Surveyed Trends in LMS

I attended a session at the AACC Conference yesterday where Fred Lokken of Truckee Meadows Community College presented the results of the 2006 ITC Distance Education Survey. The survey report is titled "Trends in e-learning: Tracking the Impact of e-learning in Higher Education." The survey will be posted soon on their website.

In this post I'll focus on a few of the findings as they relate to LMS adoption at the 320 schools (mostly two-year colleges) that responded to the ITC survey. 84% of the respondents are current users of the various products of BlackCT (Blackboard & WebCT for the uninitiated). Moodle and Angel were both at around 5%, with D2L slightly below that and then a smattering of institutions were using Etudes, Sakai, and Educator.

More interesting to me was the finding that 31% of the respondents indicated that they were considering switching LMS platforms within the next couple of years. They did not give the cross-tab on those numbers, but I am quite certain that most of those considering switching are current BlackCT users. Of course, some of them might be considering switching from one BlackCT product to another, but I have no doubt that many of them are considering a switch away from the evil empire.

Another interesting finding was that more than I would have expected host their own LMS installation:
  • 54% of the schools own and maintain their own servers for the hosting of classes.
  • 28% use a 3rd party (outsource to LMS provider, hosted by LMS company, or publisher)
  • 17% share services such as centralized consortium, system, or district.
The primary respondents for this survey were the administrators in charge of distance education (online) at the surveyed schools.

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