To paraphrase the intro paragraph from January’s post on the George Mason University report, another year month and another deeply flawed report about online education in US higher education, this time by Di Xu (assistant professor of educational policy and social context at the University of California
Irvine and a visiting fellow at AEI) and Ying Xu (Ph.D. candidate at the School of Education at the University of California Irvine). The report is titled “The promises and limits of online higher education: Understanding how distance education affects access, cost, and quality”.
While the supply and demand for online higher education is rapidly expanding, questions remain regarding its potential impact on increasing access, reducing costs, and improving student outcomes. Does online education enhance access to higher education among students who would not otherwise enroll in college? Can online courses create savings for students by reducing funding constraints on postsecondary institutions? Will technological innovations improve the quality of online education?
This report finds that, to varying degrees, online education can benefit some student populations. However, important caveats and trade-offs remain.
In many ways this report takes a similar approach to the GMU report and a prior one by Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University, which was subsequently withdrawn, in asking important questions but providing flawed analysis to support conclusions. The problems with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report lie in its description of the history of online education and the 50 percent rule, the usage of data to describe the “supply side” of online, and some misinterpretations of IPEDS data. The flaws are hard to overlook, which is a shame, in that much of the qualitative discussion on online education provides a nuanced set of answers to the questions posed above.
The Good
The AEI report takes a look at a little-used portion of the IPEDS data set – The Completions survey and its program-level data on whether an institution offers certain programs at all and whether they are offered as a fully online (distance education) offering. This data has its flaws, which we’ll get to below, but it was quite interesting to get a summary view at the program level.
After a relatively solid discussion of research findings on Online Education and Student Outcomes, which summarizes positive and negative results along with the context and limitations of the relevant research, the report presents its discussion of known strategies to improve online education. This is a welcome relief, as many studies view online as a conclusion to be made about online vs. face-to-face, while this one summarizes known methods to continue improvements of a necessary modality.
Based on the growing knowledge regarding the specific challenges of online learning and possible course design features that could better support students, several potential strategies have emerged to promote student learning in semester-long online courses. The teaching and learning literature has a much longer list of recommended instructional practices. However, research on improving online learning focuses on practices that are particularly relevant in virtual learning environments. These include strategic course offering, student counseling, interpersonal interaction, warning and monitoring, and the professional development of faculty.
The Bad
The introduction relies heavily on the “50 percent rule” and 1998 and 2006 changes to this rule as key points in the expansion of online education. This regulation did have an effect, but so did a number of other factors not mentioned in the report. To make matters worse, the wording of the rule conflates students and institutions. For example, in an email conversation with Russ Poulin from WCET, he noted how the following is inaccurate:
Similarly, the HEA also denied access to certain types of federal financial aid and loans for students who took more than half their courses through distance courses.
yet this statement is accurate:
…the rule dictated that institutions that offered more than 50 percent of their courses through distance education or enrolled more than half of their students in distance education courses would not be eligible for federal student aid programs.
The regulation applied to institutions and in no way measured this usage at the student level. I find that this article from New America does a much better job describing this regulation’s history and impact.
Update 3/8: Poulin also noted (see comment below):
After talking to you Phil, the oddity of the 50% discussion being front and center hit me even more. The lifting of the 50% rule had an impact on only a small number of institutions. Several for-profits and a small number of non-profit and public universities. The vast growth in distance learning has primarily been in institutions that get nowhere near the 50% mark, so the change in that rule was not a direct influence in their decision to enter the distance education market. To place it front and center seemed odd to me and not a real reflection of the motivations for most college leaders.
The report also confuses institutional vs. student level data in looking at per-state online statistics.
Finally, considering that state-level policies may shape online learning in unique ways, Figure 13 shows online enrollment by state in the 2016–17 school year. Unsurprisingly, the most populated states, such as California, Florida, and Texas, also had the largest number of online course takers. Once accounting for between-state differences in overall higher education enrollment, four states have the largest share of students who enrolled in at least one online course in 2016: Arizona (61 percent), Idaho (52 percent), New Hampshire (58 percent), and West Virginia
57 percent).
This might be nitpicking, but the IPEDS data referenced is for institutions located in each state, not students located in each state. But a report trying to make sense of a complex subject should get this information correct and not add to the confusion.
The Ugly
The worst aspects of the report can be seen in figure 1 and an attempt to summarize changes in the supply side of online education. The authors chose to define the supply side as number of institutions offering at least one online course or one online program, using the aforementioned Completions / program-level data.
I’ll wait while you take the necessary 5 minutes to decipher the worst color-legend usage in a chart that I’ve seen in years . . . Not yet? . . .
When I shared this image on Twitter, Kevin Carey pointed out some results that seems non-sensical.
Wait, so from 2012 to 2016, the percentage of public institutions offering at least one online programs went from 16% to 72%, whereas at for-profits it went from 4% to 33%?
The GMU report and the Stanford / Hoxby report made the more common mistake of essentially conflating online education with the for-profit sector, but this data makes little sense on the surface – implying that the for-profit sector offers relatively few online programs compared to public and private institutions. Looking at our 2016 IPEDS profile, you can see that 4-year for-profits by far have the greatest percentage of students in fully online programs (69%). How does AEI measure for-profits as much lower in offering fully-online programs?
It took a while to figure out, but I think the authors made two mistakes. One is that they combined all for-profits together (2-year and 4-year), which is confusing since 2-year for-profits have the lowest usage of online education and a bunch of really small schools. This combination cuts the for-profit numbers dramatically. Look at the 2012 summary data below, where I show data for each sector and then combining 2-year and 4-year sectors together for public, private, and for-profit.
