Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Guest: If you look at today's LMS, you look at blackboard, you look at D2L Brightspace in particular, you look at Moodle and you compare that to how the systems worked from a user interface a decade ago. They're all significantly different. So Canvas triggered the change, but all of them have come along. But it all feeds into this. The IT group in most cases is not driving the change anymore, but they're trying to figure out but how can you still be strategic when you do this?
[00:00:34] Host: Welcome to the EdTechConnect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dhillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators, and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
[00:01:10] Host: Phil Hill is the Founder and Principal of Phil Hill & Associates, LLC. In this role, Phil is a market analyst and consultant specializing in educational technology strategy and organizational change management. He has assisted multiple higher ed institutions, vendors and investors in technology enabled change initiatives with an emphasis in the development of effective online and hybrid education strategies. Along with the team at Phil Hill and Associates, he has helped several statewide systems of colleges and universities to select and implement educational technology solutions, guided many colleges and universities with their own technology decisions, and led organizational change management efforts at one of the largest higher education ERP deployments. In the past five years, he's led strategic planning and organizational design efforts for.
[00:02:05] Host: Several technology programs and provided guidance on edtech markets.
[00:02:09] Host: Along with Glenn de Morgan, he is one of the lead writers for the On EdTech newsletter.
[00:02:17] Host: Well Phil, welcome to the show.
[00:02:19] Guest: Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to this.
[00:02:20] Host: I'm looking forward to this one too. Phil, you've been kind of a legend in the industry. You know your data. Talk a little bit more about that, a little bit. But can you just start off and share the journey that led you to become this prominent figure in ed tech consulting?
[00:02:37] Guest: Sure, I guess. If there's one theme that I've discovered about myself is everything is falling into items, so reacting to the situation and moving that direction as opposed to a carefully planned out pathway. But I started out Consulting and EdTech nearly 25 years ago, like 24 years ago, which makes me feel old. And initially it was just consulting for colleges and universities who were trying to anywhere where technology enabled change that impacted the teaching and learning mission is what. What I worked on.
So did that for a while. And then really where I came into the role that you know me from is around 2010 or so, I wanted to basically have material online. So I started blogging. And the idea was simply if people wanted to know what I knew, what I talked about, how I thought about things, instead of me marketing myself, I'd prefer to say, go read this stuff. So that's how I fell into it. And at the same time, you mentioned the graphics. I had done a webinar using the SQUID graphic about LMS market share, and that sort of took off on its own, if you will. So I got known for my visualizations. But then that writing of the blog became a newsletter. We opened up a market analysis service where we were looking at LMS market share and what it means, how this affects colleges and universities. And so if you look at it over time, I've gone from consulting to. To market analysis and whatever you want to call it that I do. I'm not even quite see, I have trouble explaining to my family what I do. To be quite honest.
[00:04:24] Host: I do too. I saw my, my niche group of ed tech people. I like how you say, like you fall into it and I feel like I. I really agree with that. I resonate with that. Kind of got to be open to what's happening around you in your. In your space. Like it moves so fast.
[00:04:41] Guest: Yeah.
[00:04:41] Host: To talk about. I got to talk about your graphic a little bit. We'll put a link to this in the show notes, but our timeline kind of overlap a little bit. Like I've been in the space for a couple of decades and I remember it was around two. I think your graphic is now 15 plus years old. 2009, it came out.
[00:04:56] Guest: 2009 was the first version.
[00:04:59] Host: And this is the LMS market share graphic that I'll put a link to. And it was so interesting back in the day because the market was so dynamic. If you look at what was happening back then, there were. I think Cornell had their own lms. They built George W. Had Prometheus. And right after that, Blackboard was like buying everything up. And if you look now, you can kind of see which players are still growing. And you just really. I love that infographic that you've. You've created. And you've just released the 2024, right?
[00:05:29] Guest: Yeah. And it might be worth just describing why I came up with that graphic and why it seems to resonate. So at the time I was working just with colleges and universities and if you were doing an LMS selection, I found that they were getting way too tripped up with the details of the process. They were falling into this situation of let's come up with a requirements document with 250 requirements and let's score the details and use that to determine which system to go with. And I was trying to say to them, hey, take a step back, look at the big picture. There are only roughly four, maybe five systems you're even going to consider.
