Since 2021, I have been providing an annual review of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) market in UK higher education, aiming to highlight trends, notable developments, and evolving market shares.

As we approach the end of the year, I want to share some reflections on the past year as it relates to online education within UK higher education.

AI has dominated this year's higher education headlines, and the impressive emergence of AI in mainstream products is this year's standout story. However, the focus on AI in higher education has felt overdone at times, to the extent that one would be forgiven for thinking that nothing else happened this year.

Times Higher Education (THE) recently announced the launch of a global online learning ranking to add to their growing suite. This new ranking is an acknowledgment of the increasing number of universities that either have online degree portfolios or are beginning to develop them.

Imagine working at a university as a strong advocate for online education, striving to get this on the agenda but often facing frustration due to the lack of appetite, myopia, and misunderstanding. Then picture hearing that another university nearby has announced a significant move into online education, creating numerous online degrees and supporting them with a dedicated team and operation. It would be hard not to feel a very strong sense of envy.

“AI will revolutionise [insert sector here]” encapsulates the kind of rhetoric we've been hearing for a while. I'm not disputing AI's significant impact on higher education for a second. However, amidst the AI maelstrom, it's very easy to overlook other factors influencing higher education change.

In the last 12-18 months, I’ve frequently described sluggish performance, acquisitions, the cloud of US regulatory changes and less than healthy financial signals as turbulence in the world of online education companies. It would be difficult to claim that things have settled down significantly since my last exploration of this topic, but it does feel like an opportune time for some reflection.

Over recent years, I’ve highlighted the growing trend of UK universities developing their online education offer. The majority of this activity has been focussed on postgraduate taught online degrees, and there are good reasons for why they are pursuing opportunities in that market.

But what about online undergraduate education? What’s been happening in this part of the online education market, and what opportunities might it present to universities looking to grow and develop in this area?

In the last few years UK universities have been increasingly recruiting for senior leadership roles focussed on online learning, with over 40 new roles being established. This trend has accompanied the growing importance placed on online education as a whole, with more universities growing their online course portfolios.

One byproduct of the pandemic was that practically every subject taught in higher education had to be adapted to be taught online. Whilst a number of subject areas like business & management have a legacy of being taught online, there are a number of subjects for which that isn’t the case. There’s also a number of subjects that many people feel, almost intuitively, just can’t be taught well online.

The vast majority of engagement and interaction with online learning experiences is asynchronous. Students engage in activities, tasks and interact not simply at a set time for a set duration, but across time when they want to or are able to do so.

Whilst there are myriad types of activities, interaction, content etc that can form part of asynchronous online learning - over the years a core menu of common activity types and associated online technologies has been established.

Although many other things get much more attention - one of the notable changes in higher education in respect to edtech in recent years is the greater usage of video conferencing technology. Many HEIs had this technology in their edtech suites before the pandemic, but usage for learning and teaching was minimal and largely for online distance learning programmes with a synchronous element.

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.

Online education as a relatively new mode of teaching & learning in the grand timeline of education is often, as if by default, accompanied by a narrative of it being the growing modality of the future. Whilst there’s a lot in that - higher education institutions (HEIs) need to build foundations on something firmer than hyperbolic predictions as they look to successfully offer online distance education.

Towards the end of 2022 I wrote a post about the turbulence being experienced by online education companies that partner with universities. This was on the back of a raft of negative company announcements about their performance and financial health.

There’s been a number of changes since then and there’s still plenty of dark clouds looming. What we’re seeing is a more prolonged shake-out of some of these companies.

So it’s an interesting juncture to reflect on what’s unfolded over the most recent period of turbulence. It’s also worth considering what turbulence-driven changes might mean for the way online education companies operate in the future and what we might be left with.

UK higher education is currently growing in lots of different ways. Record numbers are applying and going to universities, and it’s been predicted that by 2030 there will be a million people applying for places. This is largely due to an increasing 18-year-old population and an ever growing number of internationally mobile students.

As a type of technology company, several online education companies have experienced the kind of turbulence that’s been prevalent across the tech sector as a whole. For some, their lack of profitability and/or valuation has been exposed by an altered macroeconomic climate and there have been layoffs as well as several acquisitions, changes in strategies and leadership.

The last few years have seen a growth in the number of learning design roles being created within universities and greater interest in learning design across higher education as a whole. 

One of the most notable developments in higher education (HE) in recent years is both the growth of interest in the practice of learning design, and the creation of more learning design roles. 

But why is it that learning design is being talked about much more and why do universities feel that they need more people to engage in this work?

During a period in which discussion of how AI is set to alter education and challenge long-standing orthodoxies, it feels somewhat antiquated to be talking about virtual learning environments (VLEs). However, these unfashionable digital technologies continue to be the mainstay of practically every UK university's digital campus. 

It’s been a pretty significant period in the world of online education with a whole raft of negative headlines emanating from a number of notable online education companies that partner with universities.