marketing

After mastering the course, and all the supporting materials, it is time to start a promotional campaign, which will make your product visible to the target audience. Social media posts, guest posts, advertisements, influencer marketing, word of the month – everything will work perfectly to establish the online visibility of the course.

You can also target Internet resources like Quora and Reddit, as Internet users often use them to search for proper courses.

When just starting the eLearning business, it’s important to offer free courses and discounts for the customers, to let them see the value of the product, and thus, proceed with full-payment courses.

The Bottom Line

eLearning is one of the most developing industries nowadays. While offering tremendous benefits to our society, and bringing knowledge to all people regardless of distance and age, it also is a source of profit for its creators.

The course creation consists of a few major steps:

• Outlining the idea of the course for a specific target group.
• Choice of course type and content creation.
• Selection of the Learning Management System, to host your materials, and its further integration with the E-commerce platform, like Shopify, to sell the courses.
• Marketing.

When following these basic steps, you are sure to create an eLearning course that will meet a specific demand of the customers, reach a wide audience of users, and improve the financial benefits.

If you found this helpful, try out Online Math and English Games to Help Kindergarten Students. 

Featured image credit: Muhamad Chabib alwi, iStock. 

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From universities to corporate offices, learning management systems (LMS) have become an essential tool for people who want to share and distribute information online. CYPHER LEARNING, a leading provider of learning platforms across multiple mediums, has re-invented the way we use LMS, prioritizing user accessibility and retention.

Early last month, CYPHER LEARNING launched a range of new features for its suite of learning management systems, this includes its new graphical dashboard system for administrators, teachers, and students, the dark mode feature, and their site-wide surveys feature. These additions came fresh from their previous LMS updates, one of which is their integration with the popular payment service YooMoney.

We caught up with the CEO of CYPHER LEARNING, Graham Glass, to discuss the new developments of the company’s LMS.

“A lot of the learning management systems are pretty clunky, they’ve got tons of features, but when you log into them, it’s like 1980 or something,” said Glass. “We wanted to build something that was like the Apple of LMS […] we wanted to do a consumer product, but at the same time a very deep, very rich feature set. So we spent a lot of time on the user interface design of our product.”

CYPHER LEARNING’s LMS operates beyond the education sector. They provide LMS to universities and schools with NEO LMS, businesses with MATRIX LMS, and most uniquely, entrepreneurs with INDIE LMS, which the company is planning to invest more into in 2022. When discussing the different LMS, Glass explained how users across all sectors are looking for more accessible ways to share, and that even though NEO, MATRIX, and INDIE cater to different audiences, what attracts them to LMS are many of the same features.

“I was predicting that K-12 would love gamification the most followed by higher education followed by business and it’s actually the opposite way round,” said Glass when discussing which demographic responded most vehemently toward the LMS user interface.

Gamification is becoming an important factor in learning management systems, and online learning as a whole. Systems like Blackboard and, most recently Microsoft SharePoint have taken further measures the embed game mechanics into their products, as it has shown to drive user engagement. A report from Fortune Business Insights, which forecasts the trends in the LMS market for the next seven years, highlights the driving force for success in LMS is with platforms that give users the ability to “administer, report, track and automate the process of online learning courses.” This is why many organizations and companies, as the report lays out, have adopted LMS platforms to implement online learning methods.

MATRIX LMS has been adopted by businesses across America, from retail chain COSTCO to personal care brand Dermologica. Earlier this year, CYPHER LEARNING managed to secure a $40 million growth equity round from Invictus Growth Partners, marking their first outside financing.

Talking further on the mechanics of the LMS and their appeal, Glass explained, “if you use automation and gamification and some of the other features that are built into our platform, it’s almost like you are a moviemaker, you can script out the adventure that your students are going to have with your course, and you can make it so your course really surprises and delights. It’s not a boring thing anymore.”

