Whilst all of these announcements focus around growth and profitability of private companies working in online education, what transcends all of this news is the demand and supply for online education and a changing overall landscape.

These types of partnerships are only set to grow in the coming years and with that we will see greater scrutiny and debate. This may lead to different partnership models emerging beyond the traditional 10-year, 50%+ revenue share. Fee-for-service models and incubator approaches that intentionally build university capabilities may become more common.

In essence what characterises all of this advice is deliberate, strategic, well-informed and thought-through decision making in relation to MOOC platform partnerships. Some universities have not always been very rigorous in this respect.

In online education the lack of consideration of the social dimension will not only result in a reductive experience, it will also have the potential to stifle participation and involvement, and in that sense be counterproductive.

It shouldn’t be controversial to conclude that there was continuity but the teaching and study experience was hugely variable and in some cases problematic and suboptimal.

The promise of data will never be truly realised if there isn’t skill to design the means of gathering relevant and useful information related to the learning process, and the conditions and capabilities of taking that information and doing something with it.

Too often programmes are not connected, unified pathways but a collection of modules with some loose and unclear relationship to each other.

Unfortunately, what I think is becoming increasingly evident here in the UK and further afield is a digital education research field that earnestly pursues a cause but not truth. It believes itself to be righteous and this blinds it, and can make it insular and exclusionary.

The ascendency of Moodle and Blackboard is increasingly under threat. There is growing adoption of the two other big VLE players in Canvas and Brightspace, as well as the adoption of newer products like Aula.

What seems to be apparent are significant deficits when it comes to design and planning or envisaging and blueprinting a teaching and study experience.

Online education is a robust and resilient mode of teaching and study and by necessity or deliberately will play an even more important role in UK higher education in the future.

Through this mode of teaching and study there is potential to create conditions that lead to learning. The challenge is one of all forms of teaching – successful orchestration and design to create those conditions.

One of the big problems in online education is that video is chosen almost by default rather than it being a well-considered design choice.

If you want to change the teaching and study model then you have to change the organisational model that buttresses it.

As people return to campus it seems abundantly clear that the university residential model is still incredibly strong and dominant.

Foregoing some freedoms in how you use the VLE so that students might experience less unnecessary friction when they use it does not seem an unreasonable position to take and to adopt.

If personas are not built on the foundation of solid and significant research then their value is hugely diluted and becomes questionable.

An excellent learning designer will be a key role in the future of many education providers, but the challenge of switching to online teaching and learning is organisational change which means that everyone involved has to do their job in a slightly different way.

When we consider what technologies to use or recommend, too often we can unthinkingly choose digital technologies over other technologies, without a thoughtful process taking place.

If there is large unmet demand for learning, then someone will seek to meet it — if it’s not universities, then it will be interesting to observe what that will mean for education in the future