Short courses on trial...
If you've been following UK higher education policy, you'll know that a change to the student finance system is set to take place in 2025 with the introduction of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE). This is how the government describes the change:
“From 2025, the lifelong loan entitlement will provide individuals with a loan entitlement to the equivalent of 4 years of post-18 education to use over their lifetime. It will be available for both modular and full-time study at higher technical and degree levels (levels 4 to 6), regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities.”
For those familiar with the ideas behind the Stanford University's Open Loop University project, the LLE offers potential to shift from several, consecutive years of front-loaded university education at the beginning of adulthood, to a lifetime of funded learning opportunities. This policy change is very much “on trend” given the strong focus on lifelong learning seen in recent years.
In anticipation of this change, the Office for Students (OfS) launched a Higher Education Short Course Trial, inviting higher education institutions (HEI) to bid for funding to develop short courses of 30 or 40 credits at Levels 4-6 in specific subject areas.
The trial essentially aimed to evaluate how HEIs could adapt existing modules into short courses for upskilling or retraining, assess student demand for these courses, test the impact of a new loan on course participation, and generally improve understanding of short course provision ahead of the launch of LLE in 2025.
The trial period, which began in December 2021 with the release of funding to providers prior to courses running over the 2022-2023 academic year, has now concluded. In January 2024, an evaluation report of the trial, commissioned by the OfS and conducted by the Careers Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC), was released, and it makes for interesting reading to say the least.
Upon initial reading of the report, it's difficult not to recall the words of David Latchman, Vice-Chancellor of Birkbeck, University of London, who described the trial as "a total catastrophe" and "a fiasco". Evidently, trials are not expected to be flawless and are designed to reveal issues, but this trial seems to have been more about falling flat than failing forward. However, in saying that I think the trial does offer lessons for UK higher education in a number of ways that are worth reflecting upon.
The short course trial in numbers
Twenty-two HEIs participated in the short course trial, initially aspiring to offer over 100 new short courses to around 2,000 students. However, the reality was starkly different: of the 96 courses offered by these providers, only 17 courses from 10 providers were actually delivered, with a total enrolment of just 125 students.
In many instances courses received insufficient applications to be viable enough to run, with many running with fewer than five students. Some providers even waived fees or opened courses to staff to make sure courses could run.
In a UK context in which HEIs are increasingly seeking to diversify income streams and reach new audiences for reasons of financial sustainability, these outcomes don’t breed confidence in the short course market. This is reflected in the fact that two HEIs subsequently pulled their courses due to concerns over financial viability.
As this trial was closely linked to student finance it’s also worth adding that only 41 students took up the offer of a loan, and only 11 took up a very belated offer of a Student Support Bursary for those facing financial barriers.
These numbers make for unpleasant reading and greatly diminish any scope to learn lessons from this trial.
Why did the short course trial fall flat?
There are broader lessons surfaced by this trial that merit reflection, as they have relevance both on these types of courses and beyond.
The first and one of the most fundamental ones is around the target audience. The original proposal emphasised focusing on mature students, either new to HE or returning, while also underlining the importance of collaborating with employers to upskill both mature students and employed individuals. This dual focus seems to have led to uncertainty among participating HEIs, with some designing courses for both audiences and others concentrating on one.
In many ways, this audience is typically the main focus of online courses but there seems to have been a disregard for lessons learned in online education.
The first of which is that traditionally universities main marketing efforts have not been focussed on these audiences. That often means there is a lack of capability and experience in marketing to an audience that falls outside of HEs traditional core demographic. Marketing to this audience, as those in online education will tell you, often requires time to nurture and convert leads, build a sales funnel, and costs money.
Remarkably, the funding provided by the OfS was restricted to course development and not allowed to be spent on marketing. As well as this, HEIs seem to have underestimated the effort and cost required for promoting these courses to less familiar audiences, as indicated in the report:
“Not all (HEIs) seemed to have predicted the effort and cost necessary to implement promotions into what were new markets for them.”
This underscores a fundamental naivety here on the part of the OfS, highlighting certain knowledge gaps about the sector it regulates. All of this is greatly exacerbated by the fact that HEIs were essentially introducing a new and relatively unknown educational product, if I can put it like that.
In this context, the trial was doomed to fall flat and tell us little about demand, which the OfS stated was the primary purpose of the exercise.
How short is a short course?
The other dimension worth exploring here is the definition of a short course. All courses offered were either 30 or 40 credits, so not an insubstantial level of commitment. This course sizing was clearly seen as an issue by several employers, who did not consider this course sizing as indicative of a short course. There were also concerns raised about courses being too large, containing too much content, involving too much individual study and ultimately requiring too much time in general.
Yet again this is an area where insights from online education could have been valuable. For online courses aimed at similar learners careful calibration is needed to ensure that modules don’t entail too high a weekly study commitment, which can be challenging for those seeking flexibility alongside other major commitments. Similarly modules that are too long can become fatiguing, while those that are too short can feel transient.
