Academic staff at multiple universities have spoken out about the outsourcing of courses to for-profit providers, saying it has led to “distressing” workloads, poor quality standards and aggressive marketing.
“Some staff are too scared and clinging to their jobs to share [their] stories,” one academic told Guardian Australia.
Australian universities now offer more than 850 courses, mostly online postgraduate diplomas or master’s degrees, where the course management, administration and marketing is contracted out to third-party online program management companies, or OPMs.
Materials for outsourced courses are usually prepared by academic staff at the university before being provided to the OPM to administer. Different universities retain different levels of oversight of outsourced courses. Some universities provide teaching staff – although these are often different from the staff who design the course – while in other instances the oversight is more cursory.
An academic at the University of Sydney, who asked to remain anonymous, told Guardian Australia the outsourcing arrangements at that university were almost “universally hated” by academics.
The university announced last year it would offer four postgraduate degrees online in partnership with the multinational OPM 2U. The first classes began this year and about 30 staff are involved in unit design.
The staff member said academics at the university had multiple concerns with how the courses were being rolled out.
“First, the workload of designing a new class you get absolutely no credit for … it’s not considered a teaching load and you’re promised you’ll have help but you don’t.” Academics were given no teaching relief or extra compensation for their work, they said.
“Second, you put your name on things but you don’t know how it’ll run. If a crappy experience happens, your name is still running on every slide.
“And third, designing a course takes a lot of time, then someone else is the unit coordinator and might not be a specialist at all. There’s a complete disconnect between who designs the class and who runs it after that.”
‘You lose control of the material’
More broadly, there were also fears among staff at the university about the vast amounts of online content created by academics – both during the pandemic and for outsourced courses – being reused in ways they do not approve of, the staff member said.
“If someone goes on strike, what prevents [the university] from using lectures? You lose control of the material. I like to think we’re a bit more than glorified YouTube videos, but you’re signing a blank cheque with your name on it.”
Staff at USyd have held strikes on seven days since August 2021 – the longest-running campaign of work stoppages at an Australian university.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is pushing for a pay rise in line with inflation, protection of the “40-40-20” rule balancing teaching and research roles and an increase in permanent positions for casual staff.
A spokesperson for the university said it did not outsource any academic work or teaching to 2U, and every course included a weekly 90-minute Zoom class run by a USyd teacher who, in some cases, was the academic who designed the unit.
“This gives students opportunities to build connections with each other and their teachers, and to put what they have learned into practice.”
They said the courses were outsourced because “time-poor mature-age students prefer completing postgraduate studies online”.
Guardian Australia asked a number of times whether the academics who ran the courses had PhDs in the areas they were teaching. The spokesperson said teachers were employed under the same hiring and contracting processes as all academic staff, with the same qualifications required by the regulator.
“These units are coordinated and the teaching is led by experienced academic staff with PhDs in relevant fields and are fully compatible with our [Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency] requirements.”
Student learning a ‘lower priority’
Another academic, who also asked to remain anonymous, said in his experience of developing a master’s course at James Cook University (JCU) for the OPM Keypath Education, “the student learning is very much a lower priority”.
He told Guardian Australia the OPM used aggressive marketing tactics on prospective students. “Usually it’s just about marketing and getting them enrolled. After that they didn’t seem to care about the quality and were hard to work with to fix content.”
JCU signed a 10-year agreement with Keypath in 2017 to initially deliver online master’s degrees in nursing and data science. It has since expanded to business and psychology, offering nine courses marketed under the brand “JCU Online”.
Keypath runs the marketing and recruitment, course design and “student retention and success services”. Guardian Australia put questions to the company but they did not respond.
The academic said the reuse of lecture material by someone other than the academic who created it is a problem across the tertiary education sector, not isolated to third-party providers. It was part of a broader move towards online education during the pandemic, he said.
“Whether through online master’s or normal undergraduate courses, the reuse of video lecture material is a big issue.” Universities own the intellectual property that academics create in the course of their employment, including lecture content. “I don’t know if there’s any real ground [for staff] to stand on,” he said.
A spokesperson for JCU said: “Working with an external provider has allowed JCU to broaden the reach of its courses, and to increase the range of flexible, high-quality courses it offers.”
They said JCU provided the curriculum, teaching and assessment for all courses and the copyright and intellectual property remained with the university. Keypath delivered all non-academic support.
“The courses are run by JCU staff who are fully qualified and accredited to run the courses. The course lecturers are tenured academics and there are also tutors who run some tutorials, and all are qualified and accredited,” they said.
‘Distressed staff’
Guardian Australia has also been shown several contemporaneous emails from staff at Australian universities complaining about workloads, quality standards and other issues in relation to the outsourcing of courses to OPMs.
In one email, an academic asks for their name not to be used on the OPM platform due to being unhappy with the quality of the course content. In others, students expressed concern over poor standards.
A senior academic at one top-ranking Australian university, who asked to remain anonymous and did not want their workplace disclosed for fear of repercussions, told Guardian Australia “there were unreasonable pressures on teaching staff to confirm to timelines provided by online service providers”.
“We had some seriously overworked and distressed staff because of having to provide those services,” they said.
“Academic staff were told the material they supplied to [the OPM] was ‘too academic’ and in-depth and that there was way too much reading.
“They only schedule in reviews of material about every few years. Some staff are too scared and clinging to their jobs to share more stories.”
‘Brutal’ job cuts
The national president of the NTEU, Dr Alison Barnes, said the union fiercely opposed any moves by universities to outsource teaching. “It undermines the pay and conditions the NTEU fought for under enterprise agreements,” she said.
“Universities’ spending on staff as a percentage of their income is at historic lows. Investment in staffing fell from an average of about 52% between 2013 and 2019 to just over 41% in 2021. That shows the brutal job cuts the sector has endured.
“Universities must come clean on exactly what their arrangements with online program managers are,” Barnes said. “The dramatic increase in third-party, for-profit companies delivering courses is a massive worry because it’s largely been obscured from the public’s view. The lack of accountability is just astounding.
“Universities owe it to students, staff and the public to be upfront about exactly what’s going on here. The amount of unanswered questions around OPMs should ring serious alarm bells.”
• This story was amended on 14 March 2023 to remove a quote from the Teqsa website that was mistakenly attributed to the spokesperson from the University of Sydney. An additional comment from the spokesperson was added on 15 March 2023.
