Are legacy online distance universities entering a challenging new era?
After over a decade of the Conservative party being in power, there is a Labour party leader potentially on the cusp of becoming prime minister. But the year isn’t 2024, it’s 1963. This was the year Harold Wilson gave his famous “white heat of technology” speech in Scarborough before winning the 1964 general election. In this speech, he also mentioned his plan for a “university of the air,” and this new university was to be:
“designed to provide an opportunity for those who for one reason or another have not been able to take advantage of higher education now to do so”
It wasn’t until 1969 that this plan materialised as the Open University. It is also not the only example of a historical state-sponsored move to create a distance education university.
In France, CNED or Centre national d'enseignement à distance (National Centre for Distance Education) traces its origins to 1939, and in 2022, it had over 200,000 higher education students. Similarly, in Spain, UNED or Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (National Distance Education University) was founded in 1972 and also has over 200,000 students. We also have another institution in the UK, the University of London, which can date its distance learning activity back to 1858 and has nearly 40,000 internationally based online distance students.
All of these institutions have had to go through a process of modernisation over the years as technology has advanced, with distance learning/correspondence-based learning giving way to online learning. They have also grown to be some of the largest higher education institutions (HEIs) within their respective countries. The Open University is both the UK’s largest HEI by number of students and our biggest online distance provider.
For decades, the Open University has stood large as THE online distance university in the UK. That legacy and specific focus have often led some people in UK higher education to develop the attitude that online education is what “they” do, not what “we” do.
Recently, I came across an FAQ for a UK HEI making a move into online education, and one of the pre-emptive questions was “Are we going into competition with the Open University?”. What followed was an explanation that online learning was no longer simply the domain of the Open University, as many universities now offer online programmes.
There was also an article published this year in The Telegraph decrying the increase in online learning as a component of campus-based higher education. However, there was a telling excerpt towards the end that said, “Surely if students want to study online, they should apply to the Open University.” These are some examples of existing attitudes and assumptions in the UK that essentially view online distance learning as synonymous with the Open University.
However, there is much, much more to the online education picture in UK higher education than just the one HEI. If it was ever really the case that one institution was UK higher education’s sole avenue for online learning, it certainly is not anymore.
A shifting of market share
The coming years will see a further diversification of the online education landscape, with more UK HEIs entering this space and a growth in the array of online programmes and courses available. This will present a challenge to legacy incumbent online HEIs to retain the positions they currently and historically hold.
Those invested in these HEIs will no doubt say it was ever thus, and there is certainly some truth in that. However, each chapter is different from the one before, and legacy incumbents will continue to be challenged by the growth in the number of HEIs offering online programmes.
In the UK, the two HEIs I’ve already mentioned, the Open University and the University of London, have both seen their overall market share of online undergraduate students decline. This is during a period where overall numbers have either increased in the UK or remained relatively static internationally.
The OU’s main market is UK-based online undergraduate students, and while still very large, their market share has gone from 93% (2014/15) to 83% (2021/22). Meanwhile, the University of London’s market share of international online undergraduates has reduced from 71% (2014/15) to 57% (2021/22). Market share decline has also been observed at the postgraduate taught level for both institutions.
A dilution of differentiation
Ultimately, when one of the key differentiators of your institution is that you deliver programmes online, more HEIs entering that market will present a fundamental challenge. Irrespective of how good you might think you are at doing this in comparison to other institutions, there are many reasons behind people’s choice of course and provider.
It has been interesting to observe how a couple of HEIs that are differentiated in the way they provide their courses have started to look to diversify or change. The Open University, for example, is now considering on-campus courses, and Birkbeck University, long known as a university specialising in evening teaching, is now offering daytime teaching.
The risk of being overtaken and outpaced
Legacy incumbents also face the challenge of complacency, and when greater competition comes, the danger is that institutions may fall into a kind of legacy arrogance, rather than acknowledging that time may have caught up with them.
It might be hard for some incumbents to recognise that others may have surpassed them, and they may now need to take the position of learners rather than educators. It is arguable to what extent some legacy incumbent institutions, which have often considered themselves beacons of online distance education, are still the ones to look to.
There are now examples of institutions formed or transformed in more recent decades, such as Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and Western Governors University (WGU) in the US, and IU International University of Applied Sciences in Germany, which have become successful online distance HEIs. Arguably, it is institutions like these and others that one might look to if you want to learn how to develop a modern online distance learning proposition.
What has been interesting to observe in the case of some of those HEIs and through other examples is that there seems to be a more deliberate focus on serving the underserved and designing HEIs and operations optimally to do so. In the UK, a HEI like the Open University may point more to its open admissions policy as being a bigger differentiator than online learning.
However, it is clear that there are online HEIs out there focusing on, to use the words of Harold Wilson, those who have not been previously able to take advantage of higher education, and are doing it differently and successfully. The adoption of performance-based admissions by some HEIs for online programmes is another example of this.
In many ways, it is the HEIs that have been designed through a deep understanding of the real lives of the people they are seeking to serve, and who display modern, excellent customer service, systems, and processes that enable seamless and frictionless interaction as well as high-touch and consistent learner support, that would concern me more as an incumbent than simply whether programmes were offered online or not.
We don’t yet have an SNHU, WGU, or IU equivalent in the UK, but that is not to say that there might not be a new entrant in the future or a separate online arm of a university that could scale online students significantly by doing things better and more effectively than legacy incumbents.
In need of evolution
Irrespective of the extent of the challenge that legacy incumbent online HEIs face, it is clear that they are experiencing issues with enrolment and drop-out rates. A recently published report by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) on student retention and support was developed “in response to recognised concerns of (HEI) members in relation to declining enrolments and higher than desirable student drop-out,” highlighting some significant current challenges.
The report concludes with what strikes me as a good recommendation:
“Institutions must evolve to meet the changing needs of this diverse student population, suggesting a shift away from traditional models towards enhancing student support and utilising data to guide interventions.”
This suggests that these institutions have not evolved significantly and that the way they operate may now be out of step with current student needs.
However, it is fascinating that all of the good practice examples given to help address challenges in this report were from the same member institutions that reported the challenges. This is not to say that there is no good practice to draw on.
However, given such a stark challenge, surely there is merit in looking to other types of institutions or online learning providers to learn how they might improve and address the challenges they face. This perhaps brings us to the inherent cultural challenge legacy incumbents face. The challenge is that long-standing and largely exclusive occupation of this space can lead to being too insular.
A change in the landscape
There are several significant and large online distance HEIs that were created in decades past with important missions to serve people for whom higher education in its typical form failed. However, the combination of the growth in the number of HEIs offering online programmes and the fact that in some instances those programmes are also targeted at a similar demographic presents a challenge to these legacy incumbents.
Additionally, other acknowledged challenges such as enrolment and retention further complicate the situation. There are also now examples of HEIs that have arguably surpassed some of these institutions in respect to online distance education.
Over the years, online distance learning has become less and less the exclusive domain of a small number of HEIs, and while those HEIs have faced challenges in the past, one might argue that we are entering a new chapter, one that might over time lead to a changing of the landscape.
