I agree with the core sentiment of your comment, although I’m not sure if I would call it commodification. Commodification usually happens with a mature product, and I would say that the LMS is more in a state of arrested development. You will see a slow accretion of coarse-grained features (e.g., ePortfolios) continue, and you’ll continue to see a lot of fiddling and differentiation in the long tail (an area that is mostly off the critical path for the kinds of schools I’m targeting in this post). But for the most part, until there’s a real rethink of the product category as a whole, I think you’re right.

I’ll add one more thought, which I think was implicit in your comment about all the major LMSes are ok. The LMS has become a commodity. By that I mean, the features are all pretty well understood and there’s not anything lacking. I could say the same thing about word processors (I’ll take Word from about 15 years ago)
or relational databases (SQL stopped changing 20 years ago). Once a software market reaches that point, it’s not about adding more features, it’s about who can
execute the best, aka service, technical support, bug fixes and so on. I’d still suggest that looking at features, and very much at usability, is a big deal, but that
you are likely to find more differentiation in your decision making on the support, execution, and of course cost.

Glad to see you are still bloggin’ away Michael!

*the most vocal
*the most aggravated by any perceived issues or lack of functionality
*most likely to email administrative higher ups and claim we got a bad deal
*some of them were the most resistant to actually migrating, waiting until the last minute to migrate and to take training (if at all)
*frequently quite wrong about the actual functionality, simply due to not knowing the new system
*eventually came on board, using and liking the new functionality that opened up to them

Interestingly, an LMS migration really does stir things up – the old LMS heroes seem to have taken on a new role as regular LMS users. Actually, from the perspective of helpdesk support staff conducting training, etc. the interesting thing is to see how other users have stepped up as the new LMS heroes – doing things in new ways, exploring new tools previously unavailable, coming up with new and interesting course designs, etc. And the cycle continues….

It seems like you have spent some considerable time gathering these thoughts, and this post is definitely going to be useful for a lot of people. Keep it up!

There are a number of outfits that are trying to find alternative revenue models for their online learning environments right now. Some of them are interesting and worthwhile experiments, but I’m not at the point yet where I’ve seen one that I would be comfortable recommending to schools in the situation I’ve described here.