Back in April 2020 a story broke about Durham University in its student newspaper Palatinate. It appeared that the university was planning a radical departure from a residential model to an online learning model. It seemed remarkable that a university like Durham, which I don’t think it would be unkind to say, isn’t renowned for online education, should be considering such a huge change. 

The story also introduced another actor, CEG Digital, an online programme management (OPM) company - who the university had been considering contracting and/or who it appears had been consulting them.

If truth be told the story was an unseemly mess to file under the PR disasters of 2020. At the heart of it seems to have been a big communication issue that led to conflation of contingency planning to go online at the beginning of 20/21’s academic year and a separate plan to “explore the possibility of more online education” in addition to what was already offered at Durham.”

Stories like this formed part of a period where there was a lot of noise about universities potentially falling into the arms of OPMs due to the pandemic, with some loud critics of that idea. Some of the discourse was relatively ill-informed and showed a lack of understanding of OPMs and the nature of these partnerships. 

The discourse was symptomatic of a broader trend in higher education - which is the inability to have nuanced, mature conversations on digital education, the private and public sector, but that’s for another time...

Online education hasn’t usurped the residential model

Ultimately, this was a more sensationalised chapter in a much bigger story that has run since the first lockdown - which is how the pandemic might change UK universities' relationship with online education in the future.

As people return to campus it seems abundantly clear that the university residential model is still incredibly strong and dominant. There’s a high demand for the residential experience and there doesn’t appear to be a big enough appetite to make any kind of fundamental and wholesale change.

Universities are not transforming into dedicated distance or online education providers, even if the use of digital technologies on residential programmes is seeing some change.

So what has changed in the online education landscape of higher education? Well to a certain extent it’s as you were. 

That might seem like a remarkable thing to say, but what I’m getting at here is that universities won’t be necessarily thinking about online education any differently than they might’ve done before the pandemic. Which is to say that it’s a component of their overall portfolio which is likely to be dominated by residential programmes.

The problem before the pandemic was that many universities didn’t seriously consider online education as a credible and valuable part of their portfolio. I think this is where we’re now seeing change and a number of universities are endeavouring to upscale their online education portfolios. 

The pandemic's impact on university online portfolios, operations and partnerships

In some cases universities are setting up new teams and operations, with one of the most notable examples being Cambridge Advance Online, which will offer a portfolio of 50 short courses over the next five years as a way of expanding Cambridge University’s educational offer through online learning.

Now I’m not wishing to give undue focus to Cambridge, but this perhaps highlights how some of the big “brands” in UK higher education are now getting serious about online learning. For some time, they’ve not fully understood the strength of their brand and therefore the potential that online learning might offer them to expand their educational offer.

It’s also interesting that the expansion of their offer is through short online courses and this along with online microcredentials is where there’s been some interesting developments. New players in the form of Esme Learning and Skilled Education have arrived and wasted no time in working with the likes of Oxford University, London School of Economics (LSE), Imperial College and Cambridge University, seemingly following in the footsteps of the 2U owned GetSmarter in offering short online courses in partnership with ‘prestigious’ universities.

FourthRev has also emerged offering what they call “Career Accelerator” courses with LSE adding to a move towards online short courses focussed on helping people advance their careers.

Then you also have more universities becoming alive to the idea of online microcredentials - so it will be interesting to see whether other universities join the likes of Glasgow, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Kings College and Queen Mary University who are offering microcredentials via FutureLearn and edX.

Apart from the very well-resourced and those who had already established strong online education operations and departments, the pandemic has hardly created conditions for universities to easily get on the front foot and proactively develop new offerings to add to their portfolios. Shorter educational formats though do provide a more attainable alternative to trying to build online degree programmes.

However, if UK universities can learn anything from their involvement with MOOCs over the past number of years, it’s that a lack of a clear plan and strategy for an online education portfolio of any size or shape won’t get you very far fast. 

...and what about MOOCs? Well I’ve spoken previously about the huge growth in registered users that MOOC platforms have experienced since the beginning of the pandemic, but this hasn’t coincided with lots of UK universities vastly increasing their portfolios or upping their engagement with MOOC platforms.

This is most likely due to my earlier points of universities being on the back foot due to all the disruption of the past 18+ months and the lack of a clear, coherent strategy for their MOOC platform partnerships. Now though is as good a time as any for universities to seriously consider why they have invested sums of money into a commercial partnership down the years that is not meeting or contributing to a strategic objective. 

OPM partnerships: A continuation of steady growth

At the beginning of this article I mentioned OPMs and discourse around the time of the Durham story. This was essentially the idea that beleaguered universities who felt that they would need to move from emergency remote teaching to something resembling pre-pandemic online education for the next academic year would enter into these partnerships as a means of achieving that.

This has not happened and was never likely to happen as these partnerships aren’t about porting whole university portfolios from one mode to another. Rather they are about partnerships to develop specific portfolios of online programmes aimed at reaching a global audience or working professionals, mostly at postgraduate level - for more on this see my article written around the time.

The pandemic hasn’t led to a raft of partnerships, but that’s not to say there haven’t been any, as the partnerships between Keele University & Higher Ed Partners, University of Central Lancashire & CEG Digital, Queen Mary University & OES and Ulster University & Pearson highlight. These types of partnerships were already slowly growing before the pandemic with over 30 of them already in place, but the last 18 months hasn’t seen a drastically higher increase than before the pandemic. Whether we’ll see an acceleration in the future remains to be seen.

Reflections on the mixed impact of the last 18 months

So what are we to conclude? Well it’s a bit of a mixed bag - the last 18+ months have certainly resulted in more universities getting serious about online or distance education as a part of their portfolio. There have been some partnerships initiated with private companies to develop short online courses and degrees, as well as some examples of in-house investment in this area.

The most notable have perhaps been those that have involved ‘prestigious’ UK universities that have previously not engaged with online education much. But I don’t think we have seen a radical change, because understandably bandwidth has been almost completely taken up ensuring continuity of teaching and study and a lot of hard yards have been put in on this.

As we enter into a somewhat different phase of this period, universities might reflect on how online or distance education is a more robust and resilient mode of teaching and study than the residential model. They might also reflect on what so many of us working in online education before the pandemic knew well - that online education can result in as good outcomes as any other mode of teaching and study. It’s not the mode that makes the difference. 

They might reflect on which learners they can reach and serve through online education, this might be the kinds of segments that online education has typically been targeted at in the past such international students or working professionals, or it might be that there are now new demographics who have experienced a remote study experience and are more amenable or interested in studying online. 

Ultimately, universities should also consider what they can and can’t realistically achieve in this space too - either by themselves or in partnership with someone else. They should reflect and clearly understand why they might develop more online courses and programmes and how it meets strategic objectives. There have been plenty of examples of poorly thought-through moves into online education that have led to courses and programmes that have had false starts, high dropout rates or have been taught out due to not meeting enrolment targets.

The experience of emergency remote teaching has been significant in many ways and it has put online and distance education much higher up the agenda than it ever has been before. Perhaps the key lesson to learn is what it takes to offer high-quality online education and what it might mean for universities as organisations. There is a danger that the experience of emergency remote teaching fuels an organisational hubris that leads universities down a path of misplaced, new expectations and ultimately, unrealised potential.