Dive Brief:
- It said Monday Moodle, an open-source learning management system provider, completed an acquisition and merger of three companies. Moodle uses the investments to create a new services company called Moodle U.S.
- Moodle U.S. will offer services including custom development, learning design, scalable hosting solutions, implementation, training, and support for Moodle products.
- The new entity is being led by Jonathan Moore, who co-founded My Learning Consultants, one of the three companies Moodle acquired.
Dive Insight:
Moodle announced in April that it was acquiring and merging three companies: My Learning Consultants, Moonami Learning Solutions, and Elearning Experts. The three were Moodle partner companies, meaning they were certified to provide services to schools using Moodle products.
Clients in every industry need vendors to help them implement open-source software packages, said Daniel Pianko, managing director at Achieve Partners, a private equity firm focused on the future of learning and earning. Higher education is no different.
The acquisitions set up Moodle to provide services under its brand to customers like schools and colleges that use its LMS instead of relying on partners. It potentially sets up competition between Moodle U.S. and other Moodle service providers like Open LMS, a Moodle-based software-as-a-service platform Blackboard sold in 2020 to move away from the open-source LMS market.
Moodle officials cast the acquisition to improve service levels for U.S. customers and set the company up to contact customers to improve products more quickly directly. Moore said he was excited by “opportunities to use our new scale to provide a very high level of quality Moodle services.”
The question of scale and size is critical for Moodle. When it announced the three acquisitions, it found its market position eclipsed by Canvas in recent years.
Canvas could count 32% of U.S. and Canadian higher ed institutions using its LMS as a primary system at the end of 2020, according to an analysis by Phil Hill, a partner at ed-tech consulting firm MindWires. Blackboard’s market share was 23%, and Moodle’s was 22%.
From 2019 to 2021, Moodle lost the second-most clients in North America among LMS providers, behind Blackboard, Hill found. Hill has since updated his LMS market figures after the first half of 2021, but Moodle has not made up any ground. With a 34% market share, compared to 21% for Blackboard and Moodle, Canvas still leads.
Open-source software has some allure for colleges and universities, said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at research and advisory firm Eduventures. It can be affordable for institutions upfront, and they can customize how it works.
But the costs of maintaining, updating, and servicing an open-source LMS are a significant downside, mainly because the faculty members who use the systems are typically focused on teaching and not coding. The market has increasingly been dominated by commercial or hybrid offerings that tout more accessible services and updates.
Adding Moodle-branded service providers won’t necessarily solve that challenge for Moodle, though Garrett said it might help the provider give institutions more of what they want.
A challenge for Moodle is competing without the scale and resources of a more commercially funded enterprise, Garrett said. “How can they expect to turn around their market share decline?” he said.
