The For-Profit LMS Market

Article: “The For-Profit LMS Market”, by Steve Kolowich, November 1, 2010
from: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/01/lms

This article provides information on who is making money in the LMS market and why. The latest data has Blackboard’s LMS being used by more than half of the non-profit markets, however eCollege has cornered the for-profit market. eCollege is owned by Pearson and has designed a product aimed toward the administrative level, whereas Blackboard was designed toward the traditional college structure according to the managing director of Eduventures. It appears that eCollege’s design has won over for-profit institutions by applying their knowledge of how these institutions operate to their learning management system development. Blackboard in their view is more “faculty-centric”. eCollege hosts their clients on their own servers which has allowed their clients to run large-scale academic programs without crashing, while Blackboard began by using their clients’ servers. The clients with high online enrollments were impressed by eCollege’s ability to service institutions with high online enrollments and heavy use. One of the major pluses for eCollege is its ability to make data collection easy to achieve. This data can then be used to evaluate how successful a student is and what can be done if needs arise. It appears that eCollege and Blackboard have positioned themselves to be leaders in the for-profit and non-profit markets respectively by playing to those markets in a way that put them on top. Currently, Blackboard is even in terms of functionality with eCollege having over 60 for-profit institutions as clients and offering hosted learning management options. Another plus for Blackboard, their data analytics and reporting abilities are exceptional, equal or better when compared to eCollege.
In fact, an executive at Kaplan University switched from eCollege to Blackboard due to its reporting tools and reliability, feeling that eCollege had pushed its products excessively. Liberty University uses Blackboard and has seen growth that has doubled. Grants are being offered for online programs geared to the more nontraditional student from the Lumina Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with the later looking for improved completion by the use of data mining tools. Pearson, the owner of eCollege has recently been made equal partner by Arizona State University, which is the second-largest nonprofit in the United States. It appears that both Blackboard and eCollege are tops in both the world of learning management systems and that learning management systems have changed the face of education and more.