The second issue is that simply measuring for-profits by institution using Completions program-level data is an unreliable approach to understanding online education supply, particularly for the for-profit sectors. Most for-profit systems own a number of smaller campuses, each with their own IPEDS code, yet the online programs are offered centrally by the system. And the Completions survey DE data has major holes in it. Consider South University (part of EDMC as of the 2012 data shown below):
All 21 online programs are offered through the online campus, with over 12,364 taking exclusively DE courses and 8,898 taking no DE courses. Using the AEI methodology, 13 of the 14 institutions have no online courses or programs – almost no supply of online education in their language.
Also consider DeVry University, which does not list a centralized online campus yet has significant online presence. For whatever reason, they report the student enrollment data per campus, but they did not fill out the Completions program-level data at all. Zero supply of online education in AEI’s approach.
My therapists jumped in at this point and convinced me to not fully duplicate the AEI findings (serenity now!!!). What’s important here is that the basis of AEI’s description of online education supply, using institutional metrics that are dubious and ignore how the for-profit sector works, is flawed and misleading. Technically they used data in IPEDS, but they misunderstood its usage and limitations.
Yes, there are valuable parts of this report. But like the GMU and Stanford reports, the flaws in analysis make it very difficult to separate the good from the bad and the ugly. This type of report from well-funded organizations aimed at policy-makers should inform, not confuse, but yet again we are faced with some serious flaws. We need better.
Over the past eight days there have been a series of valuable articles covering Online Program Management (OPM) and the broader Online Program Enablement (OPE) markets. ((See this post to better understand the OPE concept.)) All four articles provide useful historical and academic environment context to better understand market dynamics.
University of Cape Town Policy Briefing
Laura Czerniewicz and Sukaina Walji from the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) released Issues for universities using private companies for online education this week as a policy briefing for “universities who are thinking of using – or already using – private companies to develop or expand their online programmes or courses” ((I’ll stick with the South African English spelling in this section.))
Rather than just focusing on the OPM market itself, Czerniewicz and Walji place the subject into the broader context of “marketisation, digitisation, unbundling and austerity climates.” This placement is valuable, as it frames the appropriate questions that colleges and universities should address when considering OPM or OPE vendor support.
After addressing why the OPM / OPE movement is becoming so important now – from an international perspective with some global south viewpoitns – the briefing addresses the various funding models involved. The note in the description about these models being on a continuum with various combinations possible is crucial.
The briefing including a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis for the full-service OPM scenario and for an inhouse / fees-for-service scenario as well as use cases for different institution types. It is well-worth reading the whole report.
EdSurge Debate on OPMs
Last week EdSurge ran a two-article series on OPMs that missed the SNL’s Point / Counterpoint opportunity and instead tried the nuanced argument method.
In the first post “How OPMs are the Modern Enrollment Managers”, Randy Best and Harris Pastides from Academic Partnerships described OPMs as a follow-on to the enrollment management companies that emerged in the 1970s, with OPMs partially taking credit for moving away from the for-profit sector.
These OPMs, like enrollment management consultants decades before, assist universities in providing access to time-pressed, place-bound students for whom online education is the only choice for earning a degree. In doing so, OPMs shifted leadership in the market for online education from for-profit institutions, which dominated the landscape in the early days, to nonprofit institutions.
After addressing four myths about OPMs, Best and Pastides position full-service revenue-sharing OPMs against the new movement of fee-for-service OPM / OPE providers.
Given the evolution of OPMs, perhaps the time has come for a new name to describe them. They are not just managers, but partners with universities. They don’t just oversee programs, but perform operations critical to the overall success and reputation of the institution. And their efforts often result in the expansion of overall enrollment. In many ways, they should be called Enrollment Growth Partners.
Some players in the OPM space who are not traditional comprehensive providers are trying to adopt the mantle of the future with fee-for-service or unbundled offerings. But fee-for-service simply shifts the cost and financial risk to universities. Meanwhile, by unbundling services—say by separating recruitment and retention—outside partners become solely focused on getting students in the door rather than keeping them through graduation.
Michael wrote the second post “The ‘O’ in ‘OPM’ Could Stand for ‘Outsourcing’”, where instead of taking the simple pro / con approach to the debate, he argued for some nuance in our analysis. In particular, he took issue with the quoted description above.
Michael’s historical context story differed from Best and Pastides, describing John Sperling’s history creating the University of Phoenix and how the current context for bundling and revenue models.
The essential OPM characteristics of bundling and revenue sharing, both of which Pastides and Best tout as almost inherently good, contain trade-offs just like any other proposed solution to a complex problem. They balance growth opportunity against a range of risks, including risk that the up-front costs of launching the program would not be repaid, or that the universities could not execute well on essential aspects of the project (like student recruitment), or that they would let down the students by failing to maintain good quality of technology platform support or service at scale.
There’s nothing inherently bad about managing these trade-offs through a full-service, bundled revenue sharing agreement. But there’s nothing inherently superior about the approach either. For example, universities that are more worried about the risk of failing to grow fast enough than they are about minimizing the expense of using an external vendor are often well served by finding a high-quality OPM partner, while universities with different risk profiles may come to different yet equally appropriate conclusions.
Both posts are worth reading, and it is interesting to see the same issue described here and in the UCT briefing – about colleges and universities managing trade-offs when deciding which model is appropriate when selecting private partners to help with online programs.
Education Dive
Education Dive is running a three-part series on the issues involved with federal rule-making debates, and the first deep dive is “As traditional colleges grow online, OPM relationships shift”, describing the broadening market while traditional schools and systems like SUNY look to develop a strategy for online education.
