Could collaborative online provision offer benefits to UK universities?
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Recently, we’ve had more news that amplifies the financial crisis in UK higher education. The English regulator, the Office for Students, published updated financial modelling which suggests that:
“nearly three quarters (72 per cent) of higher education providers could be in deficit by 2025-26, and 40 per cent would have fewer than 30 days’ liquidity.”
Universities have been responding to a challenging financial environment in different ways. Redundancies are one headline-grabbing way institutions are cutting costs; another is portfolio rationalisation, which is a nice way of saying discontinuing degrees that aren’t financially viable.
Other responses involve looking at ways to generate more income. This might be through adjusting entry requirements to widen the recruitment pool, or diversifying into other student markets. Universities have been doing that with respect to transnational education (TNE) and online distance learning in recent years.
However, the more that universities diversify into established markets they’ve not operated in previously, the more competition grows in those markets. This is definitely true of the online student market. Those institutions that move into this market as a desperate short-term attempt to bring in more cash are likely to be disappointed.
The reality of an increasingly competitive market should cause institutions to think more carefully about their strategic journey with respect to online learning. This will mean broader thinking, and not simply viewing it as a route to new markets through new products, but as a way to enhance their existing products to keep them competitive and to appeal to a wider audience.
Too often, the default thinking behind online learning strategies is all about developing new products, most commonly a suite of online master's degrees marketed to a new audience for the university. Too few think about how online learning can help them penetrate their existing markets, and too few have considered how that might be a better short- to medium-term route than entering and failing in an increasingly competitive online learning market.
Can sharing online electives mitigate financial challenges for universities?
If we combine the financial challenges many universities in the sector are currently facing with the ambitions many have to develop online provision, then we face a challenge: if you want to grow an online learning portfolio, your number of online students, and compete with other providers, this entails investment—and not just investment, but smart investment.
However, there are other routes to consider that might help mitigate the effects of financial challenges and also aid the development of online provision. One that I’m interested in seeing more universities explore is the sharing of online elective modules across institutions.
In these financially difficult times, there has been much talk about the need for sector collaboration. One theme I’ve heard constantly in the last number of months is shared services, particularly with respect to “back office” functions.
It’s logical, but I’m not totally convinced that even in these times we’ll see it happen, particularly because we don’t always see this playing out within institutions themselves, let alone across institutions.
In an excellent recent article, Alex Usher, talking about Canadian higher education, expresses this well:
“we all know that universities and colleges do a lot of stuff that they don’t need to be doing. Many, many Deans at large universities have spent the last decade or so replicating central university structures at the faculty level in fields as varied as Finance, IT, Student Services, Communications and Fund Raising. At a certain level, you can justify all of this as being a matter of “improving service,” bringing all these services as it does closer to the level of individual students, professors, and units. But at another level, it’s an obvious duplication, a place where we need to ask, university-wide, how many of these positions do we really need? How many can be shared, merged or done away with altogether?”
There's something to be said for some universities getting their own houses in order around this before they think about this as a pan-university thing. Overall, I’m doubtful about shared back-office services being an area where we see real collaboration.
Another topic I’ve observed has been module choices and electives within degrees diminishing due to financial pressures. This essentially means students get a slimmer product and experience as a result of their breadth of choice being reduced.
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.
Collaborative online provision: Benefits and examples
The benefits for students can be viewed as either additive or in terms of continuity. If you’re a university that needs to drop elective modules due to budget constraints, this type of arrangement could enable a continuity of choice for students, and ultimately prevent the diminishment of a degree programme.
That’s probably the more negatively framed result, in which universities work collaboratively to ensure their provision continues to hold steady in terms of the breadth of elective modules.
The other benefit is more additive. This is where the choice and breadth of pathways or topic scope within a programme are expanded through collaboration. Imagine if University A can offer a module in a topic or area that is congruent with the degree programme offered by University B, but that hasn’t previously been an area of specialisation within that university. What you get then is product enhancement, and if, from a student perspective, a key application decision was around this curriculum area and its absence, then this could have positive impacts on enrolment.
Similarly, there is something to be said for students valuing the idea that they get a flavour and experience of another university during their studies. Obviously, in what I’ve outlined this would be online, but nevertheless you get something different, and that can be viewed as something positive and additive.
If this type of thing sounds radical, then it is understandable on the basis of this not being widespread. However, there are some examples of this type of approach in higher education and education at large.
I’ve previously shared about the Global Conservatoire initiative, which is a collaboration between five institutions, including the Royal College of Music (RCM), to offer online elective modules to their students. For example, RCM students get the opportunity to study elective modules from other conservatoires located in North America and Europe fully online, through an initiative they describe as a “virtual, transnational academic hub or ‘global college town’.”
Another example is from another part of education. E-sgol in Wales is an initiative that involves collaborative partnerships between secondary schools to expand post-14 and post-16 provision. The model is primarily centred around collaboration between schools, which enables one school to offer A-level provision to students in another school that would not otherwise have been possible due to viability or a lack of subject expertise. This provision is largely delivered online.
The general ethos behind some of what I’m saying here aligns with Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) initiatives, which several UK universities have been involved in.
Online modules as a step towards growing university online provision
The other tangential benefit is the development of online learning capabilities. Now, it would be easy to overstate the case here, but beginning to offer online modules is a step towards wider provision of this type.
It gives staff exposure and growing experience of online learning, and it may induce or eventually lead to the recruitment of professionals who can begin to support online learning more widely as it develops. This approach is not going to entirely address or comprehensively move institutions towards the breadth of capability, expertise, and experience that is needed, but it does move certain things forward.
Institutions with limited resources and money to invest may be wiser to start with smaller-scale innovations that create momentum than developing new degree products that risk falling completely flat in an increasingly competitive market.
Challenges and opportunities
I’ve no doubt that some reading this will think it’s fanciful, and I can understand that entirely. Similarly, some may think that this is a great idea on paper but is much, much easier said than done in practice.
I definitely understand that too. There are obvious challenges around collaboration between universities. There would have to be strong alignment between the benefits that such a partnership offers to both or multiple parties. There are also challenges related to competition, particularly between institutions that have traditionally viewed themselves as strong competitors, regional or otherwise.
Identifying module topics not currently offered that could enhance an existing degree is the easy part; finding an institution to reciprocally work with is much harder. There are other factors too, such as partners having a willingness to teach online if that is new to them, and having an appetite to put in the hard yards to make such an uncommon arrangement possible.
While this type of collaborative provision would not be straightforward to establish, where there’s a will there’s a way. It may just provide a route to halt a decline of some providers' degree provision due to the financial challenges they face, while also offering a step on the road to developing online provision.
For some universities, whether through this means or another, adopting a strategy that uses online learning to deepen and improve existing provision may just be a much smarter approach when realistically they will face an uphill struggle to compete in the online distance learning market.