And for those, they have different characteristics. So don't create an over determined system. You need to instead focus on what's our strategy of the school and which of these four or five systems best aligns with what I need. So that graphic was all about trying to tell schools, don't get caught up in the details, think about what you need instead.
[00:06:34] Host: One thing that struck me is if you look back from 1997, for the next probably eight years or so, homegrown solutions were a good chunk of the market. They were like almost an equal. And I remember that I was in it at that space. I didn't have a school, I wasn't with the school that built their own. But and almost in the last, what, five years it's gone to basically very, very few institutions are maintaining their own lms. But yeah, a lot of the things you can look at with canvas kind of being the, the beast came on board, you know, 15 plus years ago. But tell me about your evolution. So you started with, you know, LMSs were kind of your core thing, but you consult for a lot of different spaces. What have you seen in the last particular decade as far as the evolution of higher ed tech?
[00:07:21] Guest: Well, let's see, that's a pretty broad question. I guess one thing is online education. You know, if you look back 10, certainly 15 years, online education was the realm of for profits or continuing education. You know, the people over in the side, the kids playing in the corner. And one of the things that's changed is now it's very accepted. And it happened with the OPM market, with actually it happened with Coursera, neodacity, the MOOC movement, that suddenly college leaders realized we need to have an online education strategy. Even if our strategy is we're staying, they need to have a strategy. So if you look today, the market is mostly dominated by nonprofit colleges and universities. And most colleges and universities have some form of online education. But that just didn't exist 15 years ago. And that transition has actually been monumental in my opinion. Another Thing that I'll point out, and it goes back to my consulting days. Well, I still consult, but not exclusively is I had clients back in the mid 2000s where there was almost a view of the service unit that was providing the lms. They were allowed to tell you the system to use and which buttons to push. But you stay away from pedagogy and course design. We don't want you tech folks getting anywhere near us on academic design. That's been an enormous shift because these days it's now accepted that you can't solve problems with technology alone. You really have to rethink how you design a course, how you teach a course, and you need to get into pedagogy. So I guess I mentioned both of those. Pretty positive sounding like these are good changes and they're fundamentally different from what they used to be. But I think they impact a lot of what we're doing right now. More on the negative sense. You certainly have an enrollment crisis, even though it's gone up the past two years. An enrollment crisis that drives so much that's happened that 15 years ago it was the opposite. Enrollment was growing. So I'll throw those three out right now. Pretty fundamental changes.
[00:09:39] Host: And I want to latch onto one of those. The opm. You seem to have done a lot of research and talked a lot about the OPM market. I feel like it's been about a year since I've heard much chatter about that when the revenue model really was shifting. Like we can't. Is it against the law to have, you know, percentage of revenue driving this model, more flat fees? What do you think the Future is for OPMs? What's. What's the latest on that?
[00:10:05] Guest: Well, one thing I'd say is it's unknown. It is sort of a chaotic market, not just in terms of regulations and is it legal, but in terms of market pressures. I mean, look, 2U was pretty much the market leader and they went bankrupt now primarily for financial reasons, the cost of servicing debt based on their acquisition of EDX and Trilogy and stuff like that. So the financial environment has changed. And at the same token, actually I'll tie this to the. Everybody's doing online, the market is crowded now. You can't just build an online program and build it and they will come and whoever it is is going to get rich now things are competitive. And so one of the things that's done is it's made the OPM market very chaotic and difficult to operate in. So it's hard to predict. I personally do not see that we have fundamentally moved from a revenue sharing market to a fee for service. That's the common narrative. But I don't subscribe to it. And the reason I don't is because talking to schools and they still really see the value of revenue sharing as a way to access capital to fund an online program that they're not going to get from their institution. So they view it as, we can't do these programs if we don't have revenue share. So there's still a strong demand for revenue share. There's a lot more risk because of the regulatory environment.