The State University of New York (SUNY) is one of several public systems looking to raise its profile online. An early pioneer with its Open SUNY platform, the 64-campus system in July issued a request for information about how it could “take the next step in creating a comprehensive environment” for online learning within and beyond New York state. [snip]
The document, which Education Dive obtained, mentions a desire to “leapfrog competition” and “challenge current leaders in the field.”
The article explores several of the OPM-related topics as well as motivations for traditional institutions developing online strategy, based on a series of interviews that included Michael. The key theme of the article described how the OPM market is changing, and the boundaries between online and face-to-face education are blurring.
Soliciting OPM services for ground-based and hybrid programs can help colleges present a unified face in the market when they offer both on-campus and online versions of a program. Wiley, for example, provides full-service marketing support targeting prospective students for George Mason’s online and campus-based MBAs. That includes SEO, paid search, online advertising and social media.
“The dialogues (are) more and more moving toward broadening the services to be more than just about the fully online student (but) to be about the student at the university no matter what their modality,” [co-president of Wiley Education Services and Learning House] Hillman said.
That could lead to an uptick in blended and hybrid experiences, [co-founder and CEO of iDesign] Riter predicts, where learners navigate instruction online and on campus.
“Over time there’s going to be less difference between online and face-to-face education,” he said. “It’s just going to be education, and even face-to-face residential education that exists today is going to be much more technologically infused.”
It’s good to see four separate articles all worth reading about the emerging and broadening OPM market, with useful context.
Inside Higher Ed reported today on a new survey report on community colleges and challenges that students face.
Most community colleges are aware of the challenges students face if they are working, raising children or struggling to afford textbooks. But a newly released survey digs into the nuances of those challenges so colleges can pinpoint ways to lift barriers to college completion and prevent students from dropping out.
Researchers at North Carolina State University designed and encouraged students to participate in the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges survey. The survey found that working and paying for expenses were the top two challenges community college students said impeded their academic success. The researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 two-year college students from 10 community colleges in California, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming in fall 2017 and 2018.
Of the top ten challenges listed, the category of online classes was tied for fourth along with parking in an ironic twist as lack of physical facilities is one of the drivers for the growth in online education. Interestingly for parking, it is not the costs. 86% of those listing parking stated it was “difficulty finding parking on or near campus” and only 10% listed parking as too expensive.
The value of this survey, as described at IHE in interviews with the report authors, is in the nuance that can guide institutional planning.
[Report authors] Umbach and Steve Porter, also a professor of higher education at the university, said they noticed a dearth of surveys that asked students about the barriers they face to completing college and wanted to provide a tool that colleges could use to eliminate those barriers and boost graduation rates.
On the topic of online education as a barrier, one view of the results could be that only one out of five students have a problem with these classes, which is not problematic as we have long known that online is not for everyone. On the other hand, the nuance provided should give institutions some insight into how they can improve their services to students.
The big issue that I’ve seen in the field is not whether a school should offer online classes – in so many cases this is the only way for students to have access to degrees – but how well-designed the courses are and how much support is provided outside of the course. Throwing courses online with no real interaction or adequate support is a recipe for disaster here, as I described in one case last year. But the school in that example is not alone in this regard. In the many cases where community colleges make these mistakes, students should have difficulty learning and the 21% number should be problematic.
But on the opposite side, when colleges focus on improving course design and extend meaningful support services, student outcomes improve dramatically. Consider the California Community College system and their improved outcomes, where their most recent distance education report shows system-wide closing of the achievement gap between face-to-face and online students. Online education can work for community college students and is an important part of student access, but there are no silver bullets.
I was quoted in the article about these challenges.
Hill said the California Community College System’s Online Education Initiative, which he worked on as a consultant, is a good example of a well-designed online learning system. It helped close the gap between the rate of students successfully completing traditional courses and online classes from 17 percent in 2006 to 4 percent in 2016.
To be clear, the California Community College System in general has been improving their provision and support of online courses for years, and OEI is not the only driver of this change.
I don’t think the California Community College System is the only example of improvements in online education support, but I do think their focus on improving course design as well as improving advising and support structures is worth considering.
The problem of ‘difficulty learning material on my own’ and ‘difficulty keeping up’ issues can only partially be addressed – online education is not for everyone – but more engaging and well-designed online courses can help, or at least reduce barriers. The mixing of synchronous elements of a course along with asynchronous can also play an important role.
‘Lack of interaction with faculty’, ‘lack of interaction with other students’, and ‘difficulty using course technology’, however, are issues that should be addressed by the institution as part of the course design and support services. It would be naive to think that these issues could be eliminated, but there is no excuse for schools to not have a coordinated effort to make improvements across all online courses.
Online education can work, and community colleges can improve outcomes by addressing the challenges students face.
While this post focuses on the online education angle, the whole report is worth reading. The insights into issues outside the classroom, particularly for students trying to balance work and family commitments with their education, should provide valuable input into institutional- and system-level planning.
Another year and another deeply flawed report about online education in US higher education, this time by Spiros Protopsaltis (associate professor and director of the Center for Education Policy and Evaluation at George Mason University, as well as former aide to Senate Democrats) and Sandy Baum (a fellow at the Urban Institute and professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College, as well as former advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign). As Inside Higher Ed described the report, titled “Does Online Education Live Up to Its Promise? A Look at the Evidence and Implications for Federal Policy”:
Online education has not lived up to its potential, according to a new report, which said fully online course work contributes to socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps while failing to be more affordable than traditional courses.
