Is your website optimised for online education marketing and recruitment?
I recently spoke at the Online Learning Summit at the University of Leeds, sharing my analysis of the evolving online education landscape in UK higher education. Whilst that inevitably touched on a range of trends and developments, a key message was one of steady growth in the number of online degrees on offer at UK higher education institutions (HEIs) and more institutions becoming serious about online distance education.
Both of those factors help contribute towards an online education landscape that is becoming more competitive. There are now several HEIs looking to grow their online student numbers into the thousands over the coming years.
This competition is made more stark by the fact that online postgraduate degrees - where we’re seeing the most growth and activity - tend to be quite narrowly focussed on particular subject disciplines.
Some recent research I conducted on online postgraduate degrees in the UK highlighted that health & medicine, business & management and education dominate in terms of subject areas.
The trends towards UK HEIs developing their online portfolios comes with student enrolment targets to achieve goals and ensure viability. It feels somewhat inevitable that some will meet those ambitions and some will struggle in the years to come.
The factors that contribute to success or failure to meet goals are multifaceted and have nuance to them, but in an increasingly competitive landscape HEIs need to ensure that they leave no stone unturned so they can meet targets and attract students.
Effective use of the web to support online student recruitment
In that sense there’s a lot of details to consider when either successfully instigating or running an online distance portfolio with particular student recruitment goals. One component of this is HEIs websites as a key marketing tool and metaphorical shop window for prospective students.
If HEIs want to succeed in running an online distance learning portfolio in an increasingly competitive landscape then they can’t afford to neglect the importance of effective use of the web for their online courses.
In my research and work with clients, this can be an area where there's a lot of potential to make improvements. Those improvements won’t in and of themselves catapult an online distance portfolio to meet recruitment targets but can help tune up and improve this activity.
There are numerous ways in which to optimise websites but here are a few examples of things HEIs need to be thinking about.
Make it easy for prospective students to find key information
When people are considering taking a course there’s a range of things they may want to know. But there are some key pieces of information that are likely to influence their choice more than others. These include things like the cost of the course, the mode of study and the next start date of the course.
If this information isn’t easy to find or is ambiguous, it increases the effort people have to expend or to put it another way the interaction cost. This could be a factor in either their ultimate choice or whether they decide to continue or leave your website.
In 2023, it doesn’t feel like it should be difficult for people to quickly find key information on a particular online course, but unfortunately there are still examples of this being the case.
Ambiguous cost information
The most common issue is a lack of ease to find information on the price of a course or ambiguity on the actual or overall cost.
In a number of cases, I’ve found that the cost of an online degree isn’t listed on its related webpage. Instead people need to navigate or search to discover the cost through a separate fees area in some cases with different price lists.
In some cases the way these price lists are designed doesn’t make it straightforward to find or deduce cost. This might be because pricing is not by course title but rather you have to find the category the course sits within to determine the cost, or lists aren’t up to date, or they are quite lengthy.
Nielsen Norman Group have done extensive research over the years on web design and have publish their findings on the top 10 web design mistakes. One of those is “Not Answering Users' Questions” - with the worst example being not listing the price of something.
If organisationally you’re unable to list a price for your course on its associated site in a way that’s easy for people to see then you fall down in a very important area. Or to put it in the words of Steve Krug:
“The fact that the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious — and easy — can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.”
Other aspects of the interaction cost of finding out key information is an unnecessary amount of friction introduced or ambiguity about determining the course cost. I’ve seen this manifested in a few ways.
I’ve seen course cost listed as a per year amount for courses that have durations inconsistent with that (e.g. 27 months), this introduces ambiguity and uncertainty.
In other instances the overall course cost needs to be calculated by adding up cost per credit and/or the cost of per module that makes up the course.
Credit or module pricing isn’t a bad thing. There might be good reasons why pricing might need to be displayed in that way and with greater modularisation on the way this will become a more widespread practice.
However, when there’s no good reason to not list an overall or indicative overall cost and you require people (who we too often assume speak the language of credit and how that typically divides across a programme) to calculate this themselves then you add unnecessary friction.
Inconsistent terminology and muddled categorisation
Ambiguity about mode of study also seems to be an issue for some HEIs too and there’s some odd classifications out there. Such as “Distance Learning by eLearning” …all I can say to that is the 2000s would like its study mode back please…
In other instances courses that are offered as online and on-campus result in muddled categorisation. One UK HEI website that had the categories “Study mode” and “Location” in their course pages - stated for one course that the study mode was “Blended Off Campus” and the Location: “Campus / Online” …..talk about confusing.