According to a recent report by Adroit Market Research, CYPHER LEARNING is a key player in the international Corporate Learning Management System marketplace

The learning provider currently hosts over a million users across 20,000 organizations, their LMS specifically, supports 40 languages. The worldwide reach of CYPHER LEARNING is due in part to their focus on giving users a sense of community. As Glass puts it, by expanding to 25 offices around the world and providing an automatic translation feature for all LMS, users “in Poland or Malaysia or the Philippines if they want to select a learning platform, the fact that we actually have an office in their country, we speak their language, we know their customs, we adapt to their local pricing, all that kind of stuff, it’s really appealing to them.”

This push in international reach and scope in features are CYPHER LEARNING’s effort at creating an LMS which can operate on all levels, so users do not have to work outside the system to carry out necessary tasks. LMS which do not adapt to the needs of users in terms of accessibility and ease, rarely fair well with their audience. It is with this incentive that CYPHER LEARNING has developed the features it has, from their survey feature, or their in-system report card feature, a new NEO feature more typical of student information systems (SIS). Glass has mentioned this new addition will be launching in the coming weeks. The inclusion of adaptable features is important for LMS, especially at the height of remote and hybrid learning, as it eliminates the need of using different tools to complete an otherwise simple task, like filing report cards.

LMS as a Learning Companion

Developing LMS with multi-functionality and an acute focus on personalization pushes toward CYPHER LEARNING’s biggest goal for 2022.

“So one of the things we’re doing with NEO is that we’re incorporating matching learning and artificial intelligence so that NEO is going to become an active learning assistant. So if you are a student and you learning biology at school, or you’re in a large company and you are in technical support, and you’re doing various courses, our site is going to give you recommendations on how to improve your learning goals. We’re are also going to allow students to include their own learning goals, and we’re going to allow tutors and teachers to include learning goals on behalf of the students. Our learning platforms are going to be like this intelligence platform which is going to start helping people proactively on their learning journey.”

CYPHER LEARNING, much like its competitors, is in a constant state of innovation and improvement. The push toward an AI-backed system is a new development in the EdTech sector and one which proves most in line with the LMS 2021-2028 market report. Whether it be synchronous in-person learning or asynchronous remote learning, CYPHER LEARNING is leading a growing trend among LMS providers, in making learning management systems the first point of directory for learning and working online.

Featured Image: Van Tay Media, Unsplash 

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Blackboard, once the world’s largest proprietary learning management system (LMS) provider, announced on Wednesday that, following its split with Moodle, the company would be rebranding its open source SaaS service provider Moodlerooms as Blackboard Open LMS. At the tail end of the release, Blackboard Chief Portfolio Officer Kathy Vieira, said something astonishing:

“This rebrand marks a new chapter for our open-source SaaS product, where we’re realigning the solution with our overall mission to meet the evolving needs of institutions and their learners. Over the past year, we’ve seen a 20% growth in Blackboard Open LMS clients and are adding more than one new client per business day. We have a vested interest in continuing to contribute code and features back to the open-source community—and working to move the community forward together.”

Wait, What?

In other words, the company that made it big in the post-dotcom crash desert selling their proprietary LMS solutions is now gaining market share on the open-source end of the spectrum. Profit comes in by taking care of the heavy lifting involved in deploying their open-source LMS instead of licensing the product itself. 

Earlier this summer, Canvas by Instructure officially edged out Blackboard Learn as the most widely used LMS in the U.S., as reported by E-Literate. The former beat out the latter by a margin of 2 institution installs, with the scoreboard reading Blackboard: 1,216 Canvas: 1,218. That statistically gave both companies a market share of 28%.

Blackboard’s market share once stood at 70% when it acquired WebCT in 2006. E-Literate’s Michael Feldstein writes how, at the time, “A few platforms, most of which no longer exist, were vying with “homegrown” to become the Dr. Pepper of the LMS market at the time that the Coke acquired the Pepsi.”

For years, Blackboard dominated by acquiring their competition, like WebCT and later ANGEL. When that didn’t work, they aggressively sued other companies into submission.

These strongman tactics no longer translate into a viable survival strategy.

Once public, Blackboard was brought private when it was acquired by Providence Equity Partners. The public, therefore, does not have access to any juicy details of business goings-on that can be found in 10Ks, quarterly reports, or investor relations documents.