The report aims to make a research-driven case discouraging federal policy makers from pulling back on consumer protections in the name of educational innovation.
In many ways this report takes a similar approach to the report by Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University, which was subsequently withdrawn, in asking important questions but providing flawed analysis to support conclusions. But unlike the previous report, the GMU one documents its sources well with 165 end notes, and for the most part this new report describes the underlying analysis accurately. Where the major problems arise is in conflating online education in general with the for-profit sector and in drawing conclusions that are not supported by the evidence.
The report is not easy to wade through, largely from its wide-ranging discussion of for-profits, online history, past federal policy, a snapshot of research on learning outcomes, and a discussion of current policy debates. Let’s take the primary conclusions and discuss the analysis provided.
“Online education is the fastest-growing segment of higher education and its growth is overrepresented in the for-profit sector.”
The report accurately describes the growth of online education, rising to point where one in three postsecondary students take at least one online course.
There is a disturbing tendency to describe this growth as “explosive” (mentioned five times in report) and an unexplained reliance in many cases on six year old data when new data exists. But the conclusion about growth is accurate.
The phrasing “overrepresented in the for-profit sector” and “concentration in the for-profit sector” in describing online education is very misleading, however. It is true that for-profit schools have a larger percentage of their students studying fully online, but the topic of the report is online education in general, and for-profits represent a rapidly shrinking minority of this case. Never mentioned in the report is the most salient point about for-profits – the sector is in major decline. As documented by IPEDS:
This decline seems relevant, even if you then look at fully-online programs (e-Literate analysis of IPEDS data).
Even in 2012, just two years after the for-profit peak, the for-profit sector accounted for less than 35% of fully online student enrollment, and as of Fall 2017 it was down to 21% with a clear trend. For-profits are rapidly becoming less and less relevant to the topic of online education, with no evidence to back up Protopsaltisclaims that the for-profit sector is about to make a big comeback. It is high time that responsible analysts and scholars cease conflating online ed with for-profit schools, and the authors of this report should know better. If you want to study the for-profit sector, then describe it accurately and don’t extrapolate beyond what the data supports.
“A wide range of audiences and stakeholders—including faculty and academic leaders, employers and the general public—are skeptical about the quality and value of online education, which they view as inferior to face-to-face education.”
I find it strange to put this much emphasis on perceptions from an organization that purports to provide “timely, sound, evidence-based analysis”, but perceptions are somewhat important to understand. The body of the report describes a variety of research sources, but it is inaccurate to summarize that the wide range of stakeholders “view [online education] as inferior to face-to-face education.” Especially if you look at more recent data sources.
Consider the 2018 Inside Higher Ed / Gallup survey of faculty (starting page 32), where they found that faculty with actual experience teaching online have surprising high confidence in the quality potential of online education. For those who have taught online, the percentage that agree or strongly agree that “for-credit online courses can achieve student learning outcomes that are at least equivalent to those of in-person courses in the following context”, 39% for any institution, 52% at my institution, 54% in my department or discipline, and 58% in courses that I teach. Put simply, a majority of faculty who have experience teaching online think results can be at least equivalent to in-person.
Consider the 2018 Northeastern University Survey on the Use and Value of Educational Credentials in Hiring, where they found that “Online credentials are now mainstream, with a solid majority (61%) of HR leaders believing that credentials earned online are of generally equal quality to those completed in-person, up from lower percentages in years past.”
Yes, perception issues are important. But the report’s conclusions are misleading and out of date.
“Students in online education, and in particular underprepared and disadvantaged students, underperform and on average, experience poor outcomes. Gaps in educational attainment across socioeconomic groups are even larger in online than in traditional coursework.”
This topic deserves its own report, and the GMU authors are right to point out that simply comparing online to face-to-face outcomes can obscure the important issue of underprepared and disadvantaged student experiences. On the surface, the conclusion about achievement gaps being “larger in online than in traditional coursework” is also accurate. But the more important question is not whether there is a problem, but rather how to minimize or reverse the achievement gap.
The report references several studies from the California Community College system, mostly from years ago, describing how students “were less likely to complete online courses and when they completed them, less likely to pass them”. Yet the authors did not look at the trends within this system, as easily found in the most recent Distance Education report from the system, where the gap in performance overall for online versus tradition is closing rapidly.
More importantly, the achievement gains applied to all ethnic groups.
It does appear that the performance gaps within online education are not closing by ethnicity despite the broad improvements. That is a real question to consider. Rather than viewing a simplistic view that online = bad results, we should focus on how to maintain current improvements while figuring out how to do even better in providing equal opportunity.
“Online education has failed to improve affordability, frequently costs more, and does not produce a positive return on investment.”
This conclusion is largely based on the NBER Hoxby report that was subsequently withdrawn, and for which I provided a detailed critique. I was not able to get a response from the report author. Beyond a gross mischaracterization of the source data, the Hoxby report made a fundamental flaw in its ROI analysis.
This view of online education – students choosing between non-selective face-to-face institutions or online institutions – takes a zero-sum approach, as if you have the same student population just choosing between institution types. This view ignores the large and growing number of working adults who can only attend college – often in degree-completion programs or masters level programs – because of an online option. Their real choice should be seen as online institution or not at all.
The GMU report relies on the withdrawn Hoxby report and does not even describe that it was withdrawn.
There is an excellent point made that pricing for students has largely not been lower for online education, but there are specific examples (UF Online, SNHU, WGU, to name a few) where they specifically provide much lower-priced offerings to students than comparable face-to-face programs. It would be interesting to study enrollment trends and student outcomes for lower-priced online programs compared to comparably-priced programs.
