Primarily, the current higher education e-learning market is comprised of Learning Management Systems (LMS), which all have one focus, course management. This usually means these tools aren’t used for much beyond uploading and downloading files. However, there are also Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), in the e-learning market. These are fully online classes offered by the likes of Coursera, edX and Khan Academy. MOOCs have demonstrated what is possible when the internet is well-utilised for learning. They promote engagement and learning from anywhere in the world.
The LMS platform market alone was worth around $2.5 billion in 2015 and is growing year on year by 23% 1.
In the UK our primary competitors are the two LMSs that dominate the academic market, Moodle and Blackboard. Moodle is an open-source project written in PHP, while Blackboard is for-profit and has a few more features, but they are fundamentally the same. Both have very large userbases with Moodle at 89.2 Million 2 and Blackboard at 100 Million 3. Some universities which use these systems are listed below:
| Moodle | Blackboard |
|---|---|
| Bath | Brighton |
| City | Edinburgh |
| Coventry | Imperial College London |
| Cambridge | Kingston |
| Essex | Leicester |
| King’s College London | Liverpool |
| Kent | London Metropolitan |
| Nottingham | Manchester |
| Portsmouth | Reading |
| Royal Holloway | Southampton |
| University College London | Swansea |
| Warwick | Westminister |
We fundamentally believe that rapport between lecturers and their students is very important, and real-life lecture theatres and classrooms have a significant role in the 21st century. However the interactions inside and outside the university campus need to change in the digital age.
LMSs were built as a support structure to classrooms, but they are not nearly as immersive as MOOCs, nor do they provide any interaction tools that students or teachers want to use. LMSs have fallen short when it comes to helping students learn and have also fallen short in helping teachers teach. However, as MOOCs are primarily targeted at remote learning, they are not built to augment classrooms but rather as a complete replacement. This leaves a gap in the market. Enter Supernotes. We have fused together the innovative MOOC learning features and core values with the managerial role of an LMS, to form the first ever Active Learning Environment (ALE).
| Key Functions | LMS | ALE | MOOC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online learning | |||
| Course Management | |||
| Classroom Learning | |||
| Online content creation | |||
| Convenient interaction features |
Key: