There is a race on to control the architecture of online learning. While that race has been running for the past decade or more, largely dominated by a software for-profit called Blackboard and opensource freeware like Moodle, yesterday was a particularly momentous day. Yesterday it was announced that Google and Pearson are teaming up to release a new higher education focused Learning Management System called OpenClass as part of Google Apps. Also, lately, new products are emerging that are changing the race, such as the LMS Canvas, which we are likely to implement in our leadership programs at our university (for those wanting specifics on how to recode education … there you go; try it, you’ll like it).

Rather than speak to any one platform, which lots of other ed. tech. bloggers have done, I want to speak to the importance of controlling this architecture and why I expect this race to enter a new gear in the next few years, leading to some difficult choices for you.

First, it is about power and money, but not how you would expect.

These four, just using those mentioned already as an example, are very different types of companies. Moodle is not even really a company, it is just a open source project people are happy to work on. Canvas is the product of a small start-up minded company from Utah that taps their LMS into other free, open API products like Twitter, Google Docs and Skype. Blackboard is the old behemoth, billion dollar company who has mastered this market by making very large contracts with education systems. And Pearson is a multibillion dollar global publishing house based in London currently focused on shifting from paper to digits. You can see all their industries in this (not so) cute animation. Finally, I’m guessing you are aware of Google.

So, if we had our choice, who do we want controlling this learning architecture? I have my preferences, and I’d be quite interested in yours (please leave a comment), but let’s talk about why those preferences will matter.

Whatever the best-case answer is, we should ask the question why are all these different types of groups in this space right now? As Blackboard has shown, there is a lot of money to be made directly through service contracts with universities and schools. But, Google considers that pennies. And those contracts are not all that big of a deal for Pearson either. On the other hand, why are young entrepreneurs like those at Canvas jumping in this space when it is so thoroughly dominated by Blackboard right now (they have managed to buy basically every competitor)? And, how is it that an under-the-radar open source project like Moodle continues to thrive off the free time and labor of engineers and developers?