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Getting High on Your Own Supply
229 Plays7 months ago
Phil, Morgan, and Neil take a look at the optimistic projects often involved in starting online education initiatives. What are some examples of what Morgan calls 'optimism run amok', and what are the causes? What is the role of institutional brand in online education potential?
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Transcript
Introduction to Online Education Optimism
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Online Education Across the Atlantic. It's great to be here with Neil and Morgan today. One of our big topics that we're going to cover is looking at sort of optimism when we look at online programs and what that says about programs initiating it and see what we can learn about this optimism and setting up online programs.
00:00:32
Speaker
But before we do that, we'd love to sort of get to some of the current news items with that.
Current News and Apologies
00:00:38
Speaker
Sorry for no good stories and chit chat for you too. But Neil, take it away. Guys, I'm interested to know what's been what's been spinning metaphorically over in the US. But I think I think one of the things that we maybe flagged is kind of around
AI Tools in Universities: Opportunities and Doubts
00:00:55
Speaker
AI. And I know there's an article recently an inside higher ed around universities developing AI
00:01:02
Speaker
kind of tools themselves and that kind of chimes with a kind of experience i had last week so i was at a conference last week down in london so it's the ride conference stands for research in distance education and e-learning
00:01:16
Speaker
I'm not so keen on the e-learning but I think Ride works as a title but it's from the Centre for Online and Distance Education out of the University of London and one of the things that kind of I guess got me interested in thinking about this kind of topic was one of the presentations which was around the University of London kind of experimenting with a kind of an AI
00:01:37
Speaker
teaching assistant and their experiences with that but it sounds like that there's a number of at least one or two institutions in the US that are also kind of looking to develop their kind of own tools around this. I'm just interested to hear a bit about that and whether that article is representing a kind of couple and it's more widespread or whether those are the kind of outliers at the moment.
US Universities vs. ChatGPT: A Technological Showdown
00:02:01
Speaker
Well, if the article came out today and I think by definition it represents the outliers, I certainly, I don't know, Morgan, if you've heard any more than the ones that were mentioned in this report. I haven't heard any outside of this and one other news story. Yeah, not in terms of places wanting to develop their own AI. I mean, there are bits and pieces of things, you know, like David Milan and his computer science course at Yale.
00:02:26
Speaker
is working on his own tool. And so there are bits and pieces of things. And there are some tools that offer, I'm glomming in on what Neil said about the TA part rather than the institution. So yeah, there are some sort of like experiments, but they're fairly narrowly defined.
00:02:45
Speaker
But these seem to be bigger, I mean, because these at least explicitly are saying they're trying to replace chat GPT on campus. Like, let's develop our own GPT option for schools. You mentioned University of Michigan, University of California at Irvine, University of California, San Diego. There were several that were mentioned, but it was explicitly
00:03:08
Speaker
their own GPTs, which for me is quite ambitious, but we don't know what the details are.
Open-Source AI Models: A Transparent Approach?
00:03:16
Speaker
You know, like, is this something like, let's take llama as an open source model and then create a GPT on top of that? Or certainly I can't see them realistically doing
00:03:29
Speaker
their own large language model. But the article didn't really specify what that meant. So I'm assuming this means some sort of chat tool on top of existing models. But for me, it's that's pretty ambitious. I'll give it for them if they really go in this direction. And I understand the need for it because I've called out how the Google Gemini debacle on how they introduced it and the problems they
AI in Academia: Challenges and Costs
00:03:57
Speaker
have.
00:03:57
Speaker
It's well beyond politics. It gets you the thing of you don't know what text prompt is actually getting sent to the large language model to get a response. And for academia, that's a terrible situation. You don't even know what's going into the model. So if this is sitting on top of llama or something similar and it's open source,
00:04:23
Speaker
It's ambitious, but I could see this being a very interesting development, but I just wish I knew more details around what it meant. But that's sort of my read. I understand the need for it, but I'm also questioning what exactly are they doing? Hopefully they're not thinking they can actually do their own training and develop their own large language model, because no university is really in the position to be able to do that.
