Have you ever wondered why MOOCs suddently appeared? Why educational institutions didn’t just use their learning management systems (LMS) and open specific courses to everyone? Was something wrong with their LMS that pushed them to get a MOOC system? What learning management system were they using? We looked at the MOOC’s 451 partner institutions and identified the LMS used by 413 of them.
My first reaction was to notice that 223 of the 451 (49.4%) MOOC partner institution’s have Blackboard as a Learning Management System compared to 27.5% worlwide educational institutions. This was a red flag! There is overwhelming blackboard use in MOOC users.
Then, I rememberd that 240 of the 451 partner institutions are american. So I isolated the american institutions (see last two columns). You will see that the total of MOOCs and american institutions follow the the same paterns. See table below.
Table based on number of higher educational institutions that use specific LMS: in the world, in MOOC partner institutions and in american institutions
| # World | % World | # Mooc | % Mooc | # USA | % USA | |
| LMS | 4279 | % 100 | 451 | % 100 | 2321 | % 100 |
| Moodle | 1888 | 44.1% | 118 | 26.2% | 618 | 26.6% |
| Blackboard | 1594 | 37.3% | 223 | 49.4% | 1209 | 52.1% |
| Desire2Learn | 337 | 7.9% | 88 | 19.5% | 289 | 12.5% |
| Sakai | 261 | 6.1% | 54 | 12.0% | 202 | 8.7% |
| Claroline | 164 | 3.8% | 18 | 4.0% | 9 | 0.4% |
| Articulate | 161 | 3.8% | 63 | 14.0% | 105 | 4.5% |
| Epigeum | 128 | 3.0% | 40 | 8.9% | 45 | 1.9% |
This does not help us to understand why MOOC systems appeared in the first place, but it does clearly explain why Blackboard launched CourseSite.
Note: partnering institutions often have more than 1 Learning Management System (LMS) N/A can refer to not having the information or, most of the time, it has to do with the institution having an LMS with less than 10 educational users in the 451 MOOC partners
