2025 Q4 Review: Online learning developments in UK higher education
It is time for the last quarterly review of the year, covering selected developments in the world of online learning in UK higher education. There have been a number of newsworthy developments in UK higher education as a whole which, although not directly influencing online education, have broader impacts. Alongside this, there has also been a range of online learning developments of note, so let us dive in.
Policy developments shaping UK higher education
This last quarter has been a policy fest for UK higher education, with some major overarching changes being announced and proposed. Firstly, there was the announcement that undergraduate tuition fees in England will start to rise with inflation from 2026 onwards, with Wales deciding to follow suit. The freezing of the fee level over a number of years has been one of the key factors universities have cited for their poor financial positions. Taken in isolation, this is positive, and the announcement also included plans to increase maintenance loans annually in line with inflation.
Secondly, there was the publication of the long awaited Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, which sets out government plans and priorities for the future. Personally, I thought the three big themes for higher education in this paper were specialisation, quality and flexibility. Time and time again, the paper called for higher education providers to become more specialised, and these two quotes encapsulate their diagnosis of the problem and the call to action.
“Too many providers with similar offerings are chasing the same students and there has been insufficient focus on each institution’s core purpose.”
“This call to specialise is intended to address the increasing homogeneity in the system.”
The other major theme was quality. There was a reaffirmation of the issues in franchising and measures to crack down on this, as well as a plan to link the fees providers can charge to judgements on quality, and legislation to allow the Office for Students to impose recruitment limits where growth risks poor quality.
The flexibility theme is reflected in the upcoming change to funding brought about by the introduction of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), but also in the plans announced for break points within degrees. The paper’s push towards provision that is more aligned with the needs of the economy is also related to this, and the following quote stood out to me as an overarching expression of the ambition:
“Ultimately, the sector will be more focused on enabling people to train and re-skill throughout their working lives, not just at the start of their career”
Unsurprisingly, there was nothing specific here for online education, but there is still plenty to reflect on. In terms of specialisation, there are clearly a range of universities that focus on their areas of strength when developing online courses and degrees, but equally there are others which, often through online programme management company (OPM) partnerships, have tended to develop portfolios in fairly predictable subject areas where demand is highest. In that sense, there are several examples of universities pursuing homogeneity through online learning rather than specialisation.
The quality point is another area of potential concern, given that the quality system is not well aligned with online learners. Because of the students it tends to serve and the flexible mode of study, online courses typically face more acute challenges in continuation and completion. One would hope that, given the wider focus on flexibility and support for a broader demographic of students, the quality system would also evolve in sympathy with this, but I’m not holding my breath.
The final major policy announcement came through the Autumn Budget, where we learned more specific details on the government’s international student fee levy on English higher education providers. The levy will be a flat fee of £925 per student for each year of study and will begin in 2028/29. Another detail of note is that universities will not be charged for their first 220 international students, which will exempt some with low numbers of international students.
Taken together, these developments are significant for the English HE sector in particular and do at least provide some certainty about issues that had been hanging in the air. Whether they will actually contribute to bolstering the financial health of the sector is debatable, and the paper itself set the expectation that there will be consolidation in the sector.
Although the specialisation agenda is admirable and the observations about it are not far off the mark, it will take a different mindset towards portfolio development and some boldness to shift to this any time soon.
New insights from online learner and postgraduate surveys
A really welcome development this last quarter was the first publication of the 2025 Voice of the Online Learner, UK edition survey results from the US OPM company Risepoint. This has been a long-standing annual survey in the US, but this is the first time a UK version has been run. I wrote a detailed article about this, but the overwhelming feeling from myself and others working in online education in UK higher education is that it is extremely welcome and provides a helpful source of information on online learners that can support greater and wider understanding of these students.
Another longer running UK survey published this quarter was Advance HE’s Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) 2025. It has been running for 16 years now and offers a rare glimpse into the experiences of postgraduate students on taught programmes. The main headline the report highlighted was that there had been a rise in the number of students reporting higher satisfaction with course quality, reaching its highest ever level of 86 per cent of respondents. This includes distance learning students, who reported a large increase in satisfaction relative to previous years. However, as the survey notes, this may be related to a change in the survey which no longer presents them with questions that are not relevant to them.