00:04:48
Speaker
feels like we're starting to see more of this kind of stuff coming to the surface, which I think is quite interesting. And it seems to be, to my mind, kind of coalescing around the idea that it's university's own content that's kind of being fed into these
AI Tools in Education: Experimentation Phase
00:05:08
Speaker
kind of models. Certainly that was the case with the
00:05:11
Speaker
the teaching assistant pilot at the University of London like it was very much kind of the curriculum content being fed in and then the kind of teaching assistant being kind of built off the back of that if I can kind of put it like that and I guess that kind of you know maybe hints at the current feeling towards these kind of models within universities and the idea that you kind of
00:05:36
Speaker
you kind of ring fence the kind of AI teaching assistant that you don't, you know, you're not kind of opening up that teaching assistant to the kind of the breadth of training that might have, you know, might have worked for kind of chat GPT. But I think one of the interesting questions as well, and it's something you kind of often raise Phil is like the cost of these things as well.
00:05:54
Speaker
You're a better reader than I am, because as you say this, the article certainly did emphasize quite a bit about the content going into the model that they're using. And so I suspect that is one of the main... I still would like to see the details of what that means, which LLM, are they controlling and understanding the prompts up front. But I think you're certainly right that a lot of emphasis on this is on the content itself.
00:06:24
Speaker
which that's interesting by its own right. So it's definitely a development worth watching. I don't know if this will succeed, but I definitely think this is something we should track.
Federal Regulations and Online Education Growth
00:06:36
Speaker
I have to get over my initial skepticism because I do have this innate fear of universities doing things their own way when they don't need to.
00:06:47
Speaker
and trace it back to my days, sort of being in charge of classroom technology at Illinois when the engineering school said, oh, we don't need to buy your screens and brackets and lifts, we'll just make them ourselves. And of course they didn't. And there's no reason to, you know, and just I had another example recently where I told you Phil that I knew of one institution that was hoping to adopt some of the
00:07:13
Speaker
VR work that Arizona State was doing, which is pretty cool. But they've since decided that they're not going to adopt it. They're going to develop their own. And, you know, here we go again. Exactly. And it's not like Arizona State has the only model out there. It's that inclination to say, OK, we can develop our own. You're right. You got to figure out your place in the ecosystem where you should use what's out there.
00:07:39
Speaker
and where you should. So I get your skepticism. I just think that it's interesting enough that I definitely would like to watch it. There's a personal finance book called Bake the Bread by the Butter, and you've got to figure out which one that you've got to do. Some make sense and some don't make sense, and we should write that version for Ed Tech.
00:08:01
Speaker
Sounds good. I guess the way I think about it is that we're sort of in that experimentation phase and so that means people will be making interesting moves like doing their own thing, which you kind of question around the merits of that longer term.
00:08:18
Speaker
the cost is obviously going to fall back into it.
Universities' Ambitious Targets for Online Education
00:08:22
Speaker
One of the things that I found was also sitting through some presentations in the conference, I felt like the AI experimentation that was happening wasn't always necessarily driven by a lucid rationale around what problem it was trying to solve. It was an experimentation because it was a new thing.
00:08:43
Speaker
And to kind of more generically explore that rather than we think it can help us in this way or we have this problem that we want to solve for it. And I guess that's all part of the experimentation phase at the moment. Well, isn't this an improvement over most of the initial stuff that we kept reading about? Everybody's cheating. We can't catch cheating. It's all cheating. You know, we're all going to die. Nobody's going to have a job. It doesn't mean we can stop complaining. We can complain at any stage.
00:09:13
Speaker
That's true, but so it's an improvement to me. Again, like what you're describing at the conference, experimentation, as long as it's controlled in a reasonable manner is something worth pursuing. Some of the reasons behind this homemade university GPTs, I'm not sure if it's smart, but at least it's something to explore.