Another example was a course site that listed the study mode as Online Distance Learning but the description read “Blended delivery model with distance learning delivered through synchronous and asynchronous methods”.
Now whilst I can get what they mean here - this isn’t what most people mean when they talk about a blended model and adds unnecessary ambiguity.
This highlights a broader pitfall about consistency. People spend time on other sites and gain understanding about things like modes of study from the wider world. Whilst it might seem appealing for UK HEIs to come up with their own nomenclature for modalities (recent examples include “fusion teaching”) - consistency and sticking to common conventions will help to make sure people don’t have to wonder what your new term actually means and whether it means the same thing as those most commonly used by others.
Reducing the amount of interaction cost and ambiguity in respect to the key and most salient pieces of information people want or need to know about an online course they’re considering is one key way HEIs might look to improve their websites.
Write for the web and avoid tiny text
Although writing for the web best practices are more widely known, there are still examples of HEIs course pages that are essentially walls of text containing information someone wants to tell you rather than what you need to know.
Walls or big chunks of text can be intimidating and can be a factor in whether a prospective student sticks or twists.
I’ve encountered a number of these including one course that was one long stroll through a dense vertical of over thousands of words.
Now it’s worth saying at this stage - that if you’re really set on studying “that thing” at “that UK HEI” in “that way” - even the most egregious webpage won’t stand in your way. However, the points and premise here are about growing competition and the sense that there may be growing numbers of people considering multiple options and so you want to give yourself the best chance of people choosing your course.
Making sure online course websites are optimally written for the web is an obvious way in which web presence can be improved and whilst not everyone can afford a good editor, AI tools can take you some of the way to improving this.
One other quick point to make is about avoiding tiny text. This is another issue I have found with online course sites at UK HEIs, and I suspect there’s different rationales for that, like a sense this is what's needed to be mobile friendly, or as a way of dealing with lots of text.
However, small text impacts accessibility and can mean an inequality of experience across different devices. Interestingly, one of the most recent web design mistakes I alluded to earlier is “Mobile design on big screens”. Whereas in years gone by web design was too focussed on devices with larger screens, it seems like the balance has swung the other way.
When GOV.UK was communicating changes it was making to its typography their team helpfully stated that
“it’s no longer standard for smaller screens to use a smaller font size than on a desktop, as this negatively impacts those with visual impairments”
So for some it might be a case of catching up and redressing a balance that has skewed too far towards optimising for one type of device.
Improve the SEO on your website
One of the key ways in which online programme management companies market their HEI partner’s online courses is through paid search. In some cases the amount spent per student enrolment is significant and this digital marketing capability and investment is one of the key USPs of partnering with these companies.
Paid search is one of the key ways in which online course are marketed, however that can sometimes mean that SEO and improving websites to increase visibility in search engines is overlooked. Given the cost of digital marketing (which has been increasing) - SEO seems to be one avenue to continually build and improve online course websites.
A recent research report of universities in the US highlighted a lack of strategy, capability and prioritisation around SEO and demonstrated this is an area where there’s scope for improvement.
As online education in the UK becomes a more competitive arena, SEO is one important avenue to help increase visibility of courses and potentially reduce or minimise marketing costs.
If as a HEI you lack internal capability in this area the challenge of investment still remains, but this is certainly an area in which AI is developing to support SEO all the time, as well as changing it.
One way AI is likely to change things in terms of search - is how prospective students discover courses, and this was highlighted in a recent piece on global student recruitment. This piece highlighted how ChatGPT can help students more readily find courses that fit their needs and that potential subverts other forms of search that favour HEIs who have paid to be featured or ranked first.
This is an interesting development which places further emphasis on HEIs having the right information on their webpages for a different type of search optimisation.
Covering all your bases in an increasingly competitive landscape
The growth of online distance learning courses in the UK presents both an opportunity and a challenge for HEIs. But with growth, comes increased competition and challenges to recruit the number of students that make this endeavour viable and successful.
HEIs have to navigate this landscape and optimise what they do to compete and recruit students. One component of many is ensuring that the web is used effectively to enable people to discover and understand their online learning offerings and their unique value.
The effective use of the web to support HEIs online learning ambitions is often one area where there’s varying degrees of room for improvement. Although, a website is one piece of the puzzle when it comes to marketing and recruiting students for online courses, an increasingly competitive landscape means that HEIs need to make sure they’re covering all their bases.