The report drew attention to the fact that, across the eleven thematic areas covering the student experience, Community scored significantly lower than anything else. These are useful findings, but I also feel this is a somewhat tricky area to research properly through a survey. Questions such as “There are sufficient opportunities to interact with other PGT students” are useful, but others about feeling part of a community and having a sense of belonging, while not terrible questions, raise more questions than they answer, at least in my mind.
Whilst I am glad we have surveys like this, I do think the sector’s overreliance on one research method for gathering student insight is problematic. As a result, we get useful aggregated findings, but these can be quite surface level and vague. One cannot help but think of the quote attributed to David Ogilvy about market research: “People don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.” We should certainly conduct more student research, but we should also conduct better and more sophisticated research that acknowledges this human insight.
Edtech market shifts, bankruptcy and acquisitions
This quarter has seen a raft of interesting news for a range of edtech and online education companies. Interestingly, there has been not one, but two universities deciding to change their virtual learning environments (VLE). First, Imperial College London announced that it would be switching from Blackboard Learn to Canvas from Instructure. Subsequently, D2L announced that the University of the West of Scotland would be switching from Aula to Brightspace by D2L. For those avid readers of my annual VLE market report, you will notice that trends reported across recent years are reinforced here. Instructure and D2L continue to gain market share, Blackboard by Anthology continues to lose share, and the demise of Aula as a market player is complete, as it will now only be used by the university that acquired the company, Coventry University.
It has not been the greatest of periods for Anthology, the company behind Blackboard, which earlier this quarter filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. The burden of debt taken on when Anthology and Blackboard merged ultimately proved too much, and this was compounded by a decline in new business and higher than expected client attrition, as reported by Moody’s Ratings analysts in April.
The B word inevitably sounds bad, but it is worth noting that Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a particular type of restructuring process, one that online education company 2U went through and arguably emerged from in better shape. It is hardly great PR, but the process has enabled Anthology to sell off its enterprise operations to Ellucian, and its lifecycle engagement and student success businesses to Encoura. The plan is to emerge as a debt free teaching and learning business rebranded as Blackboard Inc.
The company will emerge from this on a different footing, but the reputational impact and the uncertainty and concern it will have generated may persist. Whether the move succeeds, and what the longer term impacts will be, only time will tell.
In addition to developments in the VLE company space, there have also been a number of acquisitions this quarter. Recently, Learna Ltd, which could be described as a specialist healthcare focussed OPM, was acquired by Dutch online CPD company Reducate. Learna has a couple of partnerships with UK universities and now joins a portfolio of 15 brands within the Reducate family that support online CPD across different sectors.
Another acquisition of note was edtech company Studiosity acquiring Norwegian company Norvalid. This relatively new company focuses on technologies that seek to distinguish authentic student work from AI generated text, or, in Norvalid’s words:
“Validation is the opposite of AI detection: We search for evidence of a student's own writing rather than evidence of others' writing.”
Having been adopted by a growing number of UK universities, this addition will likely enhance the attractiveness of Studiosity’s offer, particularly as higher education continues to grapple with the impact of AI on academic integrity.
Evolving university partnerships in online education
This quarter has been very light on company partnership news, although interest remains and a number of universities are currently pursuing partnerships.
One announcement that did emerge was an expanded partnership between the University of Oxford and the US OPM company 2U. In addition to working with the University’s Blavatnik School of Government and Saïd Business School, they will now also be delivering online courses in partnership with the Faculty of Law, focusing on professional development courses. This announcement points to a deepening of the relationship with the University of Oxford but also highlights 2U’s growing brand messiness.
They now have three brands involved with this university. Firstly, there is GetSmarter, the online short course business that first partnered with Oxford Saïd Business School. Then we have edX, which partnered with the University of Oxford back in 2016 to offer online courses with the Blavatnik School of Government. Finally, there is 2U, the OPM company that bought them both. These brands feel like an increasingly unclear grouping, less holy trinity and more wholly confusing trinity.