But it isn’t difficult to tell which way the wind is blowing. Campus newspapers across the U.S. almost unequivocally describe how, following the end of their contract with Blackboard, they will be switching to Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, or someone else. In the past month, readers have heard it from Cornell, the College of St. Rose, Washington University, and others.

These stories have appeared perennially for the past few years. 

So Blackboard is bleeding proprietary institutional use, but the volume and rate of blood loss is unclear. Their growth in the open-source sector, however, might be more than a band-aid. 

Blackboard and Moodle Part Ways

The news follows the breakup between Blackboard and Moodle earlier this summer, which Inside Higher Ed described as “messy.” At one time, it appeared that Moodle, a free, open-source LMS provider, would stand as Blackboard’s most viable competitor. In 2012, the company struck a partnership with the organization and acquired their service arms Moodlerooms and NetSpot, the Australian counterpart.

It was apparently a wise investment on Blackboard’s part. We truly live in interesting times. And if the company continues to sign a Blackboard Open LMS client on a daily basis, Canvas might not remain on top for long. 

Featured Image: Wikimedia Commons.

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On Monday, BbWorld 2018—Blackboard’s annual conference—kicked off with an announcement. The world’s leading LMS provider has put out a new version of CourseSites, a free version of the LMS for individual instructors.

New features include an updated UI experience which borrows from Blackboard Learn’s Ultra, the latest version of the software. The cloud-based platform will also include a host of new features.

What is Blackboard CourseSites?

Institutions using Blackboard need to scale for large class sizes, explore hosting options, and account for a whole lot of bandwidth. But individual instructors have neither the needs nor the resources to implement such a solution. These instructors might be private tutors, teachers at schools that do not currently use an LMS, or any number of other unique cases. But that doesn’t mean they can’t teach without an LMS.

Using CourseSites, individual instructors can make full use of the LMS at absolutely no cost. They are not charged to license the software, host their class or get set up in the first place.

These users can be great for Blackboard in helping spread the word, translate into lead captures, and help them improve the software. But for much of Blackboard CourseSites existence, it wasn’t necessarily as big a priority as, say, BlackBoard Learn which is still one of the most popular K-20 LMSs in the world.

That, however, is about to change. With the announcement at BbWorld 2018, individual instructors will now enjoy some of the premium features offered by the company. The Blackboard Learn Ultra experience operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS). Blackboard CourseSites users will now be able to pick and choose with greater freedom the features they want to use and those that they could do without.

For example, CourseSites users will now have access to the company’s Collaborate virtual classroom suite, the Ally content accessibility service for learners with sensory impairments, and their host of mobile apps.

“With the recent release of core features and functionality, and the momentum we’re seeing in interest and adoption, the time was right to move our free offering to Blackboard Learn with the Ultra experience,” said Jim Chalex, Blackboard’s Vice President of Teaching & Learning in a statement. “With these enhancements to CourseSites, we’re thrilled to allow even more instructors to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology from Blackboard.”

The Blackboard Learn Ultra experience, in one sense isn’t new. Actually, it launched in 2015. But, counter to many software providers that like to make a big splash with new features in set, discreet moments, Blackboard has been continuously updating and upgrading the SaaS on a monthly basis.

Fierce Competition in the LMS Sector

In the past couple years, in fact, there has been a mad scramble among LMS providers to claw their way into a greater market share. LMS companies such as Instructure (which developed Canvas) and Schoology have made significant gains in terms of use in recent years.

But at the same time, they have made these gains at a significant cost. Since Instructure went public in 2015, the company has reported a net loss every year.

Blackboard, meanwhile, has struggled itself. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the company currently carries a rated debt of $1.3 billion. For now, that seems to be good news for individual instructors and CourseSites users. It will remain to be seen how the LMS giant moves forward in the future.

Cover Image: Justin Henry, Flickr.

