2026 Q3 Review: Online learning developments in UK higher education
It would be easy to begin this review by dredging up the myriad negative news stories about the sector. After all, there is hardly a shortage of them. But as someone who is increasingly weary of a wider trend towards something I would call crisis-flation, which is the tendency to elevate literally anything into a full-blown crisis, I want to deliberately focus on what I think is some broadly positive news.
This last quarter has seen a record number of 18-year-olds (262,820) accepted onto undergraduate courses at UK universities by results day. This is notable because, if you follow the news, it would not be surprising for you to conclude that the view of the whole population is that going to university is a complete waste of time and therefore fewer people must be going as a consequence.
Clearly, some qualification is needed here. The rise is a result of there being more 18-year-olds in the population, but roughly the same proportion (approx. 32%) applied and were accepted. So the proportion is not increasing, but it is not rapidly declining either.
A significant number of 18-year-olds are still choosing to go to university. This is despite widespread commentary focused on the weak ROI of university. This includes recent comments from Amanda Spielman stating that bad degrees are eating up young people’s lives, or the “voracious bad degrees crisis”, as I like to call it. In case anyone is interested, I think this analysis is not yet good, but not inadequate, and on balance I would grade it as “Requires Improvement”.
All that aside, there is, of course, validity in considering questions such as whether university will significantly contribute to you getting a good job, making more money over time, and whether the debt you might incur is worth it relative to those things.
But you would be either naive, or work in policy, to believe that human decision-making is consistently and wholly built upon a rational, objective, cold-hearted evaluation of the financial pros and cons. There will be reasons why young people choose to go that are due to other factors, reasons they may not be able to articulate. This is why I am always wary of the litany of surveys in the sector. There is a fundamental difference between stated preference and revealed preference.
There are also other, less instrumental forms of value that people say they get from going to university, which I think were well articulated in this LinkedIn post I came across recently. This excerpt captures the essence:
“Becoming independent, meeting different people, having the space to experiment, make things, get things wrong and work out what you actually wanted to do, in a space filled with thousands of other people your age doing the same. You don’t get that opportunity living at home in your early 20s.”
None of this shuts down a debate on what university should be for and its ROI, but it highlights that people don’t necessarily make choices exclusively along those lines and that people can gain different forms of value from the experience.
Universities should take confidence from the number of people still choosing to apply to go. If it were my sole job to simply encourage continued participation in higher education, I would be telling people just how many people are choosing to go and, as I say here, not always falling into the trap of defensive messaging that tries to prove worth on critics’ terms. I would also be making a more confident case for wider forms of value in the experience itself.
So although it would be easier for me to begin with a list of course closures, redundancies and financial woes that are surfacing regularly, there are some positives even in such challenging times.
But, as this is an article focused on online learning developments (oh yes it is), it’s time to take a look through some selective developments of note related to online learning in UK HE over the last quarter.
Edtech developments: Turnitin, AI and acquisitions
It has felt as though this past quarter has seen a number of notable developments amongst edtech companies. The top story, which has even made mainstream HE reporting, has been the growing number of UK universities deciding to stop using Turnitin when their contracts run out.
There are conflicting views on why more universities have been reaching this decision. A recent statement by Newcastle University highlights “concerns arising from changes to Turnitin’s End-User Licence Agreement, particularly around the potential use of colleague and student data for AI purposes from next year.” In response to these types of concerns, Turnitin has said it is not using student work to train an LLM. Some people have also pointed to financial drivers behind the growing number of universities deciding to stop using Turnitin.
Whatever the truth is here, I would argue that, to an extent, it is secondary to some other factors. Firstly, in all my time in higher education, Turnitin has been the edtech company that would be top of my list for the most commonly encountered negative sentiment. Secondly, this feels as though it is as much about a moment in time as anything else. Even as far back as 2007, students were challenging the company’s secondary use of student work. What this cultural moment has done, with all the challenges, fears and objections around AI, is amplify these things. Allied to these developments, its product increasingly feels as though it addresses old assessment challenges and not new ones.
