Last Friday Instructure celebrated its long-awaited IPO. The market bid the LMS provider a rather warm welcome, closing around 8% up in afternoon trading that day. CEO Josh Coates stated that there was a huge renaissance in education technology.
Since its launch in 2008, Instructure has slowly but surely nibbled away market share from legacy player Blackboard. And even though Bb is working hard on freshening up its software and image it seems that more and more clients bet the future of their institution on the newcomer. Even Bb shareholders want to cash in as long as the company is still worth something.
But what will come after Instructure? Ten years down the road, a long time in the (ed)tech space, Instructure will eventually turn into the huge bloated and outdated market leader. Who will replace them?
Instructure today offers a modern take on the LMS. Teachers and students are used to sleek design, great user interfaces and experiences provided by companies like Facebook, Twitter, airbnb, Uber, Google, WordPress and so on. Many edtech companies thought that design and user experience were not needed in education. They were wrong.
Change in taste and preferences in society will eventually trickle down into education. People today expect web applications and software to work a certain way on a certain standard. And this plays a big part in Instructure’s success over Bb.
Hence, in order to predict what a future rival of Instructure will look like, we need to imagine how people will use technology a decade from now and whether there will be a need for a new LMS at all.
We still don’t know how MOOCs, Nanodegrees, and other forms of online learning will eventually affect the education landscape, but if institutions continue to lose influence the LMS will also become less important. In this case Instructure would be the last dominant player in this space.
Picture by John McSporran via Flickr