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For years, nearly decades, the learning management system (LMS) sector was a polarized ecosystem. Numerous startups fought for a limited pool while Blackboard, one of the few survivors of the Dotcom edtech boom, dominated with myriad longterm contracts and the ability to acquire or sink relevant competition. That changed a few years ago when Canvas by Instructure came on the scene. But in 2018, it appears a new competitor may be on the horizon. So far this year, Schoology has signed contracts with 157 K-12 institutions which collectively teach over 850,000 learners.

As of January of this year, according to information collected by e-Literate and LISTedTECH, the open-sourced Moodle LMS made up a quarter of known U.S. K-12 districts. Close behind with 22% and 20% were Canvas and Google Classroom, respectively. And in fourth sat Schoology with a 16% share.

Many of these LMS vendors also market their products to higher education and corporations as well. Schoology’s main clients are K-12 districts. They have partnered with 1,600 of them in the U.S.

Schoology Is on Its Way to a Record Year

“As the K-12 edtech market matures, school districts are looking toward technology to consolidate communication and give teachers new ways to educate students. We are seeing the Schoology platform successfully used in classrooms across all grade levels and having a large, positive impact on students’ ability to learn and use the technology that they will depend on in their careers,” said Jeremy Friedman, CEO of Schoology, in a statement. “We welcome these new schools and districts of all sizes into our diverse Schoology community of educators and are committed to working with them achieve amazing results for their students, teachers and parents.”

Most of the notable recent acquisitions have been U.S. school districts, such as Voyages Prep South in Queens, NY, Springdale School District in Springdale, AR, and Hanover County Public Schools in Hanover, VA. Collectively, these schools teach roughly 100,000 students.

Seizing up the LMS market isn’t an easy task. According to Phil Hill of e-Literate, it “is messier than higher education’s and its roughly 7,200 institutions. One reason is that the general IT infrastructure in K-12 is less mature than in higher ed, and for smaller schools there are a lot of ad hoc implementations running on a local server not even in a data center. Another reason is the availability of free options such as Google Classroom, or freemium options such as that offered by Schoology and Canvas for individual faculty.”

For reference, Instructure has a clientele of over 2,000 educational institutions and corporations (another product, Bridge, is a corporate LMS). So, in terms of sheer volume, adding 157 institutions is a few dozen drops in the bucket.

But this is hardly a good representation of reality. Institutions, districts, and corporations all vary widely in size. Schoology markets their LMS to K-12 schools, universities, and corporations. The LMS provider has over 1,600 K-12 districts.

Growing in a Harsh Climate

Instructor made some serious headway by gaining a large amount of market share at Blackboard’s expense. With Schoology’s reported growth, it appears that the LMS market is coming more and more into play.

But as an industry, it’s still cutthroat. Since Instructure went public in 2015, they’ve reported net losses each year. In the 2017 fiscal year, they poured over $83 million into sales and marketing—over half of their total revenue and just under half of their total operating expenses. Schoology remains a private company and does not publish their annual data.

There’s no question that, for Schoology to become a major player in the LMS sector, they still have a long way to go. But it’s also important to make hay while the sun is shining. Blackboard became a household name in edtech by surviving the Dotcom crash, which turned them into one of the only fish in a very big pond. We currently find ourselves in the midst of another season of sunny edtech forecasts. But given enough time, storm clouds will appear on the horizon.

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When Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulation Part 11 went into effect in 1997, a good many software providers were left wondering what business the Food and Drug Administration had in regulating their sector. But then again, it was a product of the FDA’s Department of Health and Human Services. The scope of CFR Part 11 covered public health, life sciences, medicine, pharmacology, medical devices, and other fields where professionals were beginning to do a large amount of their work online.

The Feds realized that the whole brave new world wide web of the ‘90s and the libertarian dreams of folks like John Perry Barlow were’t going to work too well with fields in which human lives were at stake. With Title 21 CFR Part 11, they did three things:

1. Ensure the security of online data. Say Ms. Jones is getting treated for diabetes. The FDA wanted to made sure that hackers couldn’t easily breach the system and mess with her file. The same goes for unethical doctors. It also wanted to make sure that, if a negligent medical professional went in and made a mistake, system administrators could easily go back and identify it.
2. Confirm with certainty the identity of each individual using a system. They need a verified electronic signature. This closely follows thing #1. A non-medical professional shouldn’t be able to impersonate the real deal. The system should be as secure as, say, the keycard system used to grant certain doctors access to a hospital wing.
3. Closely following thing #1 and #2, the regulation requires implementing a verifiable system of electronic records that can be easily audited.

