2022: What's the current state of OPM and UK university partnerships?
One of the big changes of the past couple of years has been the number of universities getting serious about what they are doing in the online distance education space.
Whilst the number of online distance education courses on offer in UK higher education has been steadily growing, the events of the last couple of years have spurred some universities to more intentionally consider what they are doing in this space.
For universities looking to develop an online distance education portfolio there has tended to be two main choices - make the necessary investment to do this themselves or partner with an online programme management (OPM) company.
In the UK, OPM partnerships tend to go under the radar and there’s not much widespread knowledge about who they are and what they do. I think more people in UK higher education should have an understanding of these types of partnership, not least because the number of new partnerships are accelerating.
What is the current picture in the UK?
I have been researching and analysing UK university partnerships with online education companies for a number of years now. What I’ve seen over that time is a significant increase in the number of new partnerships.
There are currently nearly 90 UK universities that have partnerships with online education companies, this is close to 50% of the 178 universities I analysed.
It’s worth saying at this stage that the type and nature of those partnerships varies as does the type of online education company. Not all of these are OPM partnerships in the traditional sense.
It’s also worth noting that several universities are partnered with multiple online education companies, with some having as many as five partnerships.
As I mentioned in an earlier post there are over 50 UK universities partnered with what have been typically referred to as MOOC platforms, because these were the types of online courses they exclusively offered in their early days.
In the most part these partnerships are not what I would class as OPM partnerships, despite the evolution of these companies from solely offering MOOCs. I’d describe a more traditional or typical OPM partnership as those that provide a range of services to support the delivery of online degree programmes either at undergraduate or postgraduate level.
In terms of those traditional OPM partnerships there are currently over 35 UK universities that have established such partnerships, that’s somewhere in the region of 15 - 20% of those I’ve researched.
What’s really striking though is that 24 of those partnerships have been established since 2018. So in the past four years there’s been really significant growth in the number of OPM and UK university partnerships.
Given that there has also been a spate of recent tenders issued for online programme delivery partners and a number that are currently weighing them up - this figure is only likely to grow over the coming years.
Which OPMs are UK universities working with?
The four biggest OPMs in terms of the number of partnerships are Higher Ed Partners (HEP), CEG Digital, Pearson and Wiley.
Both HEP and CEG Digital have grown their number of partnerships in recent years and are leading the pack in terms of numbers.
Other OPMs that have a smaller number of partnerships include 2U, Interactive Pro, Kaplan Open Learning, Keypath and OES.
It’s fair to say that all of these companies are at different places in terms of the health of their partnerships. Although I've presented a picture of growth in general, this doesn’t mean that all OPM companies operating in the UK are growing new partnerships.
Outside of these companies - that perhaps more comfortably fit in the bracket of traditional OPMs - there are also a range of other companies (excluding MOOC platforms) that have partnerships with UK universities such as Learna, Robert Kennedy College, Informa Connect Digital Learning, UNICAF, Emeritus, Skilled Education, Esme Learning, Fourth Rev and GetSmarter (owned by 2U).
Some of these companies support universities in delivering online degree programmes, but a number of the partnerships are focussed on short online courses. This has been another growth area which universities like Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and LSE have all been engaged in.
What types of universities are partnered with OPMs?
There can sometimes be a lot of misunderstanding around OPM partnerships and I have sometimes seen it claimed that OPMs only partner with “prestigious” universities.
Now the term prestigious is somewhat vague but if we were to equate this with the Russell Group of UK universities, then they make up less than a third of UK universities that have traditional OPM partnerships.
In terms of how partnerships relate to some of the university rankings there are plenty of universities partnered with OPMs that don’t feature in the higher echelons and top hundreds of these lists.
So it is a bit of a myth that OPMs only partner with “prestigious” universities - the fact is, there are a range of different universities partnered with OPMs.
This is not necessarily the case across all online education company partnerships and both Coursera and edX have been much more selective than FutureLearn in terms of the UK universities they partner with for example.
Also, companies that are mainly in the short online course market tend to be more selective in who they partner with, as reflected in the small list of universities I mentioned above.
Why do universities partner with OPMs?
One of the persistent challenges of online distance education is recruiting and retaining students. So whilst it might seem like the floodgates have been opened as online learning is everywhere now, with all manner of individuals & organisations creating and running courses, it's not quite as simple as it appears.
For the most part the online distance education market in UK HE is focussed on postgraduate taught programmes albeit more undergraduate programmes are being developed. These obviously aren’t short, low cost or free courses and are largely taken by those who already have significant work and other commitments.