Although there is no universal approach to credit sizing for online courses targeting mature and professional learners, it’s quite common to see modules mainly comprising 10 and 15 credits, for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
It is puzzling why it appears so difficult to observe and learn from existing practices in higher education that cater effectively to these audiences.
The trials of modality
It was interesting to read about the delivery modes adopted by HEIs taking part in the trial. The evaluation report highlighted that
“The most common delivery model was blended or hybrid learning (by all but two of the 22 providers), with some initial in-person teaching on campus and the majority of subsequent learning remote and online.”
But here again there were issues.
Students were seeking greater flexibility, struggling to commit to courses due to their pacing and the requirement for set time and place in-person elements, as well as online synchronous sessions.
Given that the majority of students were working full-time while studying, this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. While in-person and synchronous online learning have great value, a careful balance is sought in online education. There are reasons why the majority of online education is asynchronous and it's unsurprising that the evaluation report contains numerous calls for more asynchronous learning that's not simply content delivery, but includes interaction with educators and peers.
I’ve long thought that asynchronous online learning is a significant challenge for UK higher education. Although there are excellent practices and examples across the sector, as a whole it's an area that the sector consistently struggles with.
Similar to the earlier point about marketing, it deviates from the traditional model of UK HE teaching and learning and a rhythm of self-study punctuated by chunks of synchronous and/or in-person teaching. Shifting away from this established pattern is challenging, especially as it involves going against the grain of the well-established operating model.
In a similar vein to modality, pacing was also an issue here with fixed block structures proving problematic for learners in full time work. Alternative pacing approaches such as self-paced, mastery or competency-based don’t seem to have been considered here, but are arguably more suitable for this audience.
The trials of designing and developing short courses
The work involved in designing and developing courses is another important aspect of the evaluation report. What’s evident is that HEIs found the process of converting existing undergraduate degree modules wasn’t simply a case of “lift and shift”. The report emphasised the fact that courses need to be specifically designed for the target audience, taking into account their needs and contexts.
Speaking from personal experience, even the effort of moving courses from in-person delivery to blended or online delivery can be substantial. This challenge is made even harder when the target audience is fundamentally different to learners studying full-time at the beginning of adulthood.
In a similar way to credit sizing, this highlights how taking short courses from existing undergraduate degrees to convert, might seem like it’s light work, but the reality is, it is far from it. Adapting a 15 credit module from an online postgraduate taught degree for example, whilst still involving work, is likely to be less challenging than a larger module from an on-campus undergraduate degree.
That highlights the nature of the choices made in respect to the LLE. If anything good comes out of this pilot, it should be that there’s a better understanding of the fact that modularisation and/or taking modules from undergraduate degrees to offer separately is going to involve a huge amount of work for HEIs if it is to be successful.
The trials of processes and systems
One final point to make concerns the existing HE infrastructure and processes supporting short courses. It was clear that there were issues experienced in relation to the speed of HE processes in validating courses. This was something that hindered this trial and frustrated employers, with some describing engaging with HEIs as “somewhat bureaucratic”. For short courses to succeed, titles and curriculum will need to align with real demand. That will require a certain level of agility and speed to bring courses to market. The trial seems to have highlighted the inherent barriers to this presented by existing HE processes and cultures.
Similarly the trial highlighted a known issue: HE systems are often not configured to support flexible learning. They are built around the archetypal student and degree and sometimes anything that veers from that automatically means the computer says no.
It’s a significant challenge that many HEIs are trying to remedy and it’s not discussed or considered enough in debates about the evolving nature of higher educational offerings. This issue will also be a fundamental obstacle for LLE implementation as well as for moves towards flexible and online learning.
Summing up…
Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the HEIs involved, this trial feels like a missed opportunity, with the numbers and narrative in the evaluation report making for pretty miserable reading.
This endeavour frustratingly highlights systemic challenges and barriers that, while well-known, should have been more thoroughly considered in conducting a trial of this nature. They also warrant serious reflection in the broader context of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE).
At the heart of this trial was an aim to cater for an audience that HE has not traditionally served extensively, adult learners with significant work commitments. While there are numerous examples of HEIs that have and do serve them with distinction in different ways, in aggregate the sector is not orientated towards them as a core audience.
From this reality flows a number of challenges and barriers, ranging from effectively marketing to this audience, determining the most suitable size and structure of courses to fit their context, and identifying the most harmonious delivery methods. On the whole, these things don’t come naturally to a sector for which the archetypal undergraduate experience is still king.
You can then add to that the HE sector’s systems infrastructure, developed around that archetypal undergraduate experience, which doesn’t easily support anything that veers from that, and laboursome processes and culture that lengthen the time in which new courses get to market.
For some, the main challenge of LLE is credit transfer or the lack thereof, but the challenges are much more complex than simply that. A particularly difficult route has been chosen by defining short courses as 30-40 credits and extracting them from undergraduate degrees, because this is liable to entail more significant redesign and re-work than might be the case if another route had been taken.
As is too often the case, the valuable lessons and insights from online distance education have been overlooked and both the trial and the LLE are worse off for it.