In CFR Part 11, What Is a ‘System?’

You might be reading this and think, ‘System? The planets form a system. Our bodies contain circulatory systems. This is too vague.’ We use that word because the FDA uses it throughout Title 21 CFR Part 11 as their primary subject. In fact, in their opening section where they define the scope of the measure, they say pretty much ‘any use of electronic data, record keeping, or signatures in health and human services’ instead of identifying specific areas where the law applies. In their glossary of terms, they get a little more granular and distinguish between ‘open systems’ and ‘closed systems.’

“Closed system means an environment in which system access is controlled by persons who are responsible for the content of electronic records that are on the system.”

“Open system means an environment in which system access is not controlled by persons who are responsible for the content of electronic records that are on the system.”

So whether it’s a learning management system, a hospital database, a medical device manufacturer, a biotech company, videoconferencing used for medicine, a doctors-only dating app, or anything else that requires the online verification and security of medical work, your ‘system’ needs to comply with Title 21 CFR Part 11.

Companies Have struggled to Comply for Over 20 Years

When this code came out in ’97, just about any and every company that fell beneath its broad scope was not happy. Complying with Part 11 would be expensive, there was broad confusion over whether and what parts of it applied to which companies, and implementing the changes ultimately wouldn’t add much marketable value to any system.

After some lobbying and public complaining, the FDA released a document to serve as a guidance for observing Part 11. This helped for some, but others complained the administration was waffling and, in some cases, contradicting its previous positions.

Despite these concerns and the outsized burden placed on a wide swath of companies in the medical industry, Title 21 CFR Part 11 lives on. It has been updated through the years (and the FDA has continued to release further guidance documents). eLeaP has a write-up on how life sciences companies can comply with CFR Part 11.

The current rules on the books were implemented as of April, 2017. It appears that the latest update made some confusing requirements in regard to electronic signatures. Just a few months after it was released, yet another guidance document emerged titled “Use of Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures in Clinical Investigations Under 21 CFR Part 11—Questions and Answers.”

What happens if you don’t follow CFR Part 11?

If you don’t comply with these regulations, the FDA will eventually find out. Inspectors regularly come around to check up on companies and, if they find measures lacking in terms of electronic records and verification for your system, they will issue a Form 483. This is essentially a warning, saying you need to correct certain areas. For the past several years, the FDA has issued around 5,000 483s annually (it seems to be somewhat of a quota). Keep in mind, these are general forms, and the majority of violations documented have nothing to do with CFR Part 11.

This could mean one of two things. Either the industry has learned to deal with one of the broader and more complicated federal regulations—or inspectors tend to give companies leeway when it comes to following them.

In either case, keeping your data secure and verifying your system is important. While the regulations weren’t written with the greatest tact, they still constitute an important law for the industry.

The post What is Title 21 CFR Part 11–and Why Is It So Complicated? appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In one sense, the process of educating and re-skilling learners is the same everywhere. But numerous factors, such as mobile infrastructure, access to devices, government regulation, and even geography factor in. Don Weobong, CEO and founder of the learning management system eLeaP, has been working to optimize his product for a West African context.

This is the third article in a series on edtech startups working in West Africa.

“Data is a big deal. It’s a bottle neck,” Weobong said. “We recently signed a partnership with a firm in Ghana to deliver eLearning content to businesses as well as to individuals. To ensure that’s a success, we need to provide content in multiple formats. Satellite video is great whenever possible but it’s more realistic for people to learn via offline content.”

Optimizing eLeaP for Spotty Connections

One big factor currently in the works is switching from the SCORM standards implemented all the way back in the Clinton administration to Tin Can, also known as Experience API or xAPI.

