Today, 11 October 2026, CAPDM Limited turns 30. We’ve been quietly running the back-end systems of large and small distance learning programmes for three decades now, and I thought it was worth pausing for a moment to recall that journey, to reflect on what it means to have built a company with an ethos we can be proud of, and to think about what comes next.
In 1996 the four founding directors – Martin, Ken, Richard and myself, all of whom remain directors of the company today – had been working together at Edinburgh Business School in Heriot-Watt University for a few years, helping to design and build EBS’s innovative global distance learning MBA. Along with a team of very smart people we had built a learning content management system (long before that term was ever coined), based on markup called SGML, the precursor to XML. We created a batch publishing system on top of it, which created print-ready typeset books from that content, eventually doing so in English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. We built a custom student administration system, because the existing ones were designed for courses with defined start and end dates, not the start any time, study anywhere approach of EBS. And within a few years we had also built from scratch what today would be called a virtual learning environment, as online learning began its rapid ascent to dominance in the distance learning space.
By October 1996 it was becoming clear that organisations other than EBS could benefit from the sort of development we were doing, and with the blessing of Professor Keith Lumsden, the entrepreneurial director of the business school, we incorporated CAPDM (named after the publishing model we adopted) and began delivering the same services to EBS as an employee-owned company rather than individual contractors. In 2001, as our contracts outwith Heriot-Watt grew, we moved to our own offices in Edinburgh city centre and the CAPDM story truly began.
You can find more details on our History page, but some of the highlights of those early years included building the city of Edinburgh’s first official website, winning a Deloitte & Touche “Fast 50” award for being one of Europe’s fastest growing IT companies, embarking on our decades-long and still continuing relationship with Pearson Education, and helping to build distance learning programmes for a wide range of universities across the UK and Europe. Some of those for whom we built major programmes include Liverpool John Moores University, Edinburgh Napier University, the University of the West of Scotland, the University of Aberdeen and the University of London. We also worked with the British Council to deliver teaching skills through their worldwide network, with professional associations like the London Institute of Banking and Finance and the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors, and with European partners on public good projects under the Leonardo and Erasmus schemes.
Alongside the business courses that were our early bread and butter, we found clients keen to get our help with their law, languages and medicine course delivery. We built custom publishing routes for tax specialists where updates were monthly rather than annual. We created video-based health and fitness training courses which still run today in the US market. We created reusable learning objects for large publishers and helped them to deliver them into schools, colleges and universities. And in parallel we built all of these capabilities into Courseworker, our enterprise-level, cloud-based course production and management environment which we began to licence to larger clients to allow them to build their own courses with their own production staff.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. In a market developing as quickly as educational IT was in the 2000s and 2010s it was easy to spend significant time and resources developing something bespoke for a client which would quickly become a commodity and from which it was impossible to recoup. And we were guilty more than once of making perfect the enemy of good, only to find clients opting for the good enough solution offered by our competitors and not quite appreciating the engineering beauty of our more complex (although not generally more expensive) systems. In hindsight the errors are obvious, but I suppose we had to learn these lessons the hard way.
Like a lot of businesses we were hit by the post-Covid, post-Brexit UK economy, and by the contraction in higher education spending that has followed. But as a leaner, more focused company in the 2020s we continue to win new clients, and are able to bring to bear those three decades of experience building online and distance learning in HE, FE and the private sector to be able to get to the heart of what a new client needs quickly and cost-effectively.
From its inception CAPDM has been more than a profit-making business; it has been an attempt to make education more accessible across the world, to drive up the quality of what distance learning and online students experience, and to help institutions support and educate more people more effectively than they otherwise could. With a wealth of intellectual property, experience and proven solutions for many of these challenges, we are now actively seeking ways that we can open out access to our systems and capabilities, including potentially making them available through partners on a not-for-profit or community interest basis in the future.
Watch this space – or do get in touch if you have ideas about how we can put our capabilities in the hands of those who should benefit. But for now, here’s to everyone on the team over the last 30 years, every customer who pushed us and moulded us, and every student who never realised we were even there in the background making things work. And here’s to a fourth decade of quietly keeping things running smoothly for learners everywhere!