00:09:35
Speaker
I'm optimistic on this so far. We're starting off the show on a good note. I like that. And the risk of taking us off track that optimistic note. Is there any other news emanating from the US of a particular note that might continue the theme of positivity rather than negativity? I don't know. Maybe that's asking for too much.
00:09:56
Speaker
Well, it hasn't been as busy of a news cycle as it was even two weeks ago. Probably one of the biggest things, at least that I'm tracking, is the whole negotiated rulemaking that we've talked about, the federal government and all the regulations the Department of Ed is looking at doing that really target online education broadly and inclusive access publisher models. That's complete.
00:10:23
Speaker
And WCET, a friend of ours have by far the best resource of doing a deep dive on the regulations. They had a great webinar yesterday. They have a really useful article out today. So I guess the news is that whole cycle is done with the negotiations.
00:10:43
Speaker
Now we wait for a couple months to find out what the Department of Ed actually puts out there as new regulations, which people are expecting in the June timeframe. So maybe that's a little bit inside baseball from the news, but that seems to be some of the bigger things I've seen other than
00:11:03
Speaker
the constantly ongoing schools cutting budgets and trying to deal with financial crisis. Yeah, there was a big report out about how a lot of the discussion about higher ed on social media is very negative. It's not cheerful. Were they talking about us? No, I think even beyond us. Oh, okay.
00:11:27
Speaker
I think we could probably all do with a bit of gratitude journaling, to be honest. I think this is maybe the remedy. Maybe that's what we should add as a feature of the podcast. Maybe I don't know. Anyway, maybe now's the time to kind of delve into our kind of main topic that we wanted to discuss.
Project Kitty Hawk: A Case Study in Ambition
00:11:46
Speaker
today which was really around kind of online plans and maybe a sense of kind of optimism around or undue optimism around them because I guess I wrote something recently because I've kind of been encountering more and more
00:12:01
Speaker
universities over here with quite what felt feels like quite ambitious targets about the number of online students that they're looking to grow over a period of time and I guess kind of in the position that I sort of sit kind of over over all of that kind of landscape it feels slightly jarring and feels I guess slightly difficult to envisage that everyone's going to be successful around that kind of thing
00:12:29
Speaker
And I'm just interested in terms of whether my experience chimes with the kind of things that you might be seeing over there or whether this is kind of just a UK thing.
00:12:41
Speaker
No, it's not just a UK issue. And I'll give two anecdotes. But before I give them, it might be that these are the exceptions because they're the high profile ones. And there's an open question about our everyday programs and individual institutions doing the same thing. And I think we should explore that. But Project Kitty Hawk in the state of North Carolina in 2021, they decided
00:13:08
Speaker
they were going to create an internal OPM concept and they were going to invest well they're investing 97 million dollars in that to help all 16 schools in that university system to develop online programs or further develop it and when they put it out with the 97 million dollars in 2021 they're
00:13:30
Speaker
The five-year financial plan projects 120 new online program launches and 24,000 net new enrollments across the system's university campuses by the 26th-27 academic year. So that was the initial plans in 2021. And that if you fast forward, they've been making what I think are very good changes in the management of Project Kitty Hawk.
00:13:58
Speaker
And several of the executives come from Southern New Hampshire University, which has grown a lot, but it's real experience. But as you look at the current plans, they're now saying by 2028, they're going to have 13,600 new starts. So they've already cut it down almost in half. And if you read the plan, I think the 13,600 is very optimistic by itself.
00:14:27
Speaker
And the number of new programs is getting cut way down from the initial 120. So that was a high profile example that had the exact same problem, way too optimistic. I think it was crazy that they thought they could do 120 programs and 24,000 net new starts with this funding. And we're going to see what happens, but they're already cutting it essentially in half the projections, which personally I think is a good move.
Unrealistic Growth Targets: A Cautionary Tale
00:14:56
Speaker
So I think it's emblematic that we have definitely the same problem over here, as if we're in the same environment that we were 10 or 15 years ago that you could have some of this high growth. I see a lot of optimism run amok.
