Separate or embedded? Strategic choices for universities in online education
Universities face various questions when starting to develop a portfolio of online courses and degrees. One key decision for more ambitious universities seeking to grow online student numbers and their portfolio is whether to establish a separate online arm with dedicated functions and responsibility for new degrees and, potentially, legacy ones. A related question is whether the university should also create a distinct online brand.
These two considerations get to the heart of some overarching aspects of operating in this space: how you organise things internally to be successful, and how you present yourself externally to a prospective online student audience.
UK universities operating in the online student market have taken different approaches, and the models they have developed vary in size and shape.
Why universities may need a different model for online education
For some, the idea of treating online degrees differently within a university, and in how they are presented externally, may seem odd. Why deviate from the existing model of degrees being decentralised in academic schools, supported by current professional service functions? This view may also be reinforced by the experience of the pandemic, when courses were delivered online within the existing organisational structure.
There is much that could be said here, but perhaps the key reason for considering a different model and organisational approach is that you are serving a different audience. In UK higher education, by far the largest group of students are those studying full-time undergraduate degrees on campus, aged 20 or under. According to HESA, in 2023/24 there were over one million such students, making up more than a third of all students in UK higher education.
This is the dominant audience for most UK universities, and the audience most closely associated with higher education. But it is far from the dominant audience for online education. Whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level, the overwhelming majority of online students at UK universities are aged 30 or over and studying part-time. There is a significant difference between the core audiences currently served by universities and the audiences for online education.
Understanding the online student audience
Nothing prevents a university from developing an online education proposition targeted at students under 20, but this would be more ambitious and challenging than trying to reach the existing audience, for whom this mode of delivery is often more suited to their circumstances. Similarly, most universities enter the online student market to diversify and reach a different audience from the one they predominantly serve already.
There are fundamental differences between the audience most universities are set up to serve and the core online student audience. As a result, operations that are understandably geared towards young, full-time, on-campus undergraduates - or indeed the 55% of full-time postgraduate students (HESA 23/24), are often not well aligned to a different audience.
Take recruitment as an example. If your dominant focus is recruiting school leavers to a full-time on-campus undergraduate degree, much is laid out before you. You know when your target audience starts to seriously consider university, you know when they will apply, and you know where to engage with them. Contrast this with the online postgraduate student market, which is the larger of the two main online degree markets. An adult could consider an online degree at any point. They are not on a set progression pathway, nor are they necessarily guided by teachers, careers advisers, or parents. There are no UCAS discovery days or open day events. Typically, they must undertake their own research on what is available, which could happen at any time of year and over a protracted period.
Pathways into courses and degrees are often non-linear and do not follow the kind of timeline school leavers applying to university are on. Universities need to be set up to reach prospective learners on a regular basis, and they must be prepared to capture and nurture leads with longer decision cycles rather than simply capturing a percentage share of that year’s cohort applying to university.
This is just one example of the organisational differences and the potential implications for marketing and recruitment, which play out across areas such as messaging, channel mix and paid media strategy, content marketing, lead generation and management, and the processes involved in recruitment and admissions. Universities face the challenge of developing this new capability and capacity within their existing functions or establishing a separate, dedicated function.
Balancing priorities between online and on-campus students
But it is not only about audience alignment but also prioritisation.
I remember speaking to the head of marketing at a university that had a significant number of online students, having entered the market several years earlier. Even so, this number was dwarfed by the on-campus population. They told me that despite this imbalance, the energy devoted to marketing online students was disproportionate, because reaching and recruiting them required different approaches.
This highlights the challenge of prioritisation within an existing model and across different audiences. You might think, for example, you can allocate a portion of your existing marketing activity and capability towards online students in a way that feels proportionate to their cohort size, but this may not be sufficient or effective.
Marketing and other activities to support online education can often be inversely related to the proportion this group represents within your student body overall. Budget, resource, and capability for online education cannot simply be apportioned according to cohort size within the broader student population. I have seen struggles to secure sufficient resource and buy-in from existing organisational functions to effectively and proportionately support online education.
Similarly, in other areas such as learning design, media production, and learning technology, existing functions are typically more arm’s-length, offering discrete, time-limited engagements such as learning design workshops and drop-ins. One reason for this is that they are often centralised teams with limited resources but a remit to support schools, departments, and programmes across the institution. Suddenly allocating the level of dedicated and continuous support needed to design, develop and produce a high-quality online degree and get it to market quickly would significantly reduce the capacity and scope of that institutional learning and teaching resource.
