UK Survey Shows Moodle on the Rise

IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005.

• In the four years from 2001 to 2005 the percentage of universities and colleges without a VLE declined from 19% to 5%.
• While the average number of VLEs in use at a university of college remained nearly constant—1.64 to 1.77 per institution, statistically insignificant—it appears colleges are tending to implement fewer VLE systems.
• The use of proprietary VLEs—those with fee-for use licenses—declined from 93% to 57%. The largest decline was IBM’s Lotus products. It would have been WebCT if it had not acquired by Blackboard Inc. and combined with the increase in Blackboard’s market share.
• The software products most rapidly gaining market share are Moodle, Bodington, and Microsoft’s SharePoint.*
• The use of open source systems increased from zero to 11% with 8% of that increase from 2003 to 2005.
At the same time the number of locally-developed VLEs in use increased from 7% to 30%.

* The survey would not reflect the increased use of Moodle in Further Education. At the April
2006 OSS Watch Conference preliminary data suggested that 66% of further education
colleges were using Moodle.