OPMs, universities and 20/21

There’s been much spoken about OPMs and UK universities in recent days, the fact is these partnerships have been growing in the UK, but not many people have paid much attention to it and there’s many within the sector that don’t know anything about them. There are well over 30 UK universities partnered with OPM’s and that will most probably grow.

There are different views on them, some will always be ideologically opposed to private and public partnerships in education, others will point to terrible examples like Concordia in the US (and there are others that aren’t public knowledge). Some will raise the issue of outsourcing v insourcing. Others will point to examples that have been successful or examples that have helped universities enter and become better equipped for the digital age.

A lot of focus is placed on outsourcing of learning / instructional design, but these companies offer much more like marketing, admissions, recruitment, student support, business development etc etc. In some partnerships only some aspects are outsourced like marketing and recruitment, not learning design.

Most of the time a university will partner with an OPM to reach a global audience or working professionals and so you will see mainly online postgraduate degrees being offered. Partnerships are typically a longer term investment with terms of 10 years. So OPMs aren’t necessarily setup to be the white knights for HEIs needing full online delivery in 20/21.

I’ve been part of an in-sourced online education team in HE and have seen them work, I’ve been a strong advocate for universities investing in online education and have regularly proposed and offered to lead such a setup.

But we have to understand that insourcing is a significant longer term investment that many universities have not wanted to make. Many universities would also struggle to form such a unit as it’s so radically different to anything most traditional universities have ever done. It is also not a quick and easy thing to do.

One other important point on the insourcing v outsourcing debate is the lack of instructional designers employed within UK HE. There are learning technologists, who in the main support technology enhanced learning on traditionally taught campus programmes and all the discrete components of that like lecture capture for instance, this is quite different to working in a dedicated online education setup in my experience.

Throw in the way in which things are marketed, student support etc and what you find is something very different to how traditional universities operate, so the idea that you can magically conjure something equivalent to that is not wholly accurate. This requires leaders with vision, entrepreneurialism and who understand digital/online and we know there’s a real deficit of strong digital leadership in UK HE.

It’s disingenuous to suggest all universities currently have the ability to setup de facto full service OPMs to deliver all or most of their programmes online in 20/21…and even if all universities decided to in-source, there would not be enough instructional designers to go around…in case you’re wondering the answer below is mostly B.

This does not mean I’m arguing that all universities should go with OPMs, but it’s important that there’s some balance in this debate. For what it’s worth I would love for all universities to invest in online education strategically and internally, with great teams of people delivering a high quality educational and overall experience. To go further than that I would love for universities to invest and prioritise centres for learning and teaching.

But let’s be frank, this is not something most universities have been bothered with or prioritised. So if all universities are planning to go online in 20/21, then it’s inevitable by the fact of the supply of resource that they’ll need to be seeking outside help.

I understand that this will be anathema to many, and I’m not here to defend OPMs, neither does that mean you should seek that outside help via an OPM. I said earlier that the OPM model is not setup to create a fully online university, so don’t expect an OPM to necessarily be able to do that. In my opinion, the reason you’d engage with an OPM in these times is exactly the same reason you might do in normal times, through some targeted programmes as a way of reaching new demographics and generating revenue to help you ride out the current and future storms.

I would also add though that those scrutinising these types of partnerships should not forget the existing relationships that universities have with private EdTech companies, some of which are pretty egregious but don’t always get the same level of scrutiny.

We should also ask deep questions of our own institutions integrity. Why are some institutions not financially resilient enough to ride out the storm without significant job losses? Why is there such a gulf between the lowest and highest paid employee? Why is staff morale low in our institutions? Why have we not invested in online education sufficiently? Or teaching and learning in general for that matter? If some good can come out of this situation, then in time deep reflections on some of these things will help plot a better way forward.