One can’t help but think that the UK higher education sector as a whole, including think tanks and the press, is, at times, mired in orthodoxy, constantly reaching for solutions that maintain the status quo or preserve the time-honoured campus experience.

With the summer firmly behind us and as we’re now well into autumn, it’s time to look back at some key developments in the last quarter in UK higher education, and online education in particular. While the summer generally tends to be a quieter period, there has been no shortage of relevant and noteworthy developments over the past quarter.

One of the issues with EdTech and AI product development at present is the tendency to focus too heavily on productivity hacks rather than elevating teaching and learning. This risks limiting the potential value considerably.

For Coursera, the challenge is one of credibility, not just growing learner numbers, but proving that its courses and credentials translate into meaningful skills and workplace impact.

These two considerations get to the heart of some overarching aspects of operating in this space: how you organise things internally to be successful, and how you present yourself externally to a prospective online student audience.

The challenge for universities is not just creating new provision, but building the organisational capabilities to make lifelong learning financially sustainable.

This quarter doesn’t necessarily present anything new but reinforces some established trends.

Given everything happening in UK HE, and the increasingly competitive nature of the online education market, the international TNE online market is only going to become more important.

Budgets are now tighter and the need for income generation greater, coinciding with increased appetite to develop new, shorter forms of online provision. Universities need to go into this with their eyes open and set themselves up for success.

Overall, this data highlights a positive trendline for online enrolments and flexible study, but it doesn’t support the hyperbolic headlines that sometimes accompany rises or falls in online numbers. It’s a case of steady progress rather than a surge.

This last quarter has seen a range of interesting developments, from announcements of new partnerships between OPMs and UK universities to significant changes within online education companies and more.

Over the years, I have analysed online programme management (OPM) companies and their partnerships with UK universities, tracking the dynamics of this evolving market. It is a contested and sometimes opaque space, meaning the debate around these companies and their partnerships with universities often lacks nuance and has, at times, been shaped by misinformation from within higher education itself.

If the sector wants to take a more nuanced view of these partnerships, it must move beyond the moral asymmetry and the tendency to cast private providers as convenient villains.

Not all companies, and not all partnerships, demonstrate a strong, prioritised focus on international online student recruitment, and the student numbers reflect this.

This year has been something of a paradox for the VLE market in UK higher education. While there has been plenty to report on within the big four companies that dominate this market, there have been barely any major changes by universities regarding which virtual learning environment (VLE) they use.

Those who are tempted to view the online international student market as a massive opportunity solely based on the large and appealing numbers often presented, really need to consider how pricing affects the total addressable market.

Perhaps the overarching lesson is the need to avoid short-termism. It was this mindset that drove an in-out cycle of engagement with online learning during the 2010s, failing to yield the kind of long-term benefits that could have left some universities in a much stronger position for the remainder of the 2020s.

2024 has been another year of increasing focus on online learning from UK universities. This has been reflected in the increasing number of partnerships with online education companies and the growth of online degrees, sub-degree courses, and portfolios.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this quarter brought more online education announcements from UK universities. It also brought cost-cutting measures and announcements from some online education companies, reflecting that universities are not the only ones facing financial challenges.

This may be where, through online elective modules, collaboration might be worth exploring. This would entail reciprocal arrangements that involve two or more universities effectively offering online elective modules for each other's degree programmes.