Online Education is More Flexible But Not Necessarily Cheaper

David Annand, has asked "How do we make university education more affordable and accessible?". He is a professor at Athabasca University, one of Canada's leading online institutions, but he is not just advocating for abolishing campuses.

Annand suggests face-to-face is needed for some new undergraduate students. He also points out the importance of informal social interactions for these students. However, he questions if this is really worth the cost of the campus and points out that online learners do just as well as face-to-face ones.

I suggest that while online learners do just as well academically, this is missing the point. Study is also a social experience. As an online student of Athabasca myself, I experienced a sense of loneliness. This is despite being a very experienced student, who was also on the staff of a leading Australian university at the time. But even so, online study was a less lonely experience for me than previous face to face study: just because you are on a campus, in a room full of people, doesn't result in social ties.

Athabasca's online courses had forms of group activity built in. Also was not assumed that you would somehow meet other students outside class, with ways to meet people online. 

The assumption that eliminating the campus will make courses much cheaper also needs to be challenged. According to a report for the UK DoE, only about 10% of the cost of a course at a conventional university is the campus (KPMG, 2019). A third of the cost is teaching staff and another third central student service costs. Most of the rest are overheads in running an institution. So eliminating the campus is not going to make courses from a conventional university much cheaper. Ways to provide student services, and reduce other overheads, online might be more cost effective than eliminating the campus. 

Also, even before COVID-19, at least in Australia, most students had voted with their feet and were not attending lectures. Universities campuses were already evolving to be business parks with commercial tenants and leisure centers with fee gyms, bars, and cafes, plus accommodation. The University of Canberra's 2025 plan is an example of this.

Annand points out that there is a high financial and social burden for those remote from a campus. There are also barriers due to child minding and employment. These are the areas distance education, and in its recent form, online education, were primarily developed for and have been delivering to for decades. 

Online students tend to pay about the same fees as on-campus ones, as Annand points out. It did annoy me when a student of the University of Southern Queensland, that I was paying to maintain playing fields which I had never seen, let alone played on. But this was only a small proportion of the fees. As it happens I paid slightly less in Canada, about the amount of the cost of the playing fields. ;-)

Athabasca University has no classrooms, and most staff now work off-campus, Annand points out. However, most teaching at conventional universities was done by part time and casual staff who didn't have their own offices before COVID-19, so their is little scope for savings in this way.

Athabasca University receives a subsidy from the Alberta provincial government, Annand points out, at a rate about a third that of conventional universities. However, those universities may be providing courses where costs are higher, such as medicine. The issue of the applicability of government funding models to online universities is one which has come up in Australia, most particularly at the University of New England (UNE), an institution which has been pioneering distance education for more than 50 years. UNE staff have expressed frustration that the federal funding model limits their ability to provide innovative programs. 

The Australian government did force through a change which increased the cost of less employment related degrees (ironically making some cheaper to provide courses more expensive). So there is some appetite by legislators to use product differentiation for university fees. However, if based just on campus cost, the difference in fees would be small, and the political cost of the reform may not be worth the effort.

Perhaps a better reform to import from Australia would be to provide more funding for shorter programs. In response to the pandemic, the Australian government introduced undergraduate certificates, and  increased funding for graduate certificates. These were focused on areas relevant to the emergency, particularly health, and have proved popular. Universities did previously provided some sub-degree programs, but there was no incentive for them to offer these.

Online universities may do better lobbying government for a different funding model, because they provide superior, more flexible, more vocationally relevant forms of education, rather than focusing on the costs of conventional universities.

Reference

KPMG, "Understanding costs of undergraduate provision in Higher Education, Costing study report", UK Department for Education, May 2019, Page 21. URL https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/909349/Understanding_costs_of_undergraduate_provision_in_higher_education.pdf#page=21

UNE Bespoke Graduate Certificate

The University of New England, in regional NSW, is offering a new "Bespoke Graduate Certificate". Students can select from courses across the university to assemble their own qualification. However, UNE is not the first university to do this, and a more focused qualification may be a better option.

The UNE Bespoke Graduate Certificate looks similar to the ANU Graduate Certificate of Studies, and other universities general studies programs. These allow students to choose from courses across their institution (and between institutions).

