In one sense, the LMS has been a huge success. In just a few years starting in the late 1990s, purchases by colleges of these systems went from zero to some 90 percent of all American institutions.

Actual adoption by professors, however, has been a different, slower story. Just over half of students reported using an LMS in most or all of their courses as recently as two years ago, two decades after the creation of modern learning-management software. In short, professors aren’t as sold on using an LMS as administrators are.