XplanaZine

At a workshop yesterday, my friend Kerry Magruder made the statement that Blackboard was akin to AOL in that it started as the only
solution to an Internet-driven problem but would have to evolve
intelligently to survive the limitations of its original vision.

For those old enough to remember, when the Internet and Web
first emerged as commercial products that could be marketed to
consumers, everyone needed an “on ramp,” a portal to take
advantage of what the Internet had to offer. In Kerry’s house,
the family used AOL, while in our home Compuserve was the solution. And we all remember how the
Web, and access ot the Web, developed in a way that made AOL and
Compuserve unnecessary from an “access” perspective. In order to
survive those companies had to come up with features and services that were not necessarily related to the “on ramp” business.

That situation is analagous to LMS platforms in the
Higher Education space in the United States. In the late 90’s,
BlackBoard and WebCT came along and offered peace of mind and “on-ramp access” to education on the Web. They were a turnkey substitute for having to know anything about technology as faculty moved to the Internet as a teaching solution.

As teaching technology, pedagogy, and institutional support for teaching technology has developed, however, large LMS platform like WebCT and BlackBoard have a harder time justifying their existence as “on-ramp access” solutions. A number of factors have forced a change in the LMS market. Among those are:

What does all of this mean? The most imnportant result is that large LMS platforms will continue losing market or user share to smaller LMS platforms. In order to offset those lost LMS users, these companies are going after other services, like portal and student information system solutions, that can position them as enterprise players independent of the teaching solution model that put them on the map.