“Regular and substantive student-instructor interactivity is a key determinant of quality in online education; it leads to improved student satisfaction, learning, and outcomes.”
“Online students desire greater student-instructor interaction and the online education community is also calling for a stronger focus on such interactivity to address a widely recognized shortcoming of current online offerings.”
These last two points get to the primary purpose of the GMU report – current federal policy making efforts that include a re-evaluation of the Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) requirement for programs to be classified as online education and no correspondence courses.
The GMU report describes a large body of work documenting the importance of interaction to online student success, and the report accurately describes how “the online education community has also emphasized recently the importance of student-instructor interaction for ensuring quality.” This point is crucial – the vast majority of educators working in online education understand and accept the importance of interaction; there is not significant disagreement on the subject.
What the GMU report gets wrong is conflating actual quality interaction within courses with federal regulations. Much of the basis of the GMU analysis is a series of Office of Inspector General (OIG) reports calling out weak implementation of the RSI regulations. In the biggest case – a report on Western Governors University (WGU) and its competency-based model – this conflation is unwarranted, as I described in a detailed analysis of that action. There were two particular problems with the OIG findings in my view – the first is that the OIG defined their own terms due to the ambiguous nature of the RSI regulation.
The OIG used a binary role-based approach (you are an instructor or you are not) leading to conclusion that only course mentors and evaluators could be considered as instructors, however. The basis of this determination was an instructor must “provide instruction on course content” – clearly a content-dissemination view that rejects alternative pedagogies. And this interpretation that the OIG treats as unambiguous is not based on law, regulations, or commonly-accepted educational terminology. [snip]
This is why I call the audit methodology as hyper-literal. Somehow the OIG thinks they can determine – without any disagreement or ambiguity – the “ordinary meaning of those terms” based on their own interpretations.
The second problem was that the OIG did not evaluate the actual courses or even address the issue of course quality.
Also note that the determination was entirely based on course design materials – think syllabus and course outlines. The OIG did not look at interactions arising during the course of actual course work, just whether there were pre-defined webinars, meetings, and student-instructor interactions. [snip]
These views essentially reject not just WGU’s approach to CBE but also the broader movement of faculty from “sage on the stage to guide on the side”. Instructors, from the OIG view, must provide instruction on course content and interactions must be pre-planned in the course design materials, at least for online courses.
The OIG did not look at student outcomes, applied its own hyper-literal translation of an ambiguous regulation, and did not look at the course interactions themselves – just whether pre-planned course materials described future course interactions. Note, however, that despite the weakness of the OIG report, this does not mean thatWGU is off the hook. Likewise, this report’s over-reliance on the OIG reports mistakes regulation for actual interaction quality, but that does not mean that there is not an issue where many or most online courses could improve faculty-student interaction.
It is broadly understood that the RSI regulation is important but flawed. I agree with the GMU report that a simple elimination of the regulation would be a mistake. But it is overly simplistic and completely subjective for the GMU report to conclude that “unbundled faculty models that have difficulty complying should make changes to match the law instead of changing the law to match the needs of such models.” That is a policy position and not based on “timely, sound, evidence-based analysis”.
In Conclusion
This last point gets to the danger of this GMU report. It is a subjective set of policy recommendations disguised as extensively-documented evidence-based research. There is value in the questions asked, in much of the research documented in the footnotes, and in the clear policy position presented on regular and substantive interaction. But there is more harm than good from the report due to the mischaracterizations, selective data usage, and flawed analysis provided. Read it as a policy paper and not a research report.
Paul Fain from Inside Higher Ed provided a valuable, pithy summary at the end of his article on the report.
The report’s co-authors and its critics agreed that further research is needed on the rapidly evolving field of online education, particularly as more high-quality colleges and universities ramp up their online offerings.
Update 19 Dec 2018: Images and interactive chart have been updated to fix mistake with sector of multiple institutions. Overall totals have not changed but allocations for each sector have. Thanks to reader Drew Bagley for discovering issue and even looking at data to point me in direction of fix. Post publish date has been updated accordingly.
Below is a profile of online education in the US for degree-granting colleges and university, broken out by sector and for each state for the most recent, Fall 2017, data.
Please note the following:
There are multiple ways to filter and select data. For this set, I have limited to U.S. degree-granting institutions in six sectors – public 4-year, private 4-year, for profit 4-year, public 2-year, private 2-year, and for profit 2-year. For undergraduate totals I have included degree-seeking and non-degree-seeking students (degree-granting institutions can offer non-degree programs). Note that this will give different totals than what was reported in the NCES First Look report.
For the most part distance education and online education terms are interchangeable, but they are not equivalent as DE can include courses delivered by a medium other than the Internet (e.g. correspondence course).
I have provided some flat images as well as an interactive graphic at the bottom of the post. The interactive graphic has much better image resolution than the flat images.
There are two tabs below in the interactive graphic – the first shows totals for the US by sector and by level (grad, undergrad); the second shows a map view allowing filtering by sector.
Here is the map view of state data colored by number of, and percentage of, students taking at least one online class for each sector. If you hover over any state you can get the basic data. As an example, here is a view highlighting New Hampshire institutions.
Interactive Graphic
For those of you who have made it this far, below is the interactive graphic, which can also be found here. Enjoy the data.
In mid 2012 during the midst of MOOC mania, I wrote a post noting that we should pay attention to future generations of the concept and that there were four barriers that the MOOC vendors would have to overcome to have any long-lasting impact.
Given this short timeline and the nature of investment-backed educational experiments, I think the real focus should be on whether and how MOOCs or successor models build on current scalability and openness while overcoming these four barriers.