“We need to be able to provide the content but also to track and report in non-connected environments,” Weobong said. “Tin Can has proven to be much more adept at that. When someone is watching an offline video or consuming offline content or absorbing offline content on a mobile device with limited connectivity, that information can still be pushed out. So that’s what we’re working on next.”

“I’m excited about deploying in Ghana and West Africa because that’s where the biggest growth in the learning space is. We take a lot for granted here because there are a lot more options. But in a lot of places in the world, there aren’t many options. So this is an opportunity for us to see if we can make a difference.”

A Tradition of Teaching

eLeaP is based in Louisville, KY, but Weobong grew up in Ghana and maintains connections to the region. Both his parents are educators and run a school.

“Growing up, learning was something that we pretty much did as a family tradition. I didn’t start out trying to get into eLearning per se—I wanted to get into tech. It happened that when I was finishing up my MBA, I took on a project to build an eLearning platform, which is how eLeaP was born. It was an academic exercise. When I was in Bellarmine University, we used Blackboard. I didn’t quite like it very much and kept telling myself this is so convoluted and complicated to use. That was one of the reasons why I took on the project to build an eLearning system.”

“When I built eLeaP, I was telling my dad about it. Growing up, I always said I was going to be a big business man or a lawyer or some other field apart from teaching. I was so excited when I was telling him about eLeaP and how I help people learn and train people and all that stuff and he goes ‘huh, really so—is that education?’ I said, ‘yeah! Education.’ And he said, ‘It sounds like you’re a teacher.’ And I said, Oh I know where you’re going with this.” So it is kind of full circle. Because what we do here at eLeaP is to help people learn—in a better way, we think, and provide more value.”

Okeke Vincent Chidozie, CEO and founder of DoviLearn (and the subject of the previous article in this series), spoke at length about the landscape of education in Nigeria. Weobong had a similar experience growing up in Ghana.

“I went to a business university called the Institute of Professional Studies. One of the courses I took there was Management Information Systems. In the whole university, we had three working desktops. One was reserved for professors only. The other one was broken 90% of the time. And so all of us had to go crowd around one machine.”

“It’s not easy to get real talent, especially when it comes to coding. There’s a real dearth of skilled workers. A lot of ideas just die on the vine because there’s not enough local talent to bring them to product stage. There’s a lot of opportunity there.”

Disclosure: Telania, the company that developed eLeaP, owns and operates eLearning Inside.

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As early as 2007 there were people claiming that the learning management system (LMS) as a tool to facilitate learning and training was either dead or dying, despite the fact that it was still a relatively novel product for many businesses and schools. The debate over the utility and relevance of the LMS has continued right up until the present day, in spite of how much the learning landscape and LMS offerings themselves have changed over the years. The question now is perhaps better positioned this way: Are learning management systems are worth improving?

Learning Management Systems: A Love-Hate Relationship

People love to hate their LMS. According to Sierra-Cedar’s 2016-2017 HR Systems Survey, nearly one in four companies were re-thinking their current LMS (source). Meanwhile, a study by the Brandon Hall Group noted that, of nearly 300 companies surveyed, 31% could not recommend their LMS to others and 38% were actively seeking a different LMS (source). These are not exactly ringing endorsements for an array of software products that have long been touted as absolutely necessary to more successful learning everywhere. Many organizations have jumped on the LMS bandwagon for no other reason that it has become the default thing to do, but soon find themselves with a serious case of buyer’s remorse (although this would be more accurately called “adopter’s remorse” since some learning management systems are actually free).

The Problems with Learning Management Systems

The causes of LMS dissatisfaction are many and varied. The reporting and analytics don’t live up to expectations, the system doesn’t handle video content very well (and video content is all the rage), the user interface feels dated, it doesn’t integrate well with other applications, it’s not “social” enough for today’s learners, navigation sucks, search capability is weak, it’s not accessible 24/7 on any device, and the list goes on and on. It often feels as if many vendors have put more effort into constantly growing their list of features rather than making sure the system delivers a great user experience. A growing number of organizations want something that has a more direct link to supporting worker performance. A lot is asked of learning management systems, and when they fail to deliver or keep up with every latest trend, people become grumpy.

