Adobe Joins LMS Space Late

By: Justin Ferriman • August 6, 2015
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person-thinkingIf you haven’t heard yet, recently Adobe announced that they too will be trying their luck in the learning management system market.

They shared this via their blog just a couple of days ago.

Perhaps what’s more surprising than this announcement though is that Adobe isn’t already in this space given their Captivate, Presenter, and Connect product line.

One of Adobe’s major competitors within elearning is Articulate, and they’ve had an LMS for years. Adobe is surprisingly quite late to the game.

As you would expect Adobe is promising quite a bit with their new LMS. Their announcement article provides the specifics if you’re interested in the promotional details.

In theory everything sounds nice, but the announcement highlights some items that I didn’t find too revolutionary in the LMS world. Specifically, Adobe has pinpointed the following items as their main focus when building out their LMS:

  • Easy learning management (from user enrollment to course delivery)
  • Solve learner engagement problem
  • Deliver seamless integration between content and LMS
  • Measuring training impact

They will deliver upon these items via a software-as-a-service model.

Take Risks Or Play It Safe?

It’s a bit early to make any sweeping conclusions about this offering – there isn’t even a working beta.

There are some intriguing possibilities though and I’m eager to see how things work out. For example, I’m curious as to see how the LMS will incorporate Tin Can API (Experience API) from a reporting perspective as I see this as the best way to approach their goals around measuring training impact.

I’m also interested to see how they ultimately position their LMS as it relates to their major elearning competitors.

Articulate’s LMS is a bit bare-bones as they have focused primarily on a tight integration with their in-house products (although others can be used as well). It makes sense that Adobe will do the same, but I wonder how well it will ‘play’ with competing products?

The advantage of Adobe entering the LMS industry late is that they have a large variety of industry players to evaluate. They can see what is working and use this information when building out their solution.

This can be a slippery slope though. Given their existing product line it would be really easy for Adobe to create an LMS that does the “same thing” as the others without having to take any significant risks. There already will be a market of paying customers waiting for them.

What would be better for the elearning industry as a whole is if Adobe attempts to disrupt this market in some capacity with innovation. I didn’t get the sense that this would be the case based on what was outlined in their write-up, but hopefully I’m wrong.

Learning management systems all around could benefit from a large industry player like Adobe taking the lead in this kind of capacity.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter