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Steve Kolowich, a technology reporter for Inside Higher Education, discusses the learning management systems (LMS) of the future. The article, geared towards an audience of higher education professionals, as well as those interested in higher education technology, highlights three up and coming LMS providers: Coursekit, Instructure Canvas, and Chegg. Instructure Canvas is an open-source LMS, offering its services to more than 100 institutions, including Brown University and Auburn University. The program is marketed to administrators, as well as individual instructors. Coursekit, another LMS, is free and currently only markets to individual professors. In addition to course management, Coursekit plans to offer students assistance in locating books and homework help, in the future. A significant difference between Coursekit and other LMS is their creation of a social network oriented around education.  Chegg, formerly a solely text rental organization, has rebranded the company into a social education platform. Although Chegg is not a LMS, some of the services offered are similar. Students can search texts associated with courses at their institution, utilize a homework help center and speak with a tutor in India, and buy and sell notes through Notehall. Based on Kolowich's description of three promising LMS-like services, Blackboard (the current majority LMS market shareholder) should be prepared for a new wave of competition.

Joshua Kim, the Director of Learning and Technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program at Dartmouth College, often writes for Inside Higher Ed. In this article, Kim shares ten questions posed to him by Rachel Hanel, a student and employee at Kaplan University. Hanel presented ten questions to Kim based on his experience with learning management systems (LMS).  Kim believes higher education institutions should based their LMS selection off of the quality of the product, the quality of the company, and the size of the user community, not just price. Kim also points out the direct and indirect costs associated with each LMS must be evaluated before making a decision. Students are looking for an LMS utilized by faculty members, while faculty members have a wide range of requests from an LMS, making the selection of a LMS for a college or university difficult. A few products and services to watch break into the LMS market over the next few years are Instructure Canvas, OpenClass, and Coursekit, in addition to Moodle and Blackboard, whom already hold most of the market share. According to Kim, institutions should put education first when reviewing LMSs. College and university personnel, specifically those looking to switch or add a LMS, are the intended audience.