Higher Ed vendors in dire financial straits....

[ciao_yall]

Instructure, the parent company of Canvas has gone private. According to their investor relations page, they have been losing their shirts for years.

They came to us touting a new software product that was so half-baked I couldn't even justify bringing it in on a trial basis. When I asked about what seemed to be obvious features I got a vague "Oh, that's on the roadmap..."

Any insights or experiences from the fora?

[spork]

Really? That's interesting. Where are you getting your information? Canvas has had steady growth in terms of both number of institutions and enrollment, and it now has the largest market share of any LMS in North America. Public companies go private very frequently. Blackboard went private in 2011 and is majority owned by Providence Equity Partners.

Of Canvas, Blackboard Learn, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle, I've found Canvas by far the most user friendly for both instructors and students.

[Hibush]

They look like a startup that has had high R&D and customer acquisition costs. Their good product has led to lots of new customers, and they are hanging on to those customers. The margin on existing customers seems to be about 70%, so they should be able to make a go of it.

That financial profile is quite different from the colleges we see. (If only there were a way for the colleges to hang on to those expensively acquired customers longer.)

[ciao_yall]

Really? That's interesting. Where are you getting your information? Canvas has had steady growth in terms of both number of institutions and enrollment, and it now has the largest market share of any LMS in North America. Public companies go private very frequently. Blackboard went private in 2011 and is majority owned by Providence Equity Partners.

Of Canvas, Blackboard Learn, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle, I've found Canvas by far the most user friendly for both instructors and students.

That's a problem. If a company has the largest market share, they don't have much room to grow unless they roll out new products... which takes more R&D.

[Aster]

Does this mean that institutions can expect the contract licenses for Canvas to kick up?

I know that they've been creeping up steadily and are now on par with BlackBoard, which I thought could never happen.

[Biologist_]

Really? That's interesting. Where are you getting your information? Canvas has had steady growth in terms of both number of institutions and enrollment, and it now has the largest market share of any LMS in North America. Public companies go private very frequently. Blackboard went private in 2011 and is majority owned by Providence Equity Partners.

Of Canvas, Blackboard Learn, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle, I've found Canvas by far the most user friendly for both instructors and students.

That's a problem. If a company has the largest market share, they don't have much room to grow unless they roll out new products... which takes more R&D.

Canvas is #1, but has a market share of 28% of institutions and 35% by enrollment, so that still leaves room for growth for a while.