So where is it going to go? I think it's just, it's more fragmented in terms of business models. Some people want fee for service, some want revenue share, some want a mix like, I'll pay for this, but I want a lower percentage coming in, you know, for you. So it's more fragmented in terms of business model. But at the same token, I see sort of a consolidation of the number of vendors who are providing the primary services.
[00:12:03] Host: Yeah, yeah, makes sense to me. And then going back to the these entrenched vendors, you have the big LMS vendors, for example, like Canvas and Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle. How do you see them evolving in the coming years? Are they going to have to build in AI to their platforms? Are they going to maybe just build strong integration platforms? What are you seeing, you know, in that, in that respect?
[00:12:28] Guest: Well, I guess my fundamental view of the LMS market, you have the same top four vendors that you just mentioned and you've had them for the past decade, to be quite honest. So on one hand, there's not much change, not much movement. But at the same token, I don't believe that the LMS is a commodity market. And what I mean by that is the products are not fungible. You can't just replace Blackboard with Canvas with zero change in adoption, any direction from something to Moodle. Whatever the case may be, who you choose as an LMS partner changes the school's adoption of the tool, which programs can be enabled by it because they have different strengths and weaknesses. And so it's not a commodity market. And in terms of AI, I see the same thing. I see them sort of diverging right now, which is interesting. So if you look at it Anthology Blackboard, they bought Blackboard. They're going all in on AI. They're embedding it in the product. They're mostly including it as free additions to the product. Not exclusively, but a lot of it, they're doing it with core shell creation, stuff like that. And anywhere they can use AI, they want to do it to differentiate themselves. You go to Moodle and actually Canvas too. They both seem to be defined in AI by what they're not doing. Like we'll create subsystems to enable third parties to create AI integrated in the platform, but they're not doing it. That doesn't mean they're doing none, but they're not doing a lot. A very light touch with AI. Then you've got D2L. They're really focused on interactive content creation and they're taking their various parts of AI that have been throughout the system and grouping it together under the brand of Lumi. Like Lumi is their package of AI functionality with the lms. So it's interesting that all four are sort of taking different paths. So I don't know the answer to where they're going to go. I know they're diverging right now. I know one of the things to watch is which of these is working best and is there going to become a model that the others start replicating? That's not happening yet, but that's what I'm watching for.
[00:14:54] Host: I'm talking to a lot of earlier younger companies and Even the newest Winter 25 Y Combinator batch, you know, it's still, there's still some companies being added. But recently it was three of the five startups in Y Combinators accelerator that were focused on education, were grading companies. Grading and Feedback, which I thought was really interesting because there's already a lot of those on the market. And when I talk to those grading companies, not these new ones, but some that are already out there, like Timely Grader and Crowdmark, they're really just building the integrations like Canvas. They talk a lot about, you know, working with Canvas and building these LTI integrations and I, I see it really going that way. Just, we really just need to partner with the best of breeds out there. What are they going to do with their core product? Hard to say.
[00:15:41] Guest: And how much of AI is not really going to be customer facing? How much of it is going to be internal AI that helps the LMS companies either develop their product or even deliver their services, but sort of hidden from the customer. So I think there's going to be a lot in that area as well. So I, you know, I'm one of the people who, I don't think ChatGPT and the chatbot is completely changing what's happening. But, and so I don't think that AI, I don't view generative AI like the Internet, that big in its impact moving forward, but it's not too far behind. So I do see it in multiple areas, but a lot of experimentation right now to see what actually works, what actually helps colleges and universities.
[00:16:30] Host: Well, back, back to the graph. This LMS market share graph. You also have another, another one that's we call the, I think called the butterfly graph, the butterfly chart. And it's, it's a breakdown of market share on one side. So LMS market share defined by number of institutions and then market share as defined by usage or number of students.
[00:16:51] Guest: Or scaled by enrollment.
[00:16:53] Host: Scale by enrollment.
[00:16:54] Guest: Yeah.
