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Sites that link here
Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebCT vs. Sakai
- Moodle: 2,981 deployments / 54% market share
8,772 X (348 / 1024) -
Blackboard + WebCT: 2,500 deployments / 45% market share
3,700 - 1,200 K-12 - Sakai: 35 deployments / .63% market share
Taken from the Sakai partners page.
Related Posts:
Sakai vs. Moodle
Digging into OpenBRR Rating of Sakai and Moodle
Comments
Reply
We are running Moodle at our university, but have not "registered."
Interesting stuff on Moodle
Interesting stuff on Moodle and Sakai. I’m curious if you might have some recommendations on resources for less than expert geeks on using Moodle. I have been working exclusively with WebCT because that’s what the organizations I do work for are currently using.
Moodle
In general the Open Source development community is very supportive of Moodle. The Moodle community is seen as open and inclusive with lively forums and much information available on implementing and using the platform. The opposite is seen of Sakai. No-one is quite sure what it is and where it is going, information on ten open areas of the Sakai site is sparse and the community would seem to be closed.
The end result is a great deal of skepticism - sometimes bordering ion (sic) hostility — towards the Sakai development — with a perception that it is a well funded corporate development by and for the larger universities.
Sakai would definitely have
Sakai would definitely have more users if it were written in PHP. PHP and Perl are part of the stock HTTP server setup nowadays, where getting JSP to work... I can only imagine. Moodle, ATutor, and other environments using PHP will doubtlessly have the most users (of the open-source products) in the coming years.
Reply
PHP is very common language that is why if Sakai were written in it so it had more users.
Regards,
Jennifer Garner
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
This reminds me of a good little book that should be required reading for anyone thinking about using numbers:
"How to Lie with Statistics"
The number of Moodle installs taken from the moodle.org site is a joke at best. Scan the list some time and look at the number of "Witch and Warlock" Training sites :-). Click on some of the links and see how many of them are actually anything more than empty test sites someone set-up long ago and abandoned.
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
The moodle folks are convinced that the deployment statistics are actually unrepresentative of their real install base. But even if the real figures were 1/10th the reported numbers Moodle would still be beating the pants of Sakai.
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
"Even if they are 1/10"
First, I have no reason to believe they are 1/10...bad data is bad data and you can't conclude anything from it. What if it is really 1/100th or 1/1,000th?
I do "believe" (and I stress believe since there is no reliable data on the matter) that Moodle is deployed more than Sakai. However, I also "believe" Moodle comes no where close to being deployed and used as much as Blackboard. And for good reason...when you objectively compare Moodle and Blackboard feature-by-feature, Blackboard beats the pants off Moodle. Blackboard's discussion forum features are far superior to Moodle's...and discussion forums are still the heart of asynchronous online learning. Some of Moodle's features are for "show" and propaganda at best.
1. Surveys...Moodle doesn't have a usable survey tool.
2. Wiki...what a joke...even moodle.org uses MediaWiki for its Moodle documentation instead of its own built in wiki.
3. Email....no built in email feature
4. Document Management System...none
5. Groups?...takes a rocket-scientist to figure it out and then you run into so many bugs that it becomes a nightmare.
6. Activity locking...ha!
What Moodle has is a nice look...it beats the pants off other systems in course layout...that's it. Moodle is a collection of a lot of mediocre tools that are packaged and presented well.
The "Moodle look" catches the eye of many people and it is not until they actually start trying to use the features that they (at least those who are experienced in using Blackboard) see the limitations.
Moodle has the potential of being a great piece of software, but it needs to refocus if it wants to achieve that potential. Their discussion forums need to be developed to be more like phpBB, their wiki needs to be developed to be more like MediaWiki, their survey tool just needs to be developed. But instead of developing those essential tools, they are following the fads and are building in things like blogs eportfolios...and as you may guess, they are mediocre blogs and eportfolios with very limited functionality.