Six years later, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next-generation model for MOOCs in higher education is to become a form of Online Program Management (OPM) providers, including the near-term focus on master’s degrees. The OPM market has demonstrated revenue models (tuition revenue sharing mixed with fee-for-service), the end credential is the already-accepted degree, course completion rates are higher for paying and matriculated students, and degree programs have methods for student authentication. In other words, the MOOC-based OPM model is the next-generation designed to address these challenges.
The shift into the OPM market has been documented in a series of posts in July of 2017, March, April, and May of 2018; and from Dhawal Shah from Class Central . In the May e-Literate post:
The picture one gets is of a chaotic market that is not for the faint of heart, and one that will likely see further consolidations and category changes. 2U, for its part, has been successful partially due to a niche strategy where they go after elite master’s programs and mostly avoid direct competition or engagement with the rest of the market. And recently we have started to see the MOOC providers become OPM providers – where the primary revenue for Coursera and FutureLearn are based on revenue sharing with online programs, albeit with lower sharing rates and with very different marketing approaches. In other words, there seems to be several efforts to enter into the same OPM race, but if possible to avoid being in the mainline rev-share OPM market.
Last week Julia Stiglitz from GSV Advisors, in their first podcast episode, interviewed Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda who joined the company summer 2017. This interview gives the clearest view yet of Coursera’s emerging business model, and by extension it helps explain the new subset of MOOC-based OPM that includes FutureLearn, edX, and Udacity as vendors. ((Outside of Georgia Tech legacy contract, Udacity has moved to corporate professional development market, which is a different approach to same problem.)) I think that the media narrative of tuition revenue-sharing vs. fee-for-service OPM models is overblown, especially since there is a spectrum in that respect more than a binary choice of OPM vendor types. What the MOOC-based OPM entry introduces is a more fundamental characteristic of how traditional institutions develop online programs – namely low-cost vs. full-cost online degrees.
The first note from the interview is that the Coursera of 2018 is not the Coursera of 2012. While Maggioncalda still shows aspects of that old-time MOOC belief system, his approaches are very much rooted in focusing Coursera on a solid business model. And the difference shows. The second note is that 2U’s success in the OPM market and a successful IPO had a big influence on Coursera’s shift. [Emphasis added in transcript]
Julia: You know when you first joined. You spent some time looking at Coursera’s strategy, and really digging in and looking at the different businesses that Coursera had, and one of them that you were particularly attracted to, and you have put increased attention on here at Coursera is the online degrees business. What was it about online degrees that excited you?
Jeff: Yeah. This is sort of I think another good example of what good entrepreneurs have to do, is you have to have feedback loops; you need to get information from multiple sources to understand the nature of a problem so that you can come up with solution. The nature of an opportunity so you can develop a strategy to go after it. It’s really actually pretty simple. I came in – you were on the team, too, we did a lot. We call them deep dives. We went all through the business model, and there’s a great book Business Model Generation that really, to me, gives a nice framework for saying this is what a business model is. It is a target customer. It is a value proposition and offering that solves their needs. It’s a set of channels of how you acquire those customers. It’s a servicing models of how you service the models. Internally it’s the key activities and resources you bring to bear on that. It’s the partners that you work with. It’s the financial revenues and costs, and is your competition. So and that’s the framework. And we stepped through every one of those. I wrote 250 questions across that business model that we as an executive team went through. You know step by step by step, so that everybody learned the nature of our business. And what became very obvious is we had a few things that nobody else really has.
We had 36 million learners, at the time it was 25 million. 25 million learners from all around the world. That’s a pretty big asset. We had university partners. Now there are competitors out there like LinkedIn Learning, previously Lynda, like PluralSight, like SkillSoft. You know there’s YouTube, there’s Khan Academy – there’s a lot of content out there. You were one of the ones who told me in one of those early meetings, “Hey we’re worried that content, generic content, might become a commodity.” Well, we don’t want to play a commodity game. So what is it about my partners that’s super distinctive? Well our partners are universities, and they’re not just the universities, they’re the best universities in the world, and they’re spread around the world. So you say, well I’ve got a resource that almost no one has, which is this network of universities. Right now they’re publishing MOOCs, and there’s something special about MOOCS, but MOOCs are a little more susceptible to that commoditization just as MOOCs. But what was not very susceptible to commoditization are degrees. So that’s OK. We have an asset nobody else has, and what they do really well is degrees, and they still have market sizing. How big is the market for degrees? 1.5 trillion dollars. Okay, well that’s a pretty big opportunity. And then you say, what’s the likelihood that that industry could be transformed due to technology . . . You know, some industries it’s easier to transform, others, it’s harder. The provision of education is absolutely set up nicely to be enhanced, transformed by technology.
I think Uber and Lyft were really smart when they said “you know on-demand transportation, called a taxi, it’s a big market, but it’s a broken product. And if we just do some sort of digital view of this kind of redesign what on-demand transportation looks like, it’ll be a much bigger market.” I’m looking at degrees, I’m not saying it’s broken altogether, but if you look at the student debt out there, you look at the the lack of access, and you look at how inconvenient it is for people to have to stop their lives – especially for master’s degrees – quit their job, move their family, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, forfeit their income. That’s a broken product. So I thought we got partners who are really good, and a massive economic opportunity, and a product that is just ready to be dramatically improved by technology, and so I thought this is pretty good. We should go after this. By the way we also had 2U trading at like a 12 times forward multiple. So clearly Wall Street loved the idea of online degrees, and 2U’s been doing great. They’re growing really rapidly, so there’s a data point out that says, hey this company is doing really, really well; We should be able to do pretty well here, too.
