Today, Moodle is one of
the most popular and widely used e-learning platforms that is also
known as a Learning Management System. Being an open source
platform, Moodle has gained tremendous success in the market as of
June 2013, the platform had a user base of 83,008 registered and
verified sites, serving 70,696,570 users in 7.5+ million courses with
1.2+ million teachers.
Finally, Moodle beat out
its competitors like Blackboard among small colleges, a new and
well-known analysis of the learning management shows, providing some
evidence to the anecdotal popularity of open source solutions among
all those institutions.
The earlier Blackboard
engineer George Kroner published analysis on his Edutechnica blog
that shows familiar players like Blackboard, Desire2Learn and
Instructure are major forces in the market amid institutions with
1,000 to 2,000 full-time students. Moodle platform beats out all
its competitors in spite of their sturdy popularity and strength.
An enterprise solutions
engineer at University of Maryland University College Kroner said “I
don’t think I've ever seen hard numbers of exactly how
strong Moodle was in that space”. He also added “In
particular, seeing it surpass Blackboard below the 2,500 FTE mark --
I was actually kind of shocked to see that."
When it comes to other
studies that make opinions about the state of the LMS market based on
survey results, Kroner’s analysis basis its findings an open data
sets that mainly combined with search engine interfaces that is
mainly scanning the sites of universities in order to recognize which
system institutions use. According to the survey that produced by the
Campus Computing Project, the reports has shown a decline
Blackboard's market share.
Kroner also said that
approximately 76% of institutions recognized by the U.S. Department
of Education fit into that category. In this space, Moodle’s
success also suggests that these institutions are using the
open-source software so suit their requirements.
Kroner also said “A
lot of people tend to write off Moodle or tend to think it’s a
joke, but it’s used by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
institutions, and those institutions are having success with
it. For a lot of institutions, it does
make sense, and it probably is a good choice for them.”
Bhatt
said “The reason you go with Blackboard is because we are spending
a tremendous amount of money on R&D. The companies that can
invest in delivery of education and curriculum and content with
dollars as opposed to through community development are the
ones that are going to win in this space.”
Mark
Strassman, a Blackboard's senior vice president of industry and
product management, said “We are not surprised. This trend was part
of the rationale for our investment in MoodleRooms and NetSpot in
2012. It’s clear that for some smaller FTE institutions, Moodle has
been a good fit and we are supporting a lot of them now with
Moodlerooms. Every institution has different needs and different
goals, so this gave us a way to support the use of Moodle with an
offering that simplifies and enhances the basic Moodle LMS."
As
we all know that last October Kroner published a new data to a
snapshot of the LMS landscape that barred data from hundreds
of smaller institutions such private institutions, community
colleges. Now, the data comprises about 2,900 colleges and
universities.
By
looking at the Moodle’s popularity, we can say that in the near
future, it will rule the learning industry as it allows users to
acquire numerous benefits. If you have decided to get Moodle
development service, you should hire Moodle developer from any
professional Moodle service provider company.