Legacy Learning Management Systems in Decline

HR and talent management thought-leader Josh Bersin explained in Forbes magazine back in 2017 that many corporate learning environments had been fashioned around an older LMS that is good at managing formal compliance training but not much else. The so-called “legacy LMS” companies are being eclipsed by newer companies like Axonify and Grovo with their micro-learning platforms, long-form immersion learning platforms like Coursera and Udemy, just-in-time learning platforms like Edcast and Pathgather, and new technologies like xAPI (the successor to SCORM that represents an improvement to tracking and managing learning activities and assets) all seem to be working to make more traditional learning management systems feel increasingly obsolete and not worth the cost, whether in dollars or time spent. Some of the newer platforms and approaches mentioned above could all be called an LMS by rights, but you’ll never hear them refer to themselves like that, given how tainted the term has become in recent years.

The Future of Learning Management Systems

The LMS is not dead, but it does feel rather anemic. Learning management systems won’t disappear any time soon because they really are good at tracking and managing certain kinds of learning and training that most businesses require. But they are definitely not the hotbed of learning innovation they once were. Then again, everyone is waiting to see what Amazon is working on as it appears to be developing its own LMS, as reported here on ElearningInside News in Is Amazon Building its Own LMS?And when the big reveal comes, will it even be called an LMS?

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long dominated the back end of learning management systems in both K-20+ education and corporate training. But are they now making moves into the front end as well?

In 2011, Instructure revolutionized the learning management system (LMS) field with the first cloud-based education platform, Canvas. Using AWS, it offered schools a server-less option to host their educational content and online class operations. Since its release—with the help of an aggressive  sales and marketing team—Canvas has grown to become the number two LMS in education, second only to Blackboard.

In the years since, cloud computing has practically become a requisite feature of any LMS, either corporate or institutional. The convenience offered by Amazon’s remote computing frees managers, administrators, and IT staff from the need to build and maintain their own servers.

Rumblings at Amazon

But the success of Amazon’s cloud in hosting LMSs might soon bring a new competitor into the field. Last week, CNBC reported that Amazon is creating its own LMS. The report cites two anonymous sources at Amazon familiar with the initiative.

What’s more, the company has shown its hand through a few telling job postings. John Urquhart, for example, has reportedly joined Amazon’s ‘training and certification’ team. In June of last year, he tweeted, “Have you led a new SaaS product from concept to delivery? Want to see what “serverless” can do? Come work with me.”

Have you led a new SaaS product from concept to delivery? Want to see what “serverless” can do? Come work with me. https://t.co/KaGqKsDNaN

— James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) June 11, 2017

That tweet remains pinned to his Twitter feed as of the publication of this story. Meanwhile, other Amazon job postings seem to confirm that they’re building an LMS. One LinkedIn post advertised for a “Principle Solutions Architect, AWS Learning Platform.” The post read, “This is an opportunity for an experienced technologist to be on the ground floor of building a learning platform that will enable hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world to transform and scale their learning initiatives.”

Neither a Stranger Nor a Major Player in the SaaS/PaaS Game

Amazon already offers a host of software options for use with it’s cloud services, some of which are intended for non-developers. These range from a simple email app to machine learning to AR and VR deployment.

As of October, TechCrunch reported that Amazon continues to rule the market when it comes to cloud computing infrastructure. Citing analyst firm Synergy Research, AWS controls roughly 35% of the market when it comes to “infrastructure, platform, and hosted private cloud services.”

But while Amazon dominates the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) industry, its software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings are negligible. The introduction of their own LMS would change that and position the company to begin to take on other major tech companies on their own turf.

Potential Conflicts of Interest

If this is true, it will create yet another sector in which Amazon faces potential conflicts of interest. In the field of video streaming, for example, Netflix is one of AWS’s biggest clients. It also happens to be Amazon’s biggest competitor in its video streaming arm. There isn’t much that stands in its way from creating policies that favor the Amazon streaming service.