All Blackboard needs to do is redesign the presentation of content. Move away from compartmentalized presentation to a more natural flow of the information...like Moodle has. Blackboard has superior tools...they just need to be presented to the user in a more natural manner...if BB does that, then Moodle has nothing on it, other than being Open Source. OS will ensure it a small market, but that will not move it into the "big time" markets.
Moodle defined: A nice looking set of mediocre tools.
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
1. Surveys...Moodle doesn't have a usable survey tool.
Moodle has two survey tools. One is a sophisticalted external open source software that does not interface seemlessly but adequately, the other (Feedback module) is simple and easy to use, quite adequate for an end of term class survey. There is also a module for one question "polls."
2. Wiki...what a joke...even moodle.org uses MediaWiki for its Moodle documentation instead of its own built in wiki.
What is wrong with using MediaWiki? Ford and Honda are competing products, but Moodle and MediaWiki cooperate. Being an open source system Moodle is free to integrate all the best Open source software there is (there is a lot of Typo3 in the encoding conversion routines for instance). If Blackboard did that then it would have to become open source. The new Moodle wiki will be MediaWiki level, and progressing well. Give Ludo and team another year. The current Moodle wiki is quite useable for class projects.
3. Email....no built in email feature
The forums send notifications via email. Why do you need to send just email and not leave a record on the forums? What about the quickmail block? What about Moodle's messaging system?
4. Document Management System...none
Not much. True. I have never wanted one myself. There was talk of integrating something like "Owl" a while ago but it died down through lack of interest.
5. Groups?...takes a rocket-scientist to figure it out and then you run into so many bugs that it becomes a nightmare.
The groups are pretty simple to use if you ask me. They could be more powerful but moodle 1.7 (now in beta, running on the moodle.org site) supplements groups with roles. I have noticed a bug with groups on 1.6.2 (lack of *detailed* grades breakdown in group view) but I am confident it will be fixed soon.
6. Activity locking...ha!
As you know there is an add-in to achieve this. What is the joke?
Quizzes and Lessons are good. The TUI module is superb:-) Don't forget the price or even TCO.
Please would you be so kind as to delete this and above comment?
I am very sorry to bother you but, my domain name linked from the above comment was bought by someone else that is using it as a link farm. Please would you be so kind as to delete my comment above and this one, or change the link to nihonbunka.com? I am sorry if this request constitutes comment spam.
Tim
Timothy Takemoto
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
a few things
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
You are the one who posted that ridiculous pie chart showing Moodle deployments out numbering Blackboard....maybe you should talk to them :-)
My rant about the Moodle features is subjective?
Is it subjective that Moodle uses Mediawiki for their documentation site instead of their own Wiki? Have you even looked at this? Don't you find that a little odd? That's like the president of Ford driving a Honda to work...they should at least have enough confidence in their own products to use them. If not, why would anyone else want to use them?
Is it subjective that a Moodle teacher has no way to create an end of course survey for their students? Is it subjective that Blackboard does have this?
Is it subjective that Moodle has no email interface for effectively emailing students? Is it subjective that Blackbord does have this?
If you think this is being "subjective" then you are just uninformed.
Heck, read the Moodle forums and you will see every "subjective" thing I have pointed out here discussed there.
I understand being a "cheerleader" for open source, but don't be blind.
"...start rollig some patches..?" Ha...how do you patch something that doesn't exist? :-) True, I could write code, but I have no interest in this...I'll leave that to the Moodle cheerleaders :-)
All that Jive...
Is it subjective that Moodle uses Mediawiki for their documentation site instead of their own Wiki?
Not at all, if you think about it, Mediawiki is system built for an open, public wiki, it's management of groups and roles is primitive at best (try changing a user's password, for instance;-p). How would you back up a wiki you used in a course in mediawiki, and copy it to another course?
The Moodle wiki is built for being used inside a course, it isn't really set up for being used as a public wiki open to the world. As such it has the much more robust (than mediawiki) Moodle tools for managing roles, access, groups, etc. And you can back it up on a per course or per wiki basis.