[00:16:55] Host: Tell me, what's the significance of that chart? I have my own thoughts on it, but I want to hear your take on, on that graph that we'll put in the link to the notes for everyone here.
[00:17:03] Guest: Well, first of all, one thing I love about data and visualizations is you want people to look at it and come up with their own conclusion. So I like that there's a historical basis for it. Historically, the market share was presented as number of institutions. The Campus Computing project and some other stuff, the Educause core data, they sort of reported by number of institutions. So when I came up with the SQUID graphic, it wasn't called that initially. That's what people have called it. It was primarily based on number of institutions because of the historical basis. So you could see the changes over time what was happening in the market. And to be quite honest, you get trapped in that because at what point do you say, well, do I shift? But then do I lose the history? So the enrollment, however, gets to the thing of, okay, well, take Southern New Hampshire University when they went from, From Blackboard to D12 seven years ago.
You know, that gets counted the same as a college of 500 people swapping. And so that doesn't capture the business health of the vendors because they make a lot more money based on the large institutions. Their price is based on the enrollment bands, typically of how many students are in a university.
So the scaled by enrollment is a better track of the health of the market, like who's actually succeeding financially and where is it going. And influence. Where the butterfly comes in is to say, well, there's a reason for both of those. So come up with a graph that's basically a bar graph that goes left and right for each vendor so that you can see it in one place with a common view and the reader can figure out how to draw connections between them. But that's the reason that we've had those two different metrics. The other one, I will point out is in North America, we have a good handle because you have the IPEDS database, you know, the size of schools, et cetera, and you have high data coverage. And Listed Tech is the company we use that provides this data. You go to other global regions, it's going to be a lot less often that we know the enrollment size of the school. So it's safer to measure by the percentage of institutions and still get a global coverage. So that's the third thing that sort of drives that reporting.
[00:19:25] Host: Yeah, I do like listed tech for data. They have beautiful data and I work closely with them. I had Justin on a month or two ago.
[00:19:35] Guest: Yeah, well, he's a good guy, too. So there's always that benefit.
[00:19:38] Host: What are you seeing as the challenges that institutions are facing now when they're trying to adopt something, something new? What are the common, common barriers?
[00:19:48] Guest: Well, the hot one right now is your institution's in financial trouble in so many cases, and therefore it makes the whole environment sort of difficult to take a step back and say, what are we doing? What do we want to improve now let's go find a vendor who best matches our needs. That type of evaluation that works when you're selecting technology is difficult to do when every meeting you're having within the institution, you're hearing about budget cuts, you're hearing about massive regulation changes, particularly with the Trump administration, the changes they're going through. So there's sort of a financial crisis that just makes it difficult to take a step back and properly do decision making. And when I say proper, what I mean by that is if you choose technology for technology's sake, it's almost guaranteed you're not going to be happy with it a couple years from now. It's almost guaranteed that whatever group on campus wanted you to choose somebody else, they're going to keep sniping at you and you're never going to have, like a common approach that people buy into. So when I say a proper decision, I'm implying something where you can get real buy in from the university moving forward. So financial is a big part historically. I've already mentioned it. It used to be academics saying, don't you talk to us about pedagogy, which then makes it difficult to say, well, this is all about quality teaching and learning, but that one's improved a lot.
A lot of people get overwhelmed by the number of people they want to talk to. And then they come up. There's this false view of objectivity that the way to be objective is to take a decision, quantify it, and then just score it. And so that's what I was mentioning is like there's this difficulty of saying we have to be objective, therefore come up with these requirements, we will score them, and it will help us answer it without human subjectivity. Well, you want subjectivity. What you want is a fair evaluation where you're not predetermining what direction to go before you've done the evaluations. And so that artificial, very flawed view of objectivity, which is centered, if you don't mind me saying this directly, it's centered in typically either the IT unit or the procurement unit of a university. They can torpedo an effort that's truly looking at institutional needs and finding the right partner. That's probably my biggest frustration over time is dealing with that false objectivity mindset.