Julia: Could you share a little bit about what this redesign looks like? Because the online degrees aren’t new. You know 2U is doing them. And before 2U there were a whole set of online degree providers that were out there, so why is what Coursera is doing different?
Jeff: Yeah I think it’s a few things. The number one, I would say, is quality. When I say quality, I mean the quality of the credential. So a lot of people have spent a lot of money on for-profit college degrees that just don’t have very good credential value, they’re not recognized in the job market. You pay a lot of money, you don’t get much back for it. One of the reasons that people pay so much for the top universities is that those types of degrees means something in the job market. There have been a lot of online degrees out there, from universities, that charge a lot and don’t get you very far. Our partners happen to be the best universities in the world, with the highest credential value in the world. When these degrees come online, and these degrees online are the same degrees as on campus, you’re getting something as a credential that’s extremely valuable. That should have a very high ROI. Because we’re doing it online the cost is often less than half. So it’s a top quality credential at half the price. Same credential you get on campus.
Different Assumptions on Tuition
There’s a lot of useful insight in the full interview, but I’d like to call out the fundamental question that gets raised about online education with this market view. Should online degrees from traditional universities cost the same as face-to-face offerings, or should they cost significantly less?
For full-service revenue-sharing segment of the OPM market, some core assumptions are built on the assumption of high revenue share percentages and full-priced online degrees. 2U is probably the best-known and arguably the most successful OPM company, and like Coursera they target elite institutions as partners. In 2U’s website under “Our Approach” they describe how their online programs typically charge the same as on-campus programs.
Most of the full-service revenue-sharing segment of the OPM market is similar in its view, whether from Pearson, Wiley, Academic Partnerships, or others – relying on consistent tuition as for online programs, and if there are lower prices they tend to be marginally lower. ((Disclosure: 2U and Pearson are sponsoring participants in our Empirical Educator Project.)) The Coursera approach is in direct contrast with this view, based on the interview as well as several of their online degree programs. There are arguments for either approach. With full-cost tuition, the idea is that the online degree gives at least as much value to students as the face-to-face, or on-campus, degree, and therefore students will be willing to pay the same. With low-cost tuition, the idea is that while students get the same value, “because we’re doing it online” the costs should necessarily be lower. Online infrastructure and marginal costs are much lower than investment in physical facilities. The point here is that this is a fundamentally different set of assumptions.
For most, the initial appeal of the program was certainly the price tag. Illinois’ iMBA costs a fraction of a degree from an elite school, where the median cost is roughly $171,000 and can break the $200,000 mark at the far end of the scale. Illinois’ own residential two-year MBA costs more than $100,000. Arshad Saiyed, executive director of online programs at the Gies College, acknowledges that the low cost brought the program to many prospective students’ attention — but says the iMBA has kept students around through a combination of high-quality instruction and successful community building.
Different Assumptions on Student Recruiting
For OPM full-service vendors, the largest expense is typically marketing and sales – i.e. recruiting potential qualified students. The predominant approach to OPM student recruitment has been based on digital marketing – advertising and outreach on social media platforms, search engine placement, digital advertisements in articles. With the MOOC-based OPM subset of the market, there is now an alternative approach based on having a multi-sided platform model. Coursera views their 36 million registered learners as an asset – a natural base of potential students for online degrees that can be reached without external advertising. In addition, the original aim and design of large-scale MOOCs is based on ability to easily sign up new learners for low- or no-cost, with the opportunity to move these students into higher-cost credentials and degrees over time, not requiring full financial commitments from students up front. While a Coursera or FutureLearn might use digital marketing for recruitment, that is not their primary method.
Different Assumptions on Course Size
Related to the above assumptions, in 2U’s case the class size is small – typically 10 – 20 students leveraging the platform’s design around small discussion groups, using both synchronous and asynchronous learning. This 2018 article about Washington University’s two programs partnering with 2U partially describes this approach.
But what is it like for student to pursue a graduate degree in law fully online? How could a pre-recorded lecture support the active teaching that’s integral to discipline? After all, watching a video isn’t the same as participating in a conversation. To support such engagement, 2U created a new tool.
“Through building an online LLM [master’s of law] program with Washington University in St. Louis, we learned how to design one of the most important tools we provide today: the bidirectional learning tool, or BLT,” said Chip Paucek, co-founder and CEO of 2U. “Socratic-style teaching is fundamental to all law curriculum and coursework. As such, it was imperative for us to design a way to conduct Socratic-style group discussions for Wash U once we signed their online LLM program.
“What we didn’t realize is that while we were developing a software tool to help solve the challenge of teaching the Socratic method online, we were simultaneously creating a way to facilitate discussion-based learning in an asynchronous environment that would eventually be used in all of our future partner programs.”
The approach that 2U and Wash U Law conceived relies upon the ingenious integration of asynchronous and synchronous course components. Instead of lecturing from a podium, faculty address small groups of student actors. At key points, the instructor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the online student, who is prompted to answer without the benefit of knowing how his or her peers have responded. In other words, students can’t piggyback like they might in an in-person class.
After responding, online students can review one another’s answers. They might be prompted to answer follow-up questions, or they might be asked to come to the next live class prepared to defend whatever position they’ve chosen. The preparatory work that might otherwise happen during an in-person class is accomplished in advance through the pre-recorded sessions, enabling faculty to make better use of live, synchronous time.
In contrast, consider a Class Central interview with Maggioncalda when talking about scaling and its challenges.