On the other hand, Moodle does use Moodle for it's front page and discussion forums, which some have said are the most important tool in an LMS. Perhaps you would find it interesting that Blackboard.com uses Jive4 rather than Blackboard for it's public facing discussion forums;-).
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
If the piece chart is so ridiculous then go do your own research and analysis and prove me wrong. I'd love to see more thought and effort put into tracking the LMS market trends. I'm convinced that there are more students / classrooms being served by Moodle than Blackboard today and in one more year there will be dramatically more.
And yes, every reason you've listed of why you prefer black board of moodle is subjective and mostly besides the point since moodle wins mostly on cost and ease of setting up rather than features.
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
Blackboard is generally thought to have about 80% market share. Counting installations isn't accurate because Moodle counts a single installation by a single professor as a deployment. Where Blackboard, Desire2Learn or ANGEL Learning are typically installed campus / system wide.
The more accurate measure (if you can find it) is the # of Full Time Enrollments in use by any given system...or the number of institutions who've adopted the LMS campus wide...
b
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
I see you are deleting posts you don't like now :-) Bad...bad :-)
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
??
I haven't deleted any posts except comment spam I've been getting... which should be over now thanks to akismet. Did you have another comment since your post on 30/08/2006 - 4:24pm?
Dokeos and Moodle and WebCT
Having used all three of the above in HE in the UK the one comment I will make is that Moodle may have a lot of installations in the UK but many tend to be used as content management systems for on-line storage of course materials for easy student access the term I use is WHORE (Web Hosted On-line Resource Environment) with learning management implemented.
The Dokeos sites that are up in my experience are learning management systems with stated learning objectives and a simple but effective implementation.
WeBCt is amature product with good support but it's recent merger with blackboard leaves them with a virtual market monopoly.
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
Just a few questions:
David Delgado
Statistics can tell everything...
Marketshare is something which is defined by the marketvolume. There would clearly be NO marketvolume for this many moodle-installations if moodle would cost the price of webct. but the webct users get something moodle does not provide: service.
you are mixing up complementary marketsegments (open source/"free" vs. closed source/ "money"). comparing SUV's with BICYCLES is a bit unprofessional. no need to have a further look at it if even the simplest things are incorrect.
seems as if you are a little bit fanatic about pushing moodle, eh? cool down, the world has existed many thousand years without either moddle or sakai, or webct. it will last for the next thousands of years if we do not erase ourselves from the surface of this planet. it would also be a nice idea to give information to the public on what kind of sources your numbers are based on?
alexa may measure name recognition, but thats it.
guy: go back to the drawingboard and fight imprecision and not let fight LMS's of different leagues against each other.
Dokeos
I think there is another major player that is forgotten in this marketshare comparison: Dokeos. Dokeos is very strong in Europe with some Universities and several public administrations are using it:
Ghent University: 30.000 users
Ghent Highschool: 15.000 users
Free University of Brussels: 10.000 users
Geneva University: 25.000 users
....
The dokeos (http://www.dokeos.com) site counts 1042 installations of Dokeos around the world.
Dokeos customers
They have a list of [[http://www.dokeos.com/customers.php|commercial customers]] on their site. Quite impressive: gouvernment agencies, telco & pharma companies, ...
Dokeos
For a little update in numbers regarding Dokeos...
Dokeos now counts 1662 publicly registered campuses (which does not mean anything about the size of each campus or its goal - you can get that information from here: http://www.dokeos.com/community.php - the sites appear in there when the site admin clicks a link in the administration interface to register his portal).
What we can say for sure is that we have reached the 145.000 users and 15.000 courses on our official public website (with 58000 unique visits per month), which puts it near the quoted number of 160.000 users for the Open University, which in itself is something that makes us (Dokeos team) quite proud. Internally, we tend to evaluate the total number of permanent Dokeos users to 1.000.000, considering that we have 1662 (registered) portals and that most of the portals we know a little bit more about have more than a thousand users (and that we can already take 50.000 at least for our public campus, plus another 400.000 users for the direct commercial clients we have, combined).