With a general studies qualification there is a risk of ending up with a "Certificate of Nothing in Particular". The student may do the studies they want, but a prospective employer may not notice this detail. The student can instead consider undertaking a more focused qualification, and use the flexibility of including alternative courses to suit their interests. As an example, I undertook an ANU Graduate Certificate in Higher Education. After consultation with my supervisor, I substituted two courses from partner institution USQ, for two ANU courses.

My interest was in online education, and USQ was offering specialist courses in this. A bonus was that USQ offered courses outside ANU's semesters, allowing me to complete quicker. Having a qualification in education is far more useful than a general one made up of education courses.

UNE indicates their certificate can be completed in 1 year part-time. However this assumes the student undertakes two courses at a time. As a part-time student I found completing two courses at once to be very difficult. If the student is undertaking studies part-time, and particularly online, I suggest they should be encouraged to do only one course at a time. Where the institution offers three or four periods per year, the student can still complete in a reasonable time.

Bespoke Courses from the University of New England

I don't know quite what to make of "Bespoke Courses" from the University of New England (UNE). The idea seems to be to select 2, 3 or 4 units from UNE degrees to make your own certificate qualification. This is confusing, as what UNE calls "units" appear to be what I know as  "courses" (what a full time student typically does four to six of per semester). What UNE calls a "course" I know of as a "program" (such as a degree program).

UNE offers a four unit certificate for $10,800. At $2,700 for each unit this is not exactly a bargain. Athabasca University charged me about AU$1,900 per unit. UNE offers students a low interest loan with a regional bank (implying the course is not eligible for a government student loan). Also of interest is that the bank the loan is offered through what was originally the Staff Credit Union of UNE (now known as the Regional Australia Bank). The head of the UNE Business School is a member of the Bank's board. I suggest this, and any other interest UNE (and its staff), have in the bank, should be declared wherever UNE promotes the student loans.

I tried designing an "Advanced Bespoke Course". First I was prompted for a degree name, which is confusing as this is not for a degree and I don't know what the names of UNE degrees are. So I ticked from the list Computer Science, Education, and Sustainability (as these are topics of interest). I then clicked on "View Results". The page scrolled to the top where it said "1 Degrees found", which is not very informative. Scrolling down again I found "No results are found in Postgraduate" and "Undergraduate degrees: Bachelor of Computer Science". This seems a little odd: why does UNE have Education and Sustainability as categories to choose from, if it offers no units on these topics?

Curiously, while Computer Science was the only degree listed, the courses I was then offered included Management Accounting, Biology, and Applied Physics, as well as IT courses.

UNE claims "The first truly bespoke university qualification is here". However, for several years ANU has been offering "Graduate Studies Select" (GSS). With GSS students can undertake a Graduate Certificate, Graduate Diploma, or Masters of Studies, selecting from the courses at ANU (including my course ICT Sustainability) and also courses from affiliated institutions. 

UNE was a pioneer of distance education and lately has shown it is willing to experiment with ways to offer university education. But I suggest to make the bespoke courses a success they need to offer some suggestions for combinations of units. A "choose your ingredients" sandwich shop will have some suggested combinations ("the plowman's: tasty cheese, pickles, ham ...") , UNE could offer some combinations of units to suit particular interests ("The STEM taster: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics"). Also it would be useful if there was some vocational element to the qualifications, as more than ten thousand dollars is a lot to pay just out of interest (when you can do other on-line courses for free). In addition, they might wan to lower the price by about 40%, to make it competitive with quality on-line institutions.

Online Degrees Are Official

Edmon de Haro writes in the New York Times that "... information technology is poised to transform college degrees" ("Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official", 5 March 2015). However, this happened about twenty years ago, when paper-based correspondence distance education evolved into e-learning, at places such as Open University UK (OU) and University of New England Australia. Up until recently the teaching institutions which offered on-line degrees  posed no threat to prestige research universities, but the likes of Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. are now scrambling to catch up by offering "MOOCs" (which is a Canadian term).

Walter Perry, first Vice-Chancellor of OU detailed  the struggle for acceptance, lessons learned in supporting remote students and the transformation to on-line education in his 1976 book "The Open University: History and Evaluation of a Dynamic Innovation in Higher Education". OU also published a series of books about how to design, run and cost on-line courses.

