Emerging Trends in Online Learning

As the coronavirus pandemic forced college classes online, the higher ed community was buzzing about an instructional model called HyFlex.

The concept wasn't new. In its truest form, HyFlex, sometimes called hybrid-flexible, calls for courses to be created in a way that gives students complete control over how and when to participate, either in-person or online. A small subset of schools was using this format before the pandemic. But the effect of the health crisis on instruction brought new attention to it, as more schools saw its potential to address the uncertainties affecting course delivery.

Many colleges that pursued the approach during the pandemic have come up short of full-on HyFlex, however, online learning experts say. That's in part because the crisis is limiting how much choice students have in