Australian universities have dramatically increased their use of third-party, for-profit companies to deliver courses, a Guardian investigation has found.
The companies, known as online program managers, or OPMs, offer a variety of services – from digital platforms for delivering courses through to total course management and support.
In some cases they have assumed a central role in designing course material, teaching, marking, marketing and recruiting students, raising concerns about transparency, the quality of degrees and further casualisation of the higher education workforce.
Research by Prof Mahsood Shah, the dean of Swinburne University of Technology Sydney, has found that 33 of the 42 Australian universities had relationships with OPMs as of April 2022, and were offering more than 850 online courses via these partnerships.
The growth in online learning began nearly two decades ago with the development of Open Universities Australia, a platform that offered online degrees. But it exploded during the Covid pandemic. Suddenly forced to abandon in-person teaching, some universities took their courses to Zoom. Others turned to OPMs, who run bespoke platforms and had the expertise and software to deliver courses online.
A decision by the Morrison government to pump $32.5m into a micro-credential pilot scheme in late 2021 further turbocharged the universities’ embrace of joint ventures.
Universities rushed to gain a share of the federal funds, which are aimed at building an offshore market for Australian-based training as well as boosting domestic training in health, technology and engineering.
Many of the universities’ new offerings are being run online, via OPMs.
In November Labor’s education minister, Jason Clare, announced a further $18.5m for universities to develop and deliver short courses.
“Partnerships with OPMs have enabled universities to expand into online markets efficiently and with economies of scale,” Shah said.
Online courses are often cheaper and shorter than on-campus offerings, appealing particularly to older students with family commitments.
But 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.
“I think it’s really disingenuous that universities are contracting third parties to provide these services but badging it with their own brand,” Cahill said.
“It’s not something that they would include in their own advertising material about the benefits of studying at their university; in fact it is something they are actively trying to hide.
“It’s contrary to transparency and it’s contrary to accountability.”
Who are the OPMs and what do they do?
No formal data on OPMs is available from any of the oversight bodies for the tertiary sector, but Shah said by trawling websites and press announcements he had identified 14 third-party providers that have partnered with Australian universities to offer fully online courses.
They include FutureLearn, Edx, UpGrad, Coursera, 2U, Online Education Services, Keypath Education, Online Study Australia, Ducere, Didasko and IT Masters.
Many are large multinationals, such as 2U and EdX (which recently merged). Others are homegrown, including Keypath Education, which is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, and Online Education Services, a joint venture between Swinburne and the job site Seek.
Their services range from providing the online technology platform and helping produce course materials in a digitally appealing way, to providing virtually the entire course, including drafting the course materials, supplying teachers, offering student support, marking, course recruitment and marketing.
Most OPM arrangements involve a redesign of learning resources and assessments to suit online delivery, based on the curriculum provided by the partner university.
Take for example the online master’s in project and program management at the University of Sydney. The university announced in February 2022 that the course would be provided in partnership with 2U, one of the largest OPMs in the US, but the university would “retain full academic control … determining the curriculum content and admissions standards, with all unit development and teaching undertaken by the University’s academic staff”.
“2U will provide the technology platform, educational design and production, student and faculty support, and marketing and recruitment services.”
Nowhere on the webpage for the course does the university disclose that a third party will be involved, or what roles it will assume.
A spokesperson for the university said time-poor mature age students often preferred online courses for postgraduate study.
“This partnership with 2U provides a timely way for us to address that need with a high-quality offering that meets world’s best practice,” the spokesperson said.
“The courses were approved by our Academic Board and will be subject to our quality assurance processes.”
The financial arrangements of such partnerships are usually commercial-in-confidence, but often the fee split reflects the relative contribution of each party, with some universities paying the OPMs 60% or even 70% of the course fees, Shah said.
The University of Sydney said its contract with 2U was confidential, but details of 2U’s commercial approach to partnering with not-for-profit universities was available in 2U’s annual reports.
In some cases, OPMs engage teaching and support staff, including those who live outside Australia.
“I have seen a university offering a course with an OPM where the teaching staff are based in the subcontinent,” Shah said. “Universities would normally be paying $170,000 for an associate professor, but you could recruit 20 staff from that country [for that].
“Although these [offshore academics] may have lots of experience in their country, who knows what their qualification is and whether it meets the Australian qualifications framework, which requires master’s degrees to teach undergraduates and PhDs to teach postgraduate courses.”
A search of the job site Seek revealed multiple ads for online learning advisors and coordinators for courses offered by Monash, QUT, Swinburne and Western Sydney University, run by Online Education Services, one of the largest Australian-based OPMs.
They appear to require applicants to have field experience and academic qualifications, but not necessarily tertiary teaching experience. Successful applicants are sent to a free three-week course on being an effective teacher and are able to work 100% at home.
Who is responsible for quality?
The Tertiary Education Quality Standards Authority (Teqsa) is responsible for ensuring universities and private colleges deliver the courses they promise and at a sufficient standard. But OPMs do not need to register as tertiary education providers, and so Teqsa has no role overseeing what they deliver to students.
Higher education providers were responsible for ensuring that third parties complied with standards in delivering their courses, a Teqsa spokesperson said.
“Teqsa expects providers to inform us when entering into third party arrangements to deliver courses. In the event a third party’s delivery of a course was found not to comply with the standards, Teqsa would take proportionate regulatory action against the contracting higher education provider,” they said.
“Teqsa expects that higher education providers are accurate and not misleading when representing their educational offerings and charges, whether a course is delivered directly or through third parties.”
Universities Australia, the umbrella organisation for the university sector, said “decisions around how courses are delivered are a matter for individual institutions”.
Associate Prof Gwilym Croucher from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education also said it was up to the universities to ensure quality through their academic boards and other mechanisms that oversee standards.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with OPM and similar third-party arrangements,” he said.
“Whether there is a third-party arrangement or not, universities are responsible for ensuring quality – quality of the teaching and the quality of the experience of the students – and they should have robust systems in place to do that.”