For the last four years I have been an on-line university student at institutions in Australia and North America. The courses I am doing about how to design on-line courses are not new and in some cases have been run for more than a decade. It is at times amusing, and times frustrating, to see MOOC developers at prestige research universities learning to designed e-learning courses by trial and error, when they could simply sign up for a course and learn to do it properly.

There seems to be at times a willful ignorance, as if to read the results of decades of research on on-line education would force MOOC developers to admit that most of what they are doing is not new. In some cases this seems to be a matter of ego: a science professor at a high status research university can't bring themselves to enroll in a teaching course at a low status college (where the best on-line teaching is done).

The problem now is not how to design low cost courses, we have known that for decades, or how to assemble them into degree programs. The problem is how to market such courses, without them being seen as a cheap and second rate option. It is in this area which MOOC proponents have made some advances, by taking the on-line eduction already routinely run by teaching institutions and giving it the marketing gloss of prestige research universities.

While the USA struggles with how to produce a viable on-line education system, Australia already has a solution, combining the strengths of our two higher education systems: Vocational Education and Training (VET) and universities. Several Australian universities now have arrangements with VET. Students do bridging and introductory units at VET before transferring to university. This way VET gets students (and some of the prestige of university) and the university gets students educated at low cost and well. The university also gets the benefit of VET's nationally standardized courses and recognition of prior learning procedures. Unfortunate this system is under threat from a few rogue VET operators (not associated with universities) who are exploiting the students and threatening the reputation of the sector.

Australian Unviersites Can Offer Low Cost On-line Courses

In "Pay-per-use will keep low-cost rivals at bay" (The Australian, October 30, 2013), Professor Jim Barber, Vice Chancellor of the University of New England suggests that federal regulations are preventing Australian universities offering low cost on-line courses. He suggests that the Australian Tertiary Education Act (2011) is being interpreted by regulators in a way which measures inputs, not the education outcomes and this disadvantages efficient on-line providers. Also he argues the Higher Education Support Act (2003) requires universities to charge international students the full cost of their education. However, I suggest that neither of these laws preclude universities from offering low cost, on-line courses.

Four years ago I proposed an on-line course at the ANU, with no lectures, no examinations and no requirement for attendance. Many of my colleagues said that such a course could not be approved under the university's rules. So I looked at those rules and found they were much more flexible than folklore suggested. It was certainly much easier to have a course approved which followed the then standard pattern of face-to-face lectures, tutorials and a final paper examination. However, I just had to explain how I would meet the required standards, in a slightly different way and the course was approved.

In part this was a process of mapping what the usual inputs for a course were, as well as the expected student outputs. As an example I looked at the number of hours of lectures and tutorials a student typically was expected to attend and the amount of material (translated to pages of notes) they were provided with. Also I looked at the amount of assessment usually carried out, in its various forms. I then provided an equivalent amount of content to the students, activities for them to do, support from staff and assessment.

As a former public servant I was award of the difficulty of being seen to be doing something different, so I also made sure my on-line course fitted onto the standard university timetable and used the standard evaluation process.

I suggest Professor Barber could apply the same approach to have low cost, on-line programs approved under federal legislation. It will need to be shown that their output driven measures of quality give results at least as good as the conventional input-driven methods. It will need to be documented in great detail that costs are being fully recovered for international students, even though the fees are lower than for conventional courses. This will require considerably more work, more development cost and some frustration, but is feasible.

eLearning in the Developing World

Continuing my browsing of the shelves of the ADFA Library, I came across "Reconsidering Open and Distance Learning in the Developing World: Meeting Students' Learning Needs"  by David Kember (Routledge, 2007). This traces the development of distance university education in developing nations, especially as it relates to the UK Open University Model. This is very much a personal account with the author having experience in education in Hong Kong, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fuji and the UK. While written in the relatively early days of Internet education, the principles are still very applicable today's MOOCs. The University of the South Pacific provides an interesting model, being an institution run in cooperation by twelve nations, spread across a significant portion of the world. Many will find it surprising that the model of distance education made world famous by Open University UK was largely derived from what is called the "Armidale model" at University of New England, Australia. The experience of the University of South Africa, with an unsuccessful attempt at placing computers in schools for distance education, provides a lessen in the risks of technological optimism.