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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. 

This is a valuable directory of 150 learning and performance tools. The learning platforms are listed in alphabetic order, beginning with numbers, and ending at xylene content management system. It includes all the popular and well-known management systems such as Moodle, Blackboard, Instructure Canvas, Desire2Learn and Haiku learning management system. A bright yellow star precedes all free systems. This is a valuable page for anyone interesting in the market for a learning management system or looking for information on what is available.

This article is written by a staff reporter for a higher education technology blog. She shares information from the results of an annual survey on higher-education computing, The Campus Computing Project survey. This survey asked Information Technology administrators at 543 colleges and universities questions about mobile applications and investments in campus technology. The main topics covered in this article are: how campus information-technology officials face fewer budget cuts in their departments, their opinions of the competition for college and university business from learning-management-system companies, and the uncertain views of massive open online courses (referred to as MOOCs). A majority of campus information-technology officers agreed that MOOC's offer a capable model for the "effective delivery" of instruction online. This article also reports that the study revealed that more than two-thirds of those surveyed indicated they were uncertain about whether MOOC's offer a solid business model for campuses to "realize new revenues". The author shares how survey results pointed to the increasing competition between MOOC providers like Udacity and Coursera and that the market for companies that sell learning-management systems (LMS) is becoming more competitive as well. The number of survey respondents that use Blackboard's learning-management system had dropped from 71 percent (in 2006) to 45 percent (as of 2012). Other LMS companies, such as Desire2Learn, Moodle, Sakai, and Instructure's Canvas have been more successful as a result. The author shared that although budget cuts in technology departments are going down, 27 percent of survey respondents reported budget cuts this year, compared with 50 percent in 2009. However the author shared that public institutions may still remain at-risk for budget cuts. This information would be useful for higher education technology professionals, particularly those who are making decisions related to technol