Does your university need to work with an OPM to go online?
Post-pandemic, post-lockdown and post-emergency remote learning, a lot of institutions are recognising that they can and should put some of their programmes online. Acceptance of online and the recognised need to provide alternative modes of learning have helped everyone see that a bigger presence in the online space is desirable if not inevitable.
Two obvious routes there are apparent:
Go it alone – design, build, market, recruit and support the DL programmes with internal resources; or
Partner with an OPM – an Online Programme Management company that will be able to pick up a number of the required activities as well as bring expertise in getting successfully into the market.
In the following video, I talk about my experience of moving from working at a university to an OPM and realising what universities can or can’t do without a corporate partner.
What might you miss by not working with an OPM?
My experience of moving from a university putting programmes online for distance students into an OPM and supporting other institutions to do the same has shown me that on their own universities may not realise that they need or have the resources to do the following:
Marketing spend
Universities don’t often have the finance available to spend a great deal on programme-level marketing. The spend will be focussed on promoting the institution, or perhaps the full suite of all DL programmes as one bundle. However, if you carry out a Google search of a typical distance learning programme title, the promoted links that come at the top of the search results will most likely be institutions that partner with OPMs. The bottom line is that OPMs can spend considerably more than most universities, and a lot of this goes into digital marketing, programme-by-programme. OPMs are prepared to loss-lead in a way that most universities can't afford – it will take the first few years of a partnership before they start to make money; hence OPMs are keen to sign long-term deals.
Recruitment effort
My experience is that universities invest in the systems that allow students to register, enrol and pay for the courses they choose to study. However, they do not so often employ recruitment staff who proactively follow up on all inquiries or expressions of interest in a programme. The biggest team in an OPM will be the recruitment agents who are trained and experienced in proactively following up leads for online students. This plays a major part in driving the numbers that make the effort and expense of setting up your online programmes worthwhile.
Student support
Getting enrolled students is the first step, but to be successful against your investment, and to provide success for your students, it’s important to ensure that they get to completion, continue course-by-course and reach graduation. Distance learning traditionally has had fairly appalling attrition rates. Key to reducing attrition, and improving retention, is the provision of student support that will help students remain motivated, and navigate the complexities of leave of absence forms, resits, referrals and suspension of studies, while also being able to re-engage, return to their studies and complete. Universities typically have support staff available on campus for students to visit and gain advice from. OPMs put in place teams that know how to reach and help distance learners throughout their studies.
Learning design
I put learning design last in this list because this is something a lot of universities have in place already and is often what a university will lead on when they decide to put their programmes online. However, the numbers of designers may lag behind the number of programmes you want to develop, and even if this is all in place, the best designed courses in the world will not survive if the other components are not in place – if you can’t reach out to, recruit and retain your students, the courses will not get and keep the numbers of students needed to survive, despite the marvellous work of your academic staff and the learning design team.
How do you make the choice?
How strong is the institutional appetite to get programmes online and to attract significant numbers of distance students? If it is seen as a strategic goal, as something that you can gain buy-in for across the university, then it is worth pursuing. However, there is a danger of a great deal of wasted effort and money if it is not done right.
Ask yourself and your colleagues the questions:
Does your university have the resource and capital to accept a significant loss-lead in developing your suite of online distance learning programmes for yourself?
Does it have the market intelligence to know what programme titles to put out that are most likely to sell in significant numbers (and recap that loss)?
Does it have the capacity to resource all the activities an OPM partner would provide, or to recruit and train staff to fulfil those roles?
If the answers are yes, then you are well placed to go it alone and to reap the reputational and financial rewards of establishing yourself in the market.
If the institution does not have the capital or resource to carry out these activities, then are you willing to give up a significant percentage of the fee paid by each student in order to work with an OPM partner? In a partnership, the OPM takes the greater part of the financial risk, and by doing so greatly increases your opportunity to get a foothold in the market, which is why it is understandable that they will want to build their own revenue over time through their portion from the fees.
It is this balance between desire to deliver online distance learning at scale and the desire to keep or share the loss or revenue that will be the tipping point in whether you choose to partner with an OPM or go it alone.