The company faces a very hard road. Given the sheer number of UK universities that have been using it, it doesn’t take a genius to tell you the only way is down. But the other challenge it now faces is emerging competition. This includes Inspera through its originality tool and AI text detection partnership with Pangram, and Studiosity through its acquisition of Norvalid and subsequent development of its Validate tool. I expect to see more UK universities joining the likes of Southampton, Newcastle and Westminster in choosing not to renew.
Beyond the more headline-grabbing news, this quarter has seen a continuation of acquisitions. In September, Wooclap announced the acquisition of Vevox, which consolidates two similar classroom response tools into one and represents a development of note amongst non-core, supplementary edtech used by some universities.
The most eye-catching acquisition, though, was Kortext buying StudyStash, an AI study platform developed by two University of Birmingham graduates. This continues the trend of AI edtech start-ups being acquired by bigger players. My own reflections on this acquisition are that the reportedly eight-figure purchase is a good deal for the founders. Quite apart from the value proposition and impact of StudyStash, AI edtech start-ups will inherently be benefiting from a halo effect that they might not be able to capitalise on in years to come.
Two further developments worth highlighting here include the launch of Moodle Marketplace, which aims to improve how Moodle manages its wider ecosystem of plugins and integrations. The second was the announcement of an extended partnership between D2L and Drieam, which is centred around the integration of Brightspace and Eduframe to support the offering of short courses, CPD and other forms of non-degree provision. This helps align D2L in particular with the growing interest in continuing education-style courses.
Online undergraduate degrees and signs of demand from younger students
One development of note in this last quarter which has received very little wider attention was put out by the Open University. This is the fact that it is seeing an increase in the number of young people choosing to study with it. In 2025/26, it reported a record 3,398, 18 or 19-year-olds starting with it, and extended its enrolment deadline to accommodate this.
This is interesting evidence of a change in preferences amongst some young people. The extent to which this is a desired rather than a distressed choice, given increasing affordability issues related to a traditional campus-based option, would be helpful to understand. Also, going back to my first point, this needs to be considered in relation to an increase in the number of 18-year-olds in the population too.
However, this is still a positive and interesting signal for a market that is one of the most underexplored and underdeveloped in UK HE, that is, online degrees targeted at school leavers. The vast majority of the over 130,000 online undergraduates in 2024/25 were aged 25 or above, and many degrees on the market are more oriented towards mature students. This signal gives some degree of confidence for those willing to engage in some market testing, either through new programmes or a shift in targeting for existing ones.
For the OU, this must frankly be some very welcome news, as despite still having large numbers of students, it has experienced a massive decline in enrolments in recent years. At the same time, direct competitors such as Arden University have seen student numbers increase year on year.
Online education partnerships in UK higher education
In my last review, I noted how there had been limited new partnership announcements, but this was not indicative of a lack of activity. The last quarter has seen a few new partnerships established between online education players and UK universities. The first is of a slightly different type from those I usually cover here, but is representative of the times and the level of interest in transnational education (TNE).
This was a validation partnership announced in September between Southampton Solent University and Exceed College to deliver online degrees in the Middle East and Dubai. While these types of partnerships generally get little attention, there is an extensive web of internationally focused partnerships and partners focused on online education, of which Exceed is one. This is an area I hope to shed more light on in the future.
Beyond this, there are some partnerships that have been established between online education companies and UK universities. These include Swansea University and OES establishing a partnership centred around marketing and recruitment, which is a type of tie-up that we’re starting to see more of.
There is some opacity around another new partnership involving a Russell Group university focused on business programmes, which I hope to be able to be less mysterious about in the future.
However, after a relatively quiet Q2, we’re seeing more partnerships coming to fruition, and the number of UK universities actively considering or pursuing them is still substantial, albeit not in the public domain. I feel confident that there will be more announced before I start consuming mince pies.
