2021 Review: What's the current state of the VLE market in UK higher education?
Whether you love them or hate them, or are indifferent to them - Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) or Learning Management Systems (LMS) have been a mainstay of educational technology in higher education for many years now.
They have been discussed, debated and argued over for years. Some have pronounced death on them, some would like to pronounce death on them…but it’s hard to imagine any decent size university not having a central digital platform that orchestrates the digital educational experience.
It’s also hard to imagine continuity of teaching and study happening in the way it did at the onset of the first lockdown without universities having a VLE in place and well established. I wonder if they deserved more of a nod when it came to acknowledging contributions towards maintaining educational continuity.
The long-standing narrative around VLE use is that they have mainly been used as content repositories and in that sense have either not fulfilled their potential or not been used to their potential. There’s much more to say about all of this, but what’s certainly true is that the pandemic-caused pivot to remote teaching led to much greater reliance upon them and more expansive use of them.
Whether we’ll see a new era in which they are universally and expansively used remains to be seen, but as a key pillar of a university’s digital education experience, they and other digital technologies have come into much greater focus now.
Whether you think this is positive or negative - it’s hard to bet against digital technologies playing an even greater role in the university and study experience in the next decade.
What’s the overall picture of VLE use in UK HE?
So with all that in mind, it’s worth thinking about what the overall picture is in terms of the VLE in UK higher education, and what trends and changes we might be seeing.
Having researched and analysed 176 Higher Education Institution’s (HEIs) in the UK I’ve been able to put together some data on who is using what.
But…before we get into that - it’s worth saying that one increasingly common practice (mainly as a consequence of a growing number of OPM partnerships) is universities running two or more VLEs - one for the majority of their core, campus-based programmes and one for online/distance programmes.
This data is concerned only with the former - although given that a decent proportion of OPMs tend to instigate the use of Canvas with their partner institutions - then the figures might look more favourable for their share of the market had this been included.
Proportion of VLEs being used by UK HEIs
For many years there have been the so-called big four" in this market - they being Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas and Brightspace. However, whilst in the US the proportion of universities using those products is more evenly spread, in the UK it’s really been a case of the big two - Moodle and Blackboard.
These two VLEs are still the most widely used in UK universities and are used by over 70% of the 176 HEIs I looked at. Whilst that tells a story of two dominant players - I’m not sure that’s the true picture, because they used to be much more dominant.
The changing shape of UK VLE market share
I know of at least 15 HEIs that have switched from Blackboard or Moodle in recent years with the majority being switched away from using Blackboard. Whilst this might not be seismic it is notable that these two VLE providers aren’t growing the number of universities using their product but rather are declining somewhat.
Of those who have switched VLE recently the notable winners are Canvas, Brightspace and to a lesser extent Aula - which doesn’t class itself as an VLE as such but would act as a replacement for one within a university.
Another trend is not so much replacing a VLE but a change of product in respect to Blackboard. The woefully outdated and awkward UI that characterises Blackboard Learn is increasingly being left behind by those who use it in favour of the Ultra Experience.
A reasonable proportion of these moves in the UK are recent and might suggest this is a new product, when in fact it is several years old. Ultra has had an odd existence since it was launched and has struggled somewhat to gain traction - this might be changing though.
What I get the sense of in the UK is that there’s more appetite to reconsider and review digital learning platforms and the ascendency of Moodle and Blackboard is increasingly under threat. There is growing adoption of the two other big VLE players in Canvas and Brightspace, who have previously had a small piece of the market, as well as the adoption of newer products like Aula.
Based on recent trends, it would be hard to bet against a university with a Moodle or Blackboard VLE who reviews it - not switching to one of these three products.
It will also be interesting to see whether Microsoft Teams can in any way usurp the VLE as a central digital learning platform. There is one UK university that uses it as a de facto VLE and several smaller institutions that don’t rely on an VLE but rather on Microsoft and/or Google suites of tools for digital education.
Are we seeing signs of more vibrancy and improvement?
One of the positive signs in recent years is that at least there is some movement in this space, whether it be the introduction of some more players or the emergence of new products entirely.
For too long the VLE space has been stagnant and these are hardly the conditions that drive substantive product improvement. I hope we’ve left behind the years of low prioritisation of digital education and ancillary use of digital technologies in universities that has contributed to complacency, sluggishness and duopoly in the product space.
If universities really make good on a move to blended or hybrid models for their previously core campus-based portfolios and we continue to see more universities strategically enter the online education space, then we might be entering a period of more vibrancy and improvement.
We may also see more moves towards separate products being used for blended/hybrid/traditional models and online education. The emergence of platforms like Insendi which can support more structured, linear guided user experiences, that to an extent resemble some MOOC platforms, shows how we might see more of a horses for courses approach that matches digital technology to teaching and study models.
Ultimately what we need is better products in this space - products that allow a broader range of designs and experiences to be made manifest via their platforms and that address long standing deficiencies such as the way communication and collaboration is handled. These two will be especially important if these products are going to really support a substantial move to hybrid or blended learning portfolios.
On one last point, it’s worth mentioning LXPs which seem to have a lot of noise around them in the Learning & Development field. I think it’s fair to say this hype hasn’t really made it’s way over to UK universities. I’m not sure that the necessary conditions, practices and culture are there yet to think seriously about LXPs and so I wouldn’t anticipate any movement on that any time soon.
It’s always hard to predict what the future will look like but I am genuinely hopeful that we might start to see improvement in both choice and the type of product in this space. The two biggest players in the UK are certainly experiencing more losses than wins and although the UK picture might end up resembling the spread across the big four that we see in the US, it’s encouraging that there are new-ish entrants like Aula and Insendi.
Personally, I’d love to see platforms that support different paradigms of education and learning design and that genuinely offer a superb overall experience. I think, like a lot of things in life, the extent to which that will become a reality will really be down to how many people genuinely and seriously care about that.