I think about systems. As the system gets bigger, where would the bottlenecks emerge? My sense is that the bottlenecks will emerge in live sessions and in grading. That’s my guess. The grading, I’m actually not so concerned about because I think the ability to automate grading at scale will become pretty good. The live sessions get tricky. From a technology perspective, I’m not that worried about it. It’s the professor’s time and attention. My thought is it’s going to be a little bit like pyramid, where the number of hours that the main professor puts in won’t really change. If you think about how medical systems have worked, a doctor is in the system, but the number of minutes and hours that a doctor spends [with each patient] becomes an increasingly smaller portion of the total time [during which medical treatment is being delivered]. I think it will probably be somewhat similar for education. The size of the classes could be big, let’s say 10,000. But that will be broken into sections of say 50. And each of those sections has an expert who’s probably not the professor. Also, there will be a lot more collaborative learning among the peers in the class. If you think about it, a lot of learning does actually happen among the folks in a class. The expert just dispensing wisdom is not the way most learning happens. I call it “high engagement learning at scale.” A major piece of high engagement learning at scale is utilizing your classmates to provide a highly valuable learning experience.
Coursera is pursuing a path to enable high enrollments in low-cost programs, and they view their challenge to balance scale and student engagement, with class sections of ~50 students.
Good Enough vs. Better Enough
In twoposts recently, Michael described a battle in the digital curricular materials market. Focusing on Cengage Unlimited in the first one, he described this dynamic.
Make no mistake; this is a potential inflection point in the curricular materials market. There is a war raging between curricular materials that are “good enough,” meaning that the lower price has a bigger impact on student outcomes than any differences in the quality of more expensive alternatives, versus “better enough,” meaning both instructors and students believe the product makes a sufficient difference in student outcomes that the more expensive product is worth the premium. Cengage is betting the farm on “good enough” beating out “better enough” and, win or lose, their bet could cause tectonic shifts in how curricular materials are developed, purchased, and used. It will have implications for inclusive access, adaptive courseware, textbook companies, textbook authors, and the landscape of options available to students and teachers.
Elaborating in the second post:
The distinction I’m trying to make between two strategies is a little tricky. I’m not arguing that Cengage, for example, thinks that their products aren’t great or that they think all anybody needs is the cheapest PDF possible. And on the other hand, “better enough” no longer means better editing or better production values, which is the way that textbook publishers used to position themselves against OER (and still do sometimes, although that reflex is beginning to fade). Rather, it’s about improving student outcomes.
What we are seeing in the OPM market, with the introduction of MOOC-based degrees, is a new battle. MOOC providers and its partner institutions, represented by Coursera, betting on “good enough”; and 2U and its partners betting on “better enough”. Like the curricular materials market, the product is based on student outcomes, which wraps in the value of the credential coming from the university along with the academic and administrative experience enabled by the company. Coursera obviously believes in the quality of their experience, and their partners have some programs that are not deeply discounted, but their market position is based on the program price being the compelling feature for students, including free or low-cost on-ramps. 2U understands that students are seeking more cost effective options, which was one driver behind creating the short-course segment with the acquisition of GetSmarter, but their market position is based on quality of experience and value of credential being the compelling feature for students. But the difference in approaches is stark and significant.
While there is likely room in the market for both approaches, the Coursera of 2018 (and not the Coursera of 2012) deserves careful observation to understand future trends with online degrees. Win or lose, their bet on low-cost online degrees will have big implications in the market.
Let’s look at the top 30 online programs for Fall 2017 (in terms of total number of students taking at least one online course for grad and undergrad levels combined) in the US. Some notes on the data:
The first view combines the categories ‘students exclusively taking distance education courses’ and ‘students taking some but not all distance education courses’ to obtain the ‘at least one online course’ category; the second view shows just the ‘students exclusively taking distance education courses’.
Note that IPEDS captures distance education enrollment data based on Fall 20xx reports using a census date of October 15; this approach does not fully capture programs with multiple start dates throughout the year.
IPEDS tracks data based on the accredited body, which can differ for systems – this data has combined most for-profit systems into one institution entity as well as Arizona State University and a handful of not-for-profit systems that operate as one entity.
There is a new column this year showing changes in enrollment in each case between Fall 2012 and Fall 2017 data.
Both views highlight for-profit institutions in yellow and added sparklines to help visualize trends. There has been a wave of for-profits converting in one form or another of not-for-profit institutions (e.g. Grand Canyon University, Kaplan / Purdue Global), but these conversions for the most part had not taken place as of the Fall 2017 reporting period.
There is another new column this year showing which LMS is currently in usage at each of the schools listed, and in cases where there is a transition in 2018, both systems are shown with a direction > sign.
See this post for Fall 2017 profile by sector and state.
Looking at the case where students exclusively take online courses in a distance education (DE) mode, we see some differences in the list with a greater concentration of for-profit schools.
Finally, it’s worth looking at the top 30 trend over time. Obviously the University of Phoenix is no longer the 800 pound gorilla in distance education, with two not-for-profits – Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University – poised to overtake Phoenix in the next year or two. This view also shows the tendency for most institutions to top out at approximately 60,000 students, but this may be changing with the three counter-examples above as well as Grand Canyon University.
Based on a reader request, I have added a Google Sheet for the data used above. There are tabs for Top 200 and Top 30 listings for each category (ALO and DE), but the LMS data was added manually and only available in Top 30.
Update 11/26: Fixed mistake in 2012-17% calculations, updated first two images. Added downloadable Google Sheet for data access.
I’ll wait while you take the necessary 5 minutes to decipher the worst color-legend usage in a chart that I’ve seen in years . . . Not yet? . . .