New online degrees, AI courses and microcredentials
In respect of new courses being launched, one small theme seems to be new computer science and AI-focused courses. In the past quarter, Heriot-Watt University announced the launch of an MSc in Computer Science with a specialisation in AI with its partner Coursera. This adds to the already significant number of options to study computer science at PGT level and to the level of competition.
Another really notable computer science course announcement was Oxford Lifelong Learning starting to offer an online version of David J. Malan’s CS50: An Introduction to Computer Science course. Saying this course is popular feels like something of an understatement, as to date edX, where the course has spent much of its life, reports over 7 million cumulative enrolments. Hopefully, the addition of this successful course will give the University of Oxford’s reputation the boost it so desperately needs.
There have also been a number of AI-focused courses launched. These include an AI engineering accelerator programme between the University of Cambridge’s Professional and Continuing Education and its partner FourthRev. This further expands FourthRev’s career accelerator portfolio, which sits in an interesting and relatively distinct product space, being neither short enough to be considered a short course nor substantial enough or credit-bearing such that it might be equivalent to a postgraduate degree or exit award.
One of the most interesting AI course announcements I’ve seen so far was again Oxbridge-focused (sorry), with the launch of a PgDip in Artificial Intelligence in Education from the University of Oxford’s Department of Education. This interested me primarily because there is a significant amount of online PGT education provision, but little currently that’s directly centred on AI. The combination of the course’s subject focus, a strong institutional brand and the smaller commitment that a PgDip entails means this will be one I, and I’m sure others, will be watching in terms of interest and enrolments. No pressure guys.
There have also been a number of announcements which essentially encompass the disaggregation of online degrees. The University of London continues to add new online postgraduate stackable microcredentials. It added a further seven new microcredentials in finance and project management in July, as it continues to build out its new modular, portable and highly flexible portfolio under the banner of its global digital campus.
The University of Liverpool also announced the launch of a range of online short courses that are essentially 15-credit postgraduate modules designed to serve two distinct aims. Firstly, they can act as gateway courses into an online master’s degree or serve as standalone professional development courses supporting upskilling and reskilling.
While these developments may point to a trend of disaggregation, they are probably somewhat unrepresentative of the wider sector, which in many instances fundamentally lacks the infrastructure and capabilities to do this kind of thing.
While this might be appealing and attract a lot of advocacy, the examples of a very unique institution and a university that is operating online programmes via an OPM are not representative of the sector at large. Whatever you think about the direction the sector should be going in, for many institutions the obstacles to doing this kind of thing themselves are significant.
Reflections on this quarter’s developments
If I had to pick one interesting development over this quarter, it would be the reporting from the Open University on what seems like growing interest in online undergraduate study from a school-leaver-age audience. This is fascinating both for the opportunity it may present and the challenge it poses to the limited number of universities that actually have anything approaching significant levels of online undergraduate provision.
The challenge is one of audience alignment, because for a long time, online undergraduate and postgraduate provision has attracted and been aimed towards a much older audience than on-campus provision, and only a mere fraction of online students study at full-time intensity.
Although universities have been tweaking the experience to accommodate changing student needs, including lounges for commuter students and condensed timetables, none have yet gone all in on fully online provision. This seems a rare case of a potential alignment between fully online delivery and, to put it bluntly, the audience that we all know the sector in aggregate cares the most about.
I think it will take more than this reporting to give universities, particularly those that are not mature players in the online education market, the confidence to test this market, but it might start to challenge some views on the markets online education can serve.
Ultimately, however, at a time when diversification is more necessary than desirable, the gap in many universities is any form of provision that is geared towards a more mature audience looking for something different. There’s still significant potential for many universities to better orient themselves towards and serve a different audience through online courses and programmes, and this quarter, like others, has shown a number of different ways in which some are trying to do that.
In these most challenging times, online education continues to offer opportunities for universities to broaden the audiences they serve and grow their student numbers. The perpetual question, however, is not whether opportunities exist, but whether universities are genuinely willing and strategically smart enough to grasp them.