Then there is student support. The very reasons that attract students to online programmes, such as their flexibility to fit around busy lives, can also make them more susceptible to drop-out. This arguably makes a student support model that operates reactively, responding when students reach out, less suitable for online learners, who require a more anticipatory approach designed to make contact and provide guidance before issues and barriers arise.
This same prioritisation challenge and perception can also apply to the level of investment and recruitment needed for a dedicated approach. Given that university decision makers and budget holders are unlikely to fully understand the differences and needs of online education operations, the issue of pro-rating budgets and resources is likely to arise here too. Cue questions such as: why do we need this number of staff, or a team of this size?
There is a strong argument that a dedicated approach involving internal change in terms of capability and capacity can bring wider institutional benefits. There is also an argument that some duplication of effort may result from having online and on-campus education demarcated in this way. In the US, where a higher proportion of institutions are further ahead with online education than in the UK, there is currently a much stronger narrative in favour of an embedded approach. Duplication of effort is often cited as a key concern, with examples such as online and on-campus marketing functions bidding for the same keywords.
However, to present the other case, from an organisational change perspective it is clear why setting up something new may feel more appealing and straightforward, and may carry the sense of a clean slate. It is too simplistic to be fixed about what the best route is in all cases.
Branding choices for online education
There is also the sub-question of external branding. The three main potential pathways are:
Develop online education with no specific new branding
Bring online programmes under a University of XXXX Online brand
Create something completely new
In general, this choice tends to boil down to option 1 or 2 and is to some extent influenced by the organisational approach, with a sub-brand (adding ‘online’) being more closely aligned with a dedicated model. Some questions that can arise for learners with a sub-brand are whether online offerings, which may appear slightly separate from the main institution, provide the same quality as on-campus equivalents. Ironically, online programmes may be of much higher quality, but there remains a lingering and rather unnuanced perception that online is inherently lower quality.
There are also related questions around whether “online” will appear on certificates. In reality, there are plenty of examples of universities successfully offering online education both under their existing brand and under a sub-brand, which makes this question less critical to success and more a matter of judgement based on other factors.
Pace, scale and long-term commitment
The case for new capabilities in online education operations and delivery is clear. Regardless of whether an embedded or dedicated approach is taken, there are cross-cutting considerations that also act as influencing factors. The pace at which you want to move and the scale of the portfolio you are looking to offer both play a role. Universities that want to launch a significant suite of online degrees quickly often take a dedicated approach, frequently working with an online programme management (OPM) partner as a type of outsourced solution.
On the point of pace, I have yet to see an in-house university approach, whether embedded or dedicated, come close to matching the speed at which OPMs can bring online degrees to market. For those wanting to move faster, a dedicated option that aligns with the ethos of a skunk works, being more agile and less constrained by bureaucracy, is often more suitable.
In terms of ambitions around scale, this too may tend to lead towards a more dedicated approach, as the type and level of resource needed to support a significant volume of students may be best established separately rather than by disrupting existing functions. However, this is also influenced by how an institution is truly thinking about online education. A diversification motive can sometimes have a non-committal, short-term flavour to it, if I can put it that way.
Often it stems from a desire to solve a revenue problem rather than being vision-oriented towards serving a new population of learners and making a long-term change. In that sense, it does not have the same sense of perennial commitment as, say, serving the young adult school-leaver undergraduate audience. Ultimately, most of the universities regarded as examples in online education are those that do not treat it as a bolt-on to address short-term concerns, but rather embrace it as a key part of the university’s identity and focus.
Although a number of UK universities have moved to develop online degrees in recent years, whether through an embedded or dedicated approach, I question how many will last the course. Nevertheless, while the choices universities face in operationalising and presenting their online course portfolios may lead down different paths, it is clear that, given current and projected needs, developing to better serve a mature student audience, motivated by professional development, advancement, upskilling, and reskilling, would be a wise investment.
Making wise choices in a shifting landscape
In the eyes of some, the question of how you operationalise things internally to be successful, and how you present yourself externally to a prospective online student audience, is clear cut, with advocates on both sides. Personally, although I think there is somewhat greater advocacy at present for an embedded approach, which is linked in part to new online education services focused on internal enablement, and to some OPMs pivoting towards fee-for-service models given the burden of upfront investment in the old model, this is not a decision to be made solely in reference to the zeitgeist. As I heard someone say recently, espousing hard and fast rules is the purview of fools, and decisions of this kind require wisdom and should be contingent on a range of factors rather than slavishly adhering to the spirit of the times.
