Note: This post combines all K-12 School Districts and HigherEd Institutions in North America.
The North American LMS market has evolved a lot over the past decade. The change is not in the proposed solutions but in the leading systems. In 2013, the two leading products were Moodle (35%) followed by Blackboard (25%). Today, Canvas has taken the lead with a 30% market share, and Moodle tumbled to second place with 16%.
We covered in its company profile the numerous reasons why Moodle suffered. Although not as strong as in 2012, Moodle still responds to a need for open-source solutions in the learning management system market. As one can see in the longtail graph below, the LMS market has a very, very long market share longtail, similar to what we observe for the CRM product category.
Some LMS solutions only target the K-12 submarket. Classroom (16% in the overall LMS market) and Schoology (12% overall) are in the TOP 5 players even when we include the HigherEd solutions. The two solutions are implemented in thousands of school districts.
The enrollment progress graph (above) shows a total of 74 million students. Since some school districts or institutions use more than one LMS, we include all data we have in the graphs available on our portal.
When we calculate the number of students using Canvas, the market share of this solution hits 34%. However, when using institution numbers, it represents 30%. The leading product still outnumbers the other systems in the category. Brightspace has a small footprint in K-12, but the Canadian LMS is implemented in institutions with numerous students. It is also getting more implementations recently.
You may question why we still have Edmodo in our graphs. It’s simply because the product was still active in 2022. In January 2023 we won’t see many active systems and the numbers will simply vanish.
Different LMS Pricing for HigherEd Institutions and School Districts
Our data shows that the price per student for an HigherEd institution average between $12 and $18, while it is $5 to $10 for a school district. We can explain this situation because HigherEd and K-12 use different products with different set of criteria.
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted LMS implementations, we want to know what will affect the LMS market in the future. We have seen many acquisitions and merger in the past, but will this continue? Will we see new products that combine LMS and other school features? Your guess is as good as mine.
