Hundreds of courses at Australian universities are being outsourced for-profit companies, a Guardian Australia investigation has revealed.
The third-party online program management companies, or OPMs, are becoming increasingly common, with debate under way as to whether they are streamlining education or potentially misleading students and charging excessive fees.
Here’s what you need to know.
Can you tell if a course is being run by a third-party provider?
It can be extremely difficult to determine if a course is being run by an OPM, as they are marketed under the banner of higher education institutions and the information is often omitted when advertised online.
Typically, the university will provide the academic content and OPMs will offer recruitment, marketing, teaching and marking – however they can also provide learning design and develop course materials.
A student may believe they have the same teaching staff and curriculum as those learning on campus, with lecturers’ names appearing on the course design despite no formal interaction with the cohort once they hand over materials.
When considering a course via a higher education provider, it’s worth doing more research if it’s provided under a separate banner online.
For instance, the University of Technology Sydney offers dozens of courses with KeyPath under the brand “UTS Online”, while RMIT and QUT’s third-party courses are also branded “online” rather than the name of the OPM.
Nowhere on the webpage for an OPM masters course offered by the University of Sydney is it disclosed that a third party will be involved, or which roles it will assume. A spokesperson for the university told Guardian Australia: “The courses were approved by our academic board and will be subject to our quality assurance processes.”
Are the courses properly accredited?
Courses provided by OPMs that are run in partnership with Australian universities offer the same official accreditations that students would receive learning in a classroom.
However, it’s worth being careful when looking into courses online that do not have any affiliation with official tertiary education institutions.
The Tertiary Education Quality Standards Authority (Teqsa) is responsible for ensuring universities and private colleges provide the courses they promise at a sufficient standard. But OPMs do not need to register as tertiary education providers, so Teqsa has no role overseeing what they teach.
What are the fees for OPMs?
Costs for the courses vary as they are set by universities and so are at the discretion of the institutions.
Fees are then split between the OPM and the provider under commercial-in-confidence arrangements, often reflecting the relative contribution of each party, with some universities paying the OPMs 60% or even 70% of the course fee.
Online courses are often cheaper and shorter than those run on campus, which can be particularly appealing to older students. But fees are still often thousands of dollars for each subject, depending on the course and institution.
What is certain is the industry is rapidly expanding. Keypath’s prospectus estimates the global OPM market will more than double to $13.3bn in 2025.
How many universities use OPMs?
There is no official national database on the size and scale of OPM partnerships with higher education institutions. But as of April 2022, more than 850 online courses were offered via third-party providers at 33 of Australia’s 42 universities.
Research has identified third-party providers include FutureLearn, Edx, UpGrad, Coursera, 2U, Online Education Services, Keypath Education, Online Study Australia, Ducere, Didasko and IT Masters.
Swinburne University was the first institution to set up an OPM in Australia when it partnered with Seek in 2011 to create Online Education Services under the name Swinburne Online.
But the growth in online learning began nearly two decades ago with the development of Open Universities Australia, a platform that offered online degrees. When the Coivd pandemic hit, OPMs proliferated, having already developed the expertise and software to provide courses online.
What makes OPMs different to in-house courses?
Online learning isn’t isolated to OPMs, nor is the practice of reusing materials including lecture recordings and other course materials.
The difference lies with the outsourcing of materials without proper scrutiny and accountability. The general secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, Damien Cahill, said the rise of OPMs raised serious concerns about the quality of education on offer and the transparency of arrangements between the universities and the providers.
So-called “learning facilitators” complete a short course to learn teaching skills, however they do not have to have formal teaching experience to provide marking and feedback for courses and don’t need to meet the Australian qualifications framework, which requires masters degrees to teach undergraduate courses and PhDs for postgraduate courses.
Why are universities outsourcing?
Universities say online courses have proven popular among postgraduate and older students who desire the greater flexibility that online learning offers alongside work and family commitments. This was accelerated by Covid-19, which led to a surge in digital platform models.
When announcing an expanded relationship with multinational OPM 2U, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, Mark Scott, said the outsourcing gave staff the opportunity for “up-skilling” quicker than would be possible solely through in-house development.
The federal education minister, Jason Clare, said the OPMs had enabled universities to expand into online markets “efficiently and with economies of scale” when announcing funding for short courses.
