A Market Update On K-12 Lms

The pandemic has had a significant consequence on schooling and continues to do so.

FREMONT, CA: The pandemic profoundly affected schooling (and continues to do so). In the K-12 sector, the educational sectors observed a surge in new installs, particularly for LMS systems and conferencing solutions. It's worth noting that many school districts and school boards established an LMS for the first time since being obliged to teach remotely.

The educational sector spent the last twenty-four months scouring the internet for further data on this submarket. The industry added 300 additional implementations for the year 2020 between June and December. The industry didn't stop at this year's update; the educational institutions also enhanced their historical data: between 2015 and 2019, they included 150 extra implementation lines to their database. These additions help to improve the data and make it more representative of the market.

The educational sector has gathered additional data on the K-12 LMS market—the new implementation graph indicates a declining trend from 2015 to 2019. However, when the pandemic struck, K-12 new LMS installs soared to an all-time high. It is estimated that almost half of these new implementations occurred in school districts where teachers and students previously lacked access to an LMS.

When the education institutions examine particular product implementations over time, they notice a movement in market leaders.

For instance, Moodle, formerly the market leader, has nearly vanished from the K-12 submarket. Initially, when school districts and boards of education implemented learning management systems for the first time, they overwhelmingly chose Moodle. For example, Canvas and PowerSchool/Schoology have surpassed Moodle as market leaders. Since 2012, their proportion of new implementations has steadily increased to over 40 percent each, leaving only 20 percent for other LMS options.

The educationists are glad to report that recent data additions corroborate their earlier conclusions. As is customary, please keep in mind that the new implementation data is around six months behind schedule, which means they will detect some variances in the 2021 data when they perform their next update in June 2022.