[00:22:36] Host: Yeah, that's a great way to say it. I feel like what I've seen and tell me if this resonates with kind of what you've experienced is it used to kind of drive the boat and say, hey, we're going to buy this, you're going to get trained, show up to the training, we're getting this, go to the training, or whatever. But they were kind of making the decisions and that's flopped in the last 10 years. There's a CRM out there. Advancement and emissions know what CRM they want. It doesn't know the CRM's out there. And that's just one little example. So there's this shared purchase evaluation cycle that needs to happen. And it's just there's no model. We're not used to that. Well, it still has the budget over here. I got to convince them we need this. They kind of know we want it. I mean, it slows everything down from the already slow pace we were in. That's one thing. And the other is it's hard to think strategically. Like, it's getting a little easier with AI because it's a little easier to implement. But it's still a little bit of a buzzword. But let's say you want to move from a CMS to a dxp. That's a pretty big project, but you can usually justify that. Hey, if we tie everything together through these integrations and have all our stuff working together, it's going to be great. But our ROI is not going to come in for like three or four years. And they live in the now, like, I can't get $250,000. There's no way. You know, it's just. It's such a tough situation, but those are kind of challenges. I see.
[00:23:55] Guest: Yeah, I think that's accurate. And it sort of varies depending on the product category. And since we've been talking about LMS in the 2000s through the early 2010s, it was exactly the way you described the CIO. The IT group really drove the fact that we need to do an evaluation. And then faculty were kicking and screaming because they didn't care. They didn't like the system, but you're making us change. And so they hated it. But then that's difficult on the IT group because they always have people pushing back against them when they're trying to justify the strategic decision making. Now, a lot of that's because the lmss used to be called course management systems, were very clunky, they required training. And one of the biggest changes that's happened, and Canvas is the one that triggered this, is when it came in, it was an intuitive system and it was native cloud. And so all of a sudden you started having academics saying, hey, my friend over at this peer institution, why can't I have that system? And the academics started pushing for it. And so it reversed that relationship. Now it became academics saying, we want an evaluation and we want to change. And the IT group was coming along with it, but they have difficulty doing what you said. Like, they want to support that decision making. But how do we make sure it's strategic? How do we make sure we're not ignoring privacy or whatever other concern?
[00:25:23] Host: Security, accessibility.
[00:25:25] Guest: Right, exactly. So they're doing it now. Can this change the market? But the whole market has changed. If you look at today's LMS, you look at blackboard, you look at D2L Brightspace in particular, you look at Moodle, and you compare that to how the systems worked from a user interface a decade ago. They're all significantly different. So Canvas triggered the change, but all of them have come along, but it all feeds into this. The IT group, in most cases, is not driving the change anymore. But they're trying to figure out, but how can you still be strategic when you do this? I think it's good that you have the end users wanting something and wanting to adopt something that will help them do their job better and not just complaining. So there's a very positive element. But the risk is what you said, you know, if you just pick this favorite system, it might be that if you took your second choice, but it worked very well with your CRM or some. Some Other systems, it's actually that combination, that ecosystem will be better overall for you. That's sort of the challenge is how do you be strategic when the end users are driving the process?
[00:26:39] Host: I remember back it was 20.
Gosh, what year was it? Probably around 2014 or so when I was at Sacramento State, a large public university, and there was a group put together to evaluate a new lms. And the finalists were, we were on Blackboard. So it was the new Blackboard Ultra D2L Brightspace or Canvas. And it was a really standard process. It was, I think, 30 people on this committee, from faculty to students to. I was an IT administrator and it was kind of par for the course. This is what you did. Like we have to include everybody. And it was pretty clear, I think to most people that Canvas was the one, the leader. But the faculty wanted brightspace and it ended up being like, well, they conceded. They're like, you know, feels like the students who are on this committee want bright space. But it was a very. I was really.
It took a long time to make that decision and I almost feel like it's almost too slow these days. Though it came out was great and I helped with the adoption, but you know, it was just one of those things that when I, when I left high, right now I'm on the, on the other side of it. I just like to say that it was quite a long conversation to get to that, that point, you know.