00:15:10
Speaker
In life in general, I'm connected to online learning. That's nothing to do with this year. Yes. And we need to stamp it down. No, I see a lot of places that are not high profile that you don't read about in a lot of different settings. You have been really, really optimistic about growth in online learning. And often it is coming from senior administrators. You know, they
00:15:38
Speaker
want programs to grow quickly. I knew one program where, you know, they were presenting to senior administrators, and they sort of structured their presentation around three hours, you know, reputation, reach and revenue. And the president interrupted them and said, No, no, there's only one hour, that's revenue. You know, and it's not even a university that's that's that's having a rough time in terms of revenue. So
00:16:04
Speaker
I think there's this sort of unbridled hopefulness on the part of some senior administrators about what they can get and a lack of understanding about if you look at the Arizona states and Oregon states and the Penn states and the UCFs, it took them a long time to get there.
00:16:21
Speaker
And that's, I think that's a really interesting thing for me. And I guess you've kind of mentioned one thing there is when I see things like that, it often leads me to think, what is informing that target? And, you know, I guess revenue and the necessity of bringing in revenue.
00:16:39
Speaker
is certainly one of the factors over here and I guess over there in terms of our shared context around higher education and the kind of difficulties that it faces. But at the risk of bringing up something from last week, I just wondered, you know, whether you think
00:16:56
Speaker
hubris plays a part of Phil? Or naivety? Well, it's definitely hubris. I mean, I go back to the University of Florida online when they first came out with the program 10 years ago.
Consultants and Branding: Missteps and Hubris
00:17:08
Speaker
Similar thing. We're going to invest in the state doing its own online.
00:17:12
Speaker
And they just declared, we're going to get 47 percent out of state students purely because of our brand. When people hear the University of Florida has online, they're going to come running and pay the higher out-of-state tuition. Yes, there's a lot of hubris in the power of the brand.
00:17:31
Speaker
that's happening. But it's interesting you use the word informed, you know, what's informing this. I would consider revenue sort of as a goal. I think what's informing it partially are consultants like Parthenon. They're the ones who are now part of EY. They're the ones who wrote the report saying what University of Florida Online could do.
00:17:51
Speaker
So there's a little bit of people like that or groups like that who are helping to sell the idea and not just at the senior administrator, but at the legislative level. So now you're getting into true politics and influence. So definitely hubris, but also sales from groups that are not being responsible, if you want to be honest about it.
00:18:18
Speaker
If you don't want to be honest about it, that'd be a different podcast, right? No, I mean, I think I think that certainly chimes to some things that I've that I'm kind of aware of and I think the the brand thing is a really interesting one for me because I've I've definitely seen
00:18:35
Speaker
particularly strong brands underestimate the power of their brand when going into online. But I've also seen instances of people overestimating. And I think my impression at the moment is there's more a risk of overestimating the brand. And I see that in terms of other universities.
00:18:59
Speaker
I think another interesting dimension of this is thinking about in general, you know, you mentioned kind of the influence of outside actors, I suppose, who consultants like, and when I kind of tackle things like this, it makes me think how well equipped universities in terms of capability for, you know, you might call it new product development, market development, how well equipped universities in general are at that kind of thing. And whether actually, that's something that they
00:19:29
Speaker
need to prioritize going forward or not? Well, a lot of times they don't even have groups to even attempt market research and figuring out what realistic plans are. So it's beyond capability. There's nobody even identified to make a best guess. And then quite often that leads to, okay, let's pay somebody to come up with a plan.
00:19:54
Speaker
and it goes from there. So it's absolutely a lack of capability and I would argue even deeper than that on being able to do their own research or being able to contribute to the research in a realistic manner and not get trapped up into this is what we want to hear as opposed to this is accurate.
00:20:14
Speaker
I'm
Viability Concerns and Market Understanding
00:20:15
Speaker
gonna stick my neck out here a little bit and say something that may be controversial and maybe is a bit harsh, but I also think there is a lack of appreciation of the kind of expertise that is needed in these situations.
