Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

3. LMS, “To be or not to be”?
According to the statistics, the LMS market has grown over 20% in the year 2004. Along with the $600 million revenue, the LMS market is facing many new challenges:
- Enterprise software giants merge their products into the training fields. We have seen Oracle、Peoplesoft and SAP are rapidly moving into the market. By the way the acquisition of Peoplesoft by Oracle will very likely change the equilibrium of this competition in the year 2005.
- New web based application technologies emerged (dot net, J2EE, Flex, etc.) in the year 2004, many LMS providers are changing their product infrastructure and product delivery. For example, companies like GeoLearning, Learn.com and KnowledgePlanet are all providing to their users with a new generation of solutions with simple installation, simple interface and generic solutions.
- There are almost “too many” LMS that are out there in the commercial market, many institutions and organizations use more than one LMS for their day-to-day training practices. Multiple LMS means multiple “versions” of contents that are not compatible with each other. Challenges in reusability, portability, efficiency and much more would surface.
- Learning Object based trainings are becoming more mature now days. Shared learning contents are entering the mainstream of the e-Learning market with almost zero cost. These contents are much favored by both the learners and trainers simply due to its low cost and reusability.
- Rapid Learning is demanding the market for more up-to-date, more modular and more innovative approaches through the training process. New LMS providers are pressured to re-structure their platforms in order to adopt third party tools and vary formats of learning contents.
- Open source industry is growing rapidly. Many innovative, learner centric, FREE learning management systems and tools are surfacing. This type of LMS obviously will change the way that commercial LMS dominating the e-Learning industry.
In general, LMS market is still growing. However, there are many challenges ahead in the commercial LMS. Many e-Learning analysts predict the pure commercial based learning management systems may fade out in the year 2006.