Likewise, if Amazon launches its own LMS, it will be competing, again, against its own clients. Other notable LMS providers that use AWS include Blackboard, Schoology, Brightspace by D2L, and others.

That said, Amazon hasn’t yet taken advantage of its far reaching digital services to create a flagrant conflict of interest. It has yet to be seen whether or not their reported LMS will materialize and whether or not it will make a significant impact on the field.

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Studying the learning management system (LMS) market has never been easy. In many cases, similar software products can be applied to strikingly different settings. Generally, these settings could be described as K-12, higher education, and corporations. But within each, countless variations exist. Some LMSs go for broad appeal; others go for specialization. For this reason, it’s both difficult and reductive to clump all LMSs into one study.

But every now and then, data comes along that is both specific and broad enough to make a splash. Earlier this month, the Instructional Technology Council (ITC), a subsidiary organization of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), released their annual report titled “Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges.” Besides providing a great deal of excellent information on the current state of community colleges in the U.S. and Canada, the report detailed a good deal of recent trends of LMSs at community colleges.

In a sense, LMS activity in North American community colleges can stand in for larger trends. A couple figures match up pretty exactly and don’t offer any surprises. Other takeaways, however, seem to come out of left field.

What’s more, North American community colleges don’t just represent one LMS market; they were the first one. When online programs and remote degrees began to really proliferate in the mid-‘90s, community colleges were the first higher ed group to truly embrace the model. True, community colleges have come to represent a smaller and smaller sector of LMS clients, but they’re also a historically forward thinking group. Their activity today might just continue to prove a weathervane of trends to come.

The Latest LMS News from Community Colleges

To begin, the market share distribution in community colleges is roughly the same as the zoomed-out, all-encapsulating reports. The big four among the CCs follow as such: Blackboard is the leader with 40%, next comes Canvas by Instructure at 27%, then it’s Moodle at 17%, and in fourth at 14% comes Brightspace by D2L (Desire2Learn). The ITC report doesn’t make it clear whether or not their survey represents market share by number of institutions or enrollment, but either way, it’s pretty close to both Edutechnica and LISTedTECH’s joint report with e-Literate. Both reports include data as recent as the fall of 2017.

Like other reports, Moodle and D2L haven’t reported huge gains or losses, and Canvas continues to make inroads, snapping up bits and pieces of Blackboard’s share. This is a very general summary: Moodle, for example, has dropped as low as 12% in 2016 and others have fluctuated by more. But none have demonstrated growth as consistent as Canvas’.

Disruption Gives Way to Stability

But surprisingly, while it seems elsewhere that LMSs are in a state of disruption and fluctuation, the ITC came to a different conclusion:

“The 2017 survey confirmed a new trend in LMS adoptions – stability. Again this year, only 24% indicated they were considering changing their LMS; consistent with the 25% of respondents in 2016 that reported their college was considering switching to a different LMS in the next few years. This is now a five year trend of reduced turmoil in LMS adoptions. More historically, it was normal for approximately one-third of programs to be looking to switch. This year, 78% of respondents reported that their college restricts the number of LMS platforms it will support, up from the 68% reported last year and consistent with the 76 percent reported in 2015. The data confirms a significant majority of colleges will support only one LMS.”

When Canvas came on the scene with the first could-native LMS, they were able to snap up a lot of expiring Blackboard contracts by offering lower costs and easier maintenance. But maybe that advantage has begun to die out.

But another factor refutes this. In an LMS satisfaction survey issued to community colleges that addressed a dozen different categories, institutions were, by far, least satisfied with their LMS analytics and reporting. It might be a coincidence, but Gauge, another product by Instructure, was released last summer. It significantly outpaces all other analytics and reporting services that couple with LMSs. It would be interesting to see which LMS users reported satisfaction. They might just be all of the 27% of institutions that use Canvas plus a few others.

When it came to other forms of satisfaction, hosting and reliability also scored high, at 76% and 81.4% respectively.

Most LMS market share reports will zoom way out. ITC’s report provides a rare insight that includes both breadth and focus.

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