00:20:33
Speaker
And so if you look at, I mean, these are outliers, but if you look at the Arizona case and the Idaho case and trying to buy an online presence, did they bring people who actually knew the market in to advise them? No.
00:20:48
Speaker
And I see that sort of in, to a lesser extent, over and over again, when people are talking about online, they don't understand that there are people that do this for a living, you know, even if it's EY, you know, who you've just criticized, but they don't bring the people in to give them a rational assessment. On one level, it reminds me of a few years ago, you know, more than 20 years ago, when I was at an institution and new programs would be
00:21:18
Speaker
would be proposed through the academic affairs infrastructure. And they were starting to propose new distance programs. And so we pointed out in the IT thing that they really needed to include an IT aspect of that or an infrastructure. Is the infrastructure there to support this? And so they said, oh, that's a good idea. So they added a question about IT infrastructure, but they would assess it. They would not give it to the IT people to assess it.
00:21:44
Speaker
Well, to pull your neck out even further, Morgan, I think part of what you're referring to is Arizona did pay consultants a lot of money to do some of the projections. And I think part of what you're calling out is they paid consultants who had no experience in online education, correct? Yep.
00:22:07
Speaker
I think it's interesting you mentioned the kind of examples of, I suppose in a way, the kind of culture around how new programs are proposed, because I remember a professor friend of mine telling me about being on a board similar to the one that you described, just getting this stream of programs that were just not viable.
00:22:28
Speaker
in terms of there being a market for them and you can I guess we can kind of argue about the kind of level of capability that universities have and the emphasis that they place on that to define that but you know that was really interesting at the time to just think there's all of these ideas originating but they're not really being filtered through and I guess that adds to the kind of burden of
00:22:52
Speaker
administration within a university I think often talk about the kind of the abundance of kind of committees and maybe the kind of bureaucracy around it but when the culture's kind of set like that and that's the part of the avenue of getting programs off the ground you know that that doesn't doesn't look as the most kind of productive means of means of doing that but I
00:23:18
Speaker
I just feel like at the moment, given all of the travails that higher education is facing, if there's one thing that universities need to be better at is being able to understand what market they have for the kind of programs that they propose.
Transparency and Success Rates in Online Programs
00:23:35
Speaker
And there's lots of talk.
00:23:37
Speaker
amongst UK higher education institutions at the moment here that about kind of rationalizing the portfolio and I think that speaks to that point but has that also been something that's come to the surface in the US or is this more about kind of new product development as well in terms of online?
00:23:58
Speaker
I think we're referring to, certainly what I'm talking about and what I think Morgan's talking about is more new program development, setting expectations of online in order to get it started. Let's take a counter view. Take my argument on Kitty Hawk. It was crazy to think they could do those numbers
00:24:20
Speaker
Well, imagine if you had me proposing this to the legislature back there saying, no, no, it's not feasible. You should be looking for more like eight to 10,000 new starts and 20 programs. Would they have gotten the $97 million from the legislature if they had that type of view? I mean, I don't like that type of approach, but isn't there an argument that if they didn't take those overly optimistic views, they wouldn't get the funding in the first place?
00:24:48
Speaker
I'm interested as well, just going back on the Kitty Hawk example, I guess we kind of focused on the number projections in terms of students, but I'm also interested in the number of programs. Yes. And whether that's overly inflated or unrealistic as well, because when I reflect on this in terms of different approaches that I've seen and contrast them with, say, maybe an OPM partnership, it feels like when you look at even an ambitious OPM partnership over here tends to yield
00:25:17
Speaker
15 to 20 programmes. But yet sometimes I see universities and they seem to have such overinflated ambitions around the number of programmes, not just the number of students,
00:25:31
Speaker
120 new programs is a huge part of the problem. And I'm trying to find it the status report they did last month for the state legislature where they gave an update, but they've cut way back on the number of programs as well. But I think as important, it's not just a matter of let's get from 120 down to something feasible.