[00:27:52] Guest: Well, two things. First of all, now I'm remembering your name from the past. So I helped Cal State University in the late 2000s when they came with the Master Enabling Agreements for the various vendors. And I know that the Sacramento State, when you were there, I knew about that evaluation. It was after the Master Enabling Agreement. Then they worked with us Market Analysis where we gave them reports. And I think that got shared. So I know your name and I remember that evaluation. So just.
[00:28:23] Host: Yeah, yeah. We've overlapped so many times and it's great. We're finally, finally.
[00:28:28] Guest: Yeah. The second thing is getting me to be the curmudgeon or the ornery man sitting on the step saying, get off my lawn. Not you. I get so frustrated when somebody comes up with a one and a half year or longer evaluation project to select an lms. When you just sit back and you say you need to be strategic, you need to talk to your stakeholders, but come up, you're picking between one of four systems, probably. This is not rocket science. It's an exercise in communication between groups, codifying your priorities. Then make a Choice.
There's no way an LMS evaluation should take longer than nine months in my opinion.
[00:29:17] Host: It took a few months and I was even frustrated with that length. But I was really proud of faculty for saying both these solutions are great. Let's go with one that this kids really like.
[00:29:25] Guest: By the way, that's one of the biggest successes in an evaluation for any ed tech, something that touches teaching and learning. When you get people saying, listen, I might choose this, but I see why we might choose system B instead of system A and I can live with it. That is a sign of success, to be quite honest.
[00:29:44] Host: Well, let me ask you this one final question. Looking ahead, what developments in and edtech are you most excited about?
[00:29:51] Guest: Does excited have to imply positive or no, no, no.
[00:29:55] Host: What. What draws your attention again?
[00:29:58] Guest: Well, to be quite honest, the thing that's sucking all the oxygen out of the room is the new administration and the changes happening and what's going to happen next and we get pulled into this. So what is likely to happen with the Trump administration and the Department of Ed changes and not just them, but even state level changes. So this whole regulatory oversight environment is right now, you can't avoid it. So it's a huge thing that we're still tracking. And to be quite honest, the big issue is trying to avoid the hair on fire type of analysis that I see right now. Instead taking a step back and say let's be a little bit calm about what's likely to happen, what to watch for. So that one I'm definitely watching.
[00:30:45] Host: That's a great one to point out.
[00:30:46] Guest: Yeah, yeah. The other thing obviously AI we're now, you know, over two, two and a half years practically into the new environment that was really triggered by chat GPT 3.5 release in November 22nd I believe now things are not as much of the discussion being completely about cheating is this ruining colleges. But it's getting, as my partner Glenda Morgan always talks about, the moral panic. We're getting somewhat past that and we're getting into wait, what are the use cases that truly are going to work and change or improve education? Hopefully improve. So that one, watching the evolution of use cases around AI to get some insight into what's actually going to stick and work. So those are two and I guess the third one is continue tracking of the financial crisis that so many institutions are in even if their enrollments are temporarily going up.
You've got the whole demographic, I wouldn't call it a cliff, but the Nathan Gro stuff about enrollments are going to go down and you have financial pressures from inflation. So how do institutions, how can they actually still be smart in their usage of technology and properly invest in support services in this environment? So if I had to say the top three regulatory gen AI integration and dealing with institutional financial crisis.
[00:32:21] Host: You know, it's funny, those all three, by the end of the year we're going to know a lot more about those. So those are great. 20, 25. They're here right now.
[00:32:27] Guest: Yeah, 25 is going to be a fun year. It won't be just nothing's happening.
[00:32:31] Host: Well, you heard it here from Phil Hill. We will put links in the show notes. So thanks for your insights, Phil.
[00:32:35] Guest: But that also means you can come back to podcasts like this in about a year year and say, huh, what did you get completely wrong?
[00:32:41] Host: Let's do that. Let's see how close we were. Yeah.
Thanks, Phil.
[00:32:45] Guest: Okay, well, great. I enjoyed this.
[00:32:47] Host: Me too. Have a good one.
[00:32:54] Host: We wrap up this episode. Remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