One last piece of news for this section was the widely reported platform fee imposed by Coursera on its partners. In October, an email to partners stated the following:
To sustain this progress and continue investing in innovation that benefits our educators and learners, Coursera will implement a 15% Platform Fee beginning January 1, 2026, across all product types in our Consumer (excluding Degrees) and Enterprise channels. This fee will be charged to learners and customers using the platform, and will not change partner revenue-sharing percentages. Learner pricing remains unchanged. The fee applies to Q1 2026 activity and will be reflected in May 2026 disbursements.
Essentially, Coursera will be retaining 15 per cent of the fee that learners pay before any revenue sharing splits are applied, meaning they receive more revenue and their partners, universities, receive less. I highlighted in an article earlier this year that there seems to be a growing shift in the balance of power between Coursera and university partners, and this reflects that. Undoubtedly, university partners are unhappy with this move, but I would not be surprised to see this becoming a continuing trend.
My longer term concern with Coursera is that they have become one of those businesses that may have become myopically driven and influenced by quarterly financial reporting, and that with the new CEO we may be seeing a kind of Amazonification of the company, with this being the first seller squeeze.
Although directly observable online education company and university partnership news has been limited this quarter, developments are taking shape and I would expect that by the end of the next quarter we will be able to observe some new partnerships beginning and a number of existing partnerships coming to an end.
New online degree launches across UK higher education
It has been interesting to observe a number of new online degree launches in the past quarter, and I want to highlight a few here.
There have been a small number of new online undergraduate degrees launched, which is a welcome sign of growth in this area, as online degrees are still largely concentrated at postgraduate taught level. Falmouth University announced that its already significant and long standing online degree portfolio would expand with two new online undergraduate degrees, a BA (Hons) Game Art and a BA (Hons) Game Development. While a small number of universities internationally offer online bachelor degrees in this area, the UK has a dearth of options to study these programmes online at undergraduate level, so these new degrees are welcome.
This quarter has also seen another online undergraduate degree launch from an established university player in the online education market. Heriot Watt University has launched an online BSc Business Management, marking a move into online undergraduate degrees, albeit with a title that is one of the more established in the online undergraduate market. The degree showcases many of the trends in how online degrees are being developed and offered as products. It is an open enrolment, start any time degree that is self paced and flexible, you can pay per course and there is a performance based admissions route. In recent years, we have seen a growing number of degrees formulated in this way.
Staying with the business theme and in Scotland, this quarter saw yet another university enter the online MBA market. The University of Dundee, which has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late, announced the launch of a suite of online MBA products including a DBA. It is difficult to observe great levels of distinctiveness here, and perhaps the most eye catching aspect is the pricing, given these come in at under £9k for the whole course. Whether there is room in what is already a crowded market for more online MBAs is debatable, and it will be interesting to observe how well these courses perform in terms of enrolments, and whether the university can genuinely obtain a sustainable share of this market.
Another launch of note was the fifth online masters degree to be launched by the University of the Arts London (UAL) Online, an MA Illustration Practices. It is encouraging to see how UAL’s portfolio of online courses and degrees is growing, and these add to a small but increasing cluster of online degrees in the creative arts in UK higher education.
Last but not least, I have to mention the launch of the University of Liverpool’s Master of Arts in The Beatles, Heritage and Culture, which will be offered online from September 2026. One wonders if the government would class this as a university meeting the challenge to specialise in areas of strength and specialist advantage….
Reflections on this quarter’s developments
There is no doubt that this quarter has been most notable for policy, as it feels as though a long wait for clarity has finally been provided on fees at least. The desired trajectory has also been laid out for higher and further education, but whether we will get there is debatable. The focus on specialisation makes sense to an extent, but it goes against the grain of how UK higher education has operated for many years.
I hope the underlying message here, of needing to move away from a herd mentality and be bolder and somewhat more differentiated, is heeded. It is certainly something I think we need to see more of when it comes to online education portfolio development. The degree market is at times running the risk of becoming somewhat commodified due to the conservatism that exists.
The small moves in the online undergraduate degree market witnessed this quarter are a welcome divergence from this, and if the market is to grow, and student choice of study mode is to increase, then it will involve a different calibration between risk and caution than exists at the moment.