00:25:52
Speaker
It's also, and I like this about what they're doing, they're saying we shouldn't be a traditional OPM from 10 years ago where we're getting a master of social work over here and an MBA over here and there. Instead, we should be partnering with one institution and doing nine programs with them and really working deep with the institution. So, long and short, I do think the number of programs is part of it, not just enrollment.
00:26:19
Speaker
And in the Kitty Hawk case, I actually like the fact that they're saying, we really shouldn't just be counting programs, let's get a deeper relationship with each of our schools. Yeah, interesting.
Economic Pressures on Online Degrees
00:26:30
Speaker
I think the other part of this that sort of emerges in bits and pieces is nobody really talks about the fact that some online programs don't work out. Like you get hints of it sometimes, I think, with Gray and Associates, the market research people,
00:26:48
Speaker
It really struck me when Pearson got sold and there was discussion about how many of its programs were not profitable.
00:27:00
Speaker
But nobody really talks about that, not institutions, not OPMs, nobody. And we need to have a franker conversation about how many programs don't work out and what is the sort of trajectory of a program because presumably some of them work for a while and then stop working for a while when there's less interest or something like that. But we need to actually have frank conversations about that and there needs to be more
00:27:24
Speaker
information about that and maybe that's my next big research project. I think it's interesting you mentioned that because it reminds me of something that Phil I think you wrote this week around reflections on the kind of noodle conference and you were talking about the fact that
00:27:40
Speaker
actually sometimes OPMs are framed as kind of sucking money out of higher education where actually you know the kind of interest rate and economic environment has meant that actually they're kind of funding they've funded online programs and so I'm kind of interested around the idea um online plans being too optimistic
00:28:03
Speaker
the economic landscape changing and whether there's just a bit too much riding on online degrees and their success for institutions but also for the companies themselves and I think of companies like 2U who growing their degree portfolio seems to be a key part of their strategy. Is there too much riding on online degrees at the moment?
00:28:27
Speaker
Certainly from the, let's take the institutional part is on one hand, it's good to see that presidents and deans and, you know, very senior administrators fully understanding the strategic potential of online education. But having said that, yes. What did you call it, Morgan? Optimism run amok is and they're you and they're relying on it too much on online education for revenue.
00:28:57
Speaker
But in particular, not understanding that it's going to take a long time before you're getting net revenue. They tend to ignore the investment. In a way, we might say that, you know, if the criticism of online education companies is maybe short term profit kind of aspirations, actually, maybe that's something that's inflicting, you know, higher education and universities more than it is. OPMs may be potentially at the moment.
00:29:23
Speaker
Well, so this is the second point I wanted to make sure I covered here. I've been waiting for the right segue.
Market Dynamics: Ambition vs. Realism
00:29:32
Speaker
But I wrote a post back in 2019 called The Day the OPM Market Changed, and it was tied to 2U's earnings call where they radically changed their projections on future enrollment and revenue
00:29:47
Speaker
within their degree segment. And the key part of what they were saying at the time was, we have not been accounting for program to program competition. The fact that, you know, what did I think, Morgan, you had mentioned there are like 600 online MBAs. 800 and something.
00:30:06
Speaker
Good Lord. But in any case, that nature means any one program can only grow so much. And if you want a program to scale, you're going to have to spend lots of money in marketing and recruitment to get there. Well, what two you did in the public market in 2019 was say, hey, the market has changed. It's not just OPM to OPM competition, but program to program.
00:30:32
Speaker
So they did that and they had, it was a bad day in the stock market, ended up having a couple of inside higher ed posts. What two you knew at the time is even if they had flaws in their business model, they were willing to recognize the change in the environment. That is what led to them acquiring edX as a way to reduce their marketing costs.