A few months later
Since I wrote the post above several months ago, I got concerned about the image of Dokeos in comparison to others so I worked on the statistics reporting a little bit to fix a few issues that I didn't know were there (the voluntary registration didn't work anymore and there were a lot of duplicates, lack of info, etc).
This results in far more encouraging statistics (in my opinion):
- 4.673 portals (which has to be compared to the chart above, although in the meantime Moode reports 40.000 portals here: http://moodle.org/sites/
- 66.957 courses (campus.dokeos.com contributes for 15.000)
- 817.127 users spread over these 4600 portals (campus.dokeos.com contributes for 195.000 right now)
- about 5000 downloads per month (all versions together)
As usual, the 4673 portals number has to be taken with a lot of care, as anyone installing a test portal and clicking the "I want to register on the Dokeos website" option gets registered. The list of portals is available here: http://www.dokeos.com/en/community.php
These statistics are based on numbers registered voluntarily by Dokeos portals administrators (they have to click a box to start sending info).
Updates for others
Blackboard now reports 3400 portals professionally installed, and Sakai reports (although it isn't clear this is a real portals count) 166 portals (see the Sakai "in production" page).
There are also other players in the market, like Ganesha (mostly French apparently, no information about number of install, says it's GPL but no download information anywhere, reports it's the *first open-source e-learning platform* but I have serious doubts - taken in any meaning), ILIAS (impossible to get a clear number - about 1 to 10 portals per country?) and Claroline (1196 organisations).
umm.... ok anonymous
This is totally false. Moodle users get services as well: from the Moodle community for free or from hired vendor firms.
What? In what way do Moodle and WebCT's market segments in higher-ed differ?
All the sources I used for these statistics are linked to directly from the post. Alexa was not used for this analysis.
What do you mean by Higher-Ed here? is this Further Education + Universities? worldwide? certainly in the UK moodle does not have this penetration in Universities (HE to me)
Universities worldwide
(surprising right?)
You should not take the number of implementations at face value. In many instances you have a single large university that has multiple licenses across different departments that act independently. My own very large university has 14 licenses from 5 providers. How do you count that. It may well be that a Moodle implementation is actually an individual who has downloaded the software and is running it on a box somewhere. The Sakai implementations are at huge schools that make up a larger share of the student population than one might discern by merely counting the number of institutions. These sorts of occurences are normal and make it hard to really know who has what percentage of market share.
Dig into the numbers...
Sakai unquestionable has a small fraction of the user base that Moodle does.
Huge?
IU is the only Sakai implementation I know of larger than NZVLE (45,000 students), and none of the Sakai implementations (MIT is ~10k and UMich ~39k) are larger than the Open University, UK (160,000 students).
It is interesting to look at the numer of students in Moodle at moodle.org/stats.
Re: Higher-ed LMS market penetration: Moodle vs. Blackboard+WebC
Just to let you know that there are definitely people using Moodle who are unregistered on the Moodle site.
We are running Moodle at our university, but have not "registered."
It's not a large number, but we do have 7 teachers using it for courses with approximately 1,500 students enrolled.
Our courses are totally password-protected, so there is no need to announce a URL, since no uninvited guests are allowed.
My guess is that there are a lot of Moodle users that are uncounted, for the same reason.
Please open my site
Please open my site http://comes.umy.ac.id .... thank to Moodle, we have develop three modules, Engineering e-encyclopedia, e-journal, and e-portfolio. we have 37 course, 2134 enrolled students. We have experience with WebCT four years ogo, ... you see ... we enjoy with Moodle.
We Enjoy with Moodle but we want to new experience
please open my site http://els.fk.umy.ac.id we have develop moodle since 2003 until current, and we enjoy too with moodle packages.
But we want new experience anyway with Sakai. WebCT + Blackboard very expensive for me. Thanks to moodle, go Sakai.