There is a degree of risk in institutions developing and running such courses in terms of their financial viability and sustainability. Recruitment for undergraduate on-campus programmes might be extremely healthy at the moment, but we’re not talking about the same market.
What an OPM partnership offers universities is a way of balancing the opportunities of growing and establishing an online distance education portfolio against the risks that costs won’t be recouped or programmes won’t be successful in a manner of ways.
One of the main selling points of an OPM partnership is the upfront burden they are able to bear financially and the investment they are able to make into things like marketing which can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds per student recruited.
They are also very active in generating and converting leads (i.e. students enrolled) through the services they offer. One of the main strengths of OPMs is marketing and recruitment, to the extent that there are partnerships that simply draw upon those services that exist.
As well as marketing and recruitment, OPMs often have student support services that are a different flavour to how universities support students on-campus and are geared to help ensure retention and mitigate the problems with student attrition that online education has commonly experienced.
These three services are in a sense not directly to do with the learning experience itself but are a really important facet of developing a successful and sustainable online distance education portfolio. Any university seeking to go it alone in the online distance education market will need to think long and hard about its capabilities in terms of marketing, recruitment and retention in what is only going to become a more competitive area.
Universities need to bear in mind that marketing and recruiting students to online distance education isn’t the same as recruiting the archetypal demographic of school leavers onto undergraduate on-campus degree programmes.
Equally, the type and level of support online distance students need is different too. It can be easy for universities to think that because they have success in the marketing, recruitment, retention of students in one area that they can achieve this in another area relying on the same capabilities and approach.
What about learning design support?
Learning design support is something that OPMs can also provide universities who partner with them, as universities might not have the capabilities or capacity to support the creation of a number of new programmes.
Although learning designer roles have grown in UK universities in recent times, some are learning designer roles in name alone, and involve very little specific work on creating new programmes, but rather are an extension of the “one and done” workshop paradigm that typifies some education support in UK HE.
In that sense, universities have to be honest with themselves about their real capabilities beyond the number of people they have on the payroll with that job title.
If the objective is to get several new programmes up and running in a short time frame this might necessitate learning design support in a way that a more modest objective might not.
However, learning design isn’t a prerequisite of an OPM partnership and there are plenty of partnerships whereby the learning design and anything that comes under the broad banner of pedagogy is conducted by the university. There is certainly some wisdom in this approach where capability and capacity exists.
What are some of the challenges of these partnerships?
What OPMs are about and what they offer and seek in return is fairly well established so to a certain extent there is a greater onus on the university to make sure any partnership really works for them in the short, medium and long term.
There are cases of UK partnerships being unsuccessful and examples of these beyond the UK but this doesn’t mean all are tarnished with the same brush.
A partnership is exactly that, it’s a relationship that’s geared up around mutual benefit so there’s responsibility on both sides to make it work, to communicate clearly, to establish accountability structures and to understand one another's goals amongst other things.
There is a line of criticism that exclusively paints a picture of predatory private companies as being the ruinous effect on partnerships that go wrong. The reality is more nuanced than that.
Universities are not always as diligent as they might be when entering into partnerships, do not always draw upon the expertise they have in-house to help as partnerships are established, and don’t effectively manage the change that an OPM partnership brings about.
It’s fair to say that when the commercial or private world collides with the public it can be jarring and it can feel like people are speaking different languages.
The knowledge of the realities and workings of both those domains are not always sufficient on both sides, and whilst that can be remedied - having people who understand the commercial/private world on the university side can be invaluable.
What’s the future for these types of partnerships?
These types of partnerships are only set to grow in the coming years and with that I would anticipate that we will begin to see much greater scrutiny, discussion and debate. This certainly seems to be the case in the US, where these types of partnerships have existed in greater numbers for longer.
This may lead to different partnership models emerging that don’t follow the traditional 10 year 50%+ revenue share model, which is pretty unpalatable to some. Fee for service models may start to grow and become differentiators for companies operating in this space.
There may also be greater differentiation sought through a more overt incubator model - in which services aren’t simply outsourced but universities are deliberately and intentionally supported to develop their skills and capabilities.
Given the growing consciousness and prominence of learning design I’d expect some companies to focus on learning design as a specific area where they can add value and support universities in online distance education and potentially beyond.
One thing that we can be relatively certain about is that the number of OPM partnerships with UK universities will grow in the future and with them more competition in the online distance education space.
This will make it all the more important that universities starting to develop portfolios in this space essentially “find their lane” and determine where they can add value to prospective learners, rather than seeking to simply mimic other more established providers.
