Predicting What Institutions Will Select for their Next LMS

Over the past few months, we received a lot of requests to update this blog post. We agree that for LMS vendors and institutions in the process of changing their LMS, this post could be of interest. However, we have noticed that predicting what an institution will select for its next LMS is not just about having a good algorithm. Some readers may be disappointed to learn that we won’t make new predictions in this post until we update our algorithm. (We will still update our table with previous data!) We will focus our post on the lessons learned from this exercise.

1. The first lesson learned is that IT peer institutions are not an exact science. Some products are better predictors than others when we look at specific products. For instance, using BI systems to predict LMS selection is often irrelevant. As previous versions of this post mentioned, we focused our IT peer institution on eight core products. This set of predictors could change. As James raised in his post on key drivers of technology implementation, “the most significant driver in predicting which LMS an institution has implemented is another technology.” But this does not mean that all IT systems are governed by the same tech stack.
2. Another aspect of our misleading predictions was how we counted implementations. For instance, when a multi-campus institution selected an LMS, we counted them as multiple decisions, even though the decision was made centrally for all campuses. We now use a new approach: if it’s one decision, it’s one prediction.
3. Another challenge we encountered when looking at historical implementations was that we looked back 6-7 years to see what peer institutions implemented. Some product categories vary greatly from one year to another. We now look at 2-3 years in the past. A good example of this situation is D2L. The company only represented about 15% of new implementations three years ago. In 2022, it was around 30%.

While working on the algorithm, we validated it using publicly available RFP data as a starting point. We verified our internal predictions using the announcements made by institutions, companies or our scrapers.

As you can see in the table below, we have listed RFPs that we have found dating back to 2019. This list is only for LMS selected in higher education in North America.

We will validate our predictions when we discover an announcement or learn that an institution uses a new LMS. We will only include new system implementations in this prediction table. If an institution does not select a new system or keeps its current system, we will not count it since some RFPs are often RFIs.

List of LMS Predictions in HigherEd

Percentage of good LMS predictions as of March 6, 2023: 16 out of 25 (64%)

Here is a list of ListEdTech predictions and the product selected by the institutions.

Institution Name	ListEdTech Prediction	Institution Selection	Valid Prediction
Brock University	Canvas	Brightspace	No
Carleton University	Brighstpace	Brightspace	Yes
Central Connecticut State University	Canvas	NA
Chemeketa Community College	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Framington State University	Brightspace	Canvas	No
Holyoke Community College	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Illinois Central College	Brightspace	Canvas	No
Illinois Valley Community College	Canvas	Brightspace	No
Kent State University	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
MacEwan University	Brightspace	NA
Metropolitan Community College-Kansas City	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Metropolitan State University of Denver	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Mississippi State University	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Mohave Community College	Brightspace	Canvas	No
Mount Royal University	Brightspace	Brightspace	Yes
Northeast Ohio Medical University	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Southeast Missouri State University	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
St. Cloud State University	Canvas	NA
University of Illinois at Chicago	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
University of Kansas	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
University of New Mexico	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
University of Rhode Island	Canvas	Brightspace	No
University of Tennessee	Canvas	Blackboard	No
University of Victoria	Brightspace	Brightspace	Yes
Virginia Commonwealth University	Canvas	Canvas	Yes
Western State Colorado University	Canvas	Canvas	Yes

Here are some predictions we have made with the new data.

Institution Name	ListEdTech Prediction	Institution Selection	Valid Prediction
Black Hills State University	Blackboard
Bridgewater State University	Brightspace
City University of New York	Canvas	Brightspace	No
Dakota State University	Blackboard
Dallas College	Canvas	Brightspace	No
Northern State University	Canvas
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology	Canvas
South Dakota State University	Canvas
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston	Brightspace
University of Maryland, College Park	Brightspace
University of South Dakota	Canvas
University of Texas at Austin	Blackboard
University of Windsor	Canvas	Brightspace	No