00:30:56
Speaker
and the edX and the amount they paid for it is really the proximate cause, not the only cause, but the proximate cause of what's bringing them down financially. So very circuitous way to get back to it that yes, the companies themselves are also guilty of over relying on revenue, even when they recognize the environment's changing. It's both sides, it's institutions and companies, and it's not healthy in the long term.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah, because we talked last week around, I think the question was framed as a bubble. And this doesn't seem like a bubble to me. But it does feel like there's a lot riding on it for people because of that kind of over ambitious framing. And I guess there's always that tension between kind of ambition and realism. I do like ambition. I think it's kind of a good driver. But when it kind of tips over the balance, it's kind of challenging. But I'm just interested.
00:31:53
Speaker
The more widespread level of ambition also makes me think about the kind of incumbents who've been doing online degrees for a long time.
00:32:05
Speaker
and what that means for them. Whether the ambition is well placed or not, ambition is potentially a driver. If institutions really continue and really make an effort because of that ambition, what that's going to mean for some of the existing players. Do you see
00:32:28
Speaker
The ambition driving a change in the kind of market and market share around online, or is it more just that there's a lot of naivety and actually people are going to have some false starts? Well, you're going to have false starts, but aren't we?
Influence of Big Brands in Online Education
00:32:43
Speaker
It seems like the answer to almost everything in online education quite often, overstating this here, comes back to in the end, the rich get richer.
00:32:52
Speaker
It's like while you get the Project Kitty Hawks that are overly ambitious, while you get a lot of the lesser named schools of Morgan reference being overly ambitious. Meanwhile, Southern New Hampshire is adding another 40, 50,000 enrollments to their case as they move along. Arizona State University is adding to its enrollments.
00:33:16
Speaker
Now, the for profits and the formerly for profits keep going down. But a lot of the a lot of what's happening is the strong ones, particularly Western governors, Southern New Hampshire, Arizona State, Oregon State, those it's like they're sort of quiet in the background when some of this overly ambitious plans and then they're the ones who grow.
00:33:37
Speaker
There is an exception to that which is Penn State because back in 2014 Penn State had ambitions to actually triple in size and they've actually walked back from that now and it's like no we want to stay the size because this is a size that works for us and this is a size that we can deliver.
00:33:51
Speaker
good value and a good experience. Now maybe there are other things going into that, but they've really stepped back from that. But it does also, I feel the need to get in my joke here, but I have Morgan's 10 iron laws of edtech, one of which is never let your provost sign a contract because of all the bad ones that they signed with OPMs.
00:34:13
Speaker
But the other one was never let your president go to a conference because there was a period when presidents would go to a conference and they'd meet the president of Penn State and they'd come back and say inevitably to me, please build me a world campus next week. I used to call that tendency a Mitch Daniels envy.
00:34:35
Speaker
the Purdue Global example that he set and all the presidents wanting to be like him. That's what led to Calbright College out in California, which was overly ambitious again. Yes, so presidents and provosts, we love you, but please use some knowledgeable people, many of whom probably already work for you, to give you realistic estimates that help out in the long run.
00:34:58
Speaker
I would add to that, don't allow them to be taken out for dinner by presidents of tech companies as well. I'm interested by the get richer thing because I feel like the contrast in the UK, you mentioned Southern New Hampshire and Western governors,
00:35:15
Speaker
I've seen kind of what seems like a bit more of a decline around the you know the smaller bunch of online focused universities here that we have here like the Open University, University of London and the rich get richer is an interesting point because I guess you kind of framed it more as the idea that you know those who have the infrastructure and a setup for online education succeed but I'm also interested in the
00:35:39
Speaker
thinking about that in a slightly different way in terms of the richer, bigger brands who maybe the more established big players with big reputations who haven't really seriously entered the online education space.
00:35:53
Speaker
I just wonder whether you could see them taking some share based on ambitions and how that relates to what we're talking about. But isn't that a source, at least in the US, of a lot of the over-optimism, like University of Florida relying on its name? Now, they might not be the biggest name nationally, but that's what they were banking on.
00:36:18
Speaker
UNC system, I think they're doing that. So I guess that's an interesting question in terms of, are there big names that are missing out on it? So I guess a natural one would be Stanford.
Strategic Approaches: UK vs. US Markets
00:36:34
Speaker
Yes, they helped while they nurtured the whole MOOC movement, but they really haven't thrown their hat in the ring from an access and really growing their brand.
00:36:46
Speaker
So I think there are a couple like Stanford that if they truly wanted to go into online education in a major way, they could up in or change the market.
00:36:57
Speaker
But I think there's just a few of them that would have that potential. And I think the rest, it's much more about the ones that invested starting 10 or 15 years ago. I don't think there are very many who could do it. Can you think of any others besides Stanford, Morgan? Maybe some of the other
00:37:16
Speaker
big publics that but but you know many of them are already in that but or else really constrained you know so Michigan is already doing it Berkeley some of that
00:37:28
Speaker
I was just at Michigan for a panel this week, and one thing we were talking to them about is how they were very early and probably the most successful school in the US in terms of the MOOCs and monetizing MOOCs, making actual money from their partnership from Coursera. And boy, are they reinvesting it. It's pretty impressive. But in terms of online degrees from the University of Michigan, they're pretty late to the game.
00:37:57
Speaker
they're growing now, but they actually really have only started recently investing that way. And so I think they're gonna succeed, but I don't think it's gonna be market changing success. And the way things are going in terms of legislation and regulation, it's gonna be harder and harder for smaller players to enter, I think, the space because of the regulatory burdens.
00:38:24
Speaker
Is the UK different in this regard? Like do you see over there the true potential? You mentioned earlier on that there's universities not taking advantage of their brand in this space. Do you think there's real potential over there?
00:38:38
Speaker
I mean, I guess it comes back to one of the underlying aspects of this is kind of like the strategy and the prudence and the robustness of the approach. But there's certainly plenty of players with good solid reputations in the Russell group here that haven't seriously gone into online. And so depending on how well they approach that, they may present a challenge to some who've been in the market for longer. I mean, I think another dimension to this is
00:39:07
Speaker
things like the kind of type of audience that you look to attract and I guess some of the levers that you can pull on that are things like entry requirements and pricing and there's definitely been instances over here in which universities with good strong brands and reputations have kind of
00:39:26
Speaker
priced online degrees in a way that raises your eyebrows because it's not it's a kind of a lower pricing than you'd expect from a university like that and I think the other aspect of a dimension of that is that we've definitely seen a little bit of movement
00:39:45
Speaker
around entry requirements for international students over here from some high profile universities and that I guess that slightly speaks to the kind of context that we find ourselves in like
00:39:58
Speaker
And it kind of comes back to strategy whether an entrant who's got a big brand is more aggressive in their approach around attracting students and equating that to kind of things like pricing and entry requirements. So I suppose in answer to your question, there's like maybe a couple of different examples of that. I'm seeing more on the end of an overinflation of the kind of brand than kind of maybe more modest kind of approaches for it really.
00:40:27
Speaker
And it seems to me that part of what we're, the three of us are saying, um, and we, we're not going to be able to raise the $97 million with this approach. But what we're calling for is if you have a good brand and you want to be aggressive, that's great.
00:40:42
Speaker
but don't make your brand and hubris and pure revenue the point of while you're doing this. What I would say is you need to go for understanding the students you're serving and how you can build a sustainable long-term approach to keep doing that and build up the infrastructure to do it and avoid the trap of over-promising upfront. And have a strategy.
00:41:10
Speaker
beyond just people love us, right? That feels like a good note to end on. Have a strategy.
00:41:19
Speaker
It took us 45 minutes to get to that point. We recommend a strategy. Well, this has been great. Interesting to hear some of the differences between the UK and the US because part of what I'm picking up, I mean, the UK started later in online education and in a lot of ed tech as well. So you're at a different point in the cycle, but there are some real differences on the internal dynamics here.
00:41:45
Speaker
We did get to the point of saying, yes, there's too much optimism and there needs to be a strategy, a long-term strategy in place. Well, it's been great having this conversation again, and we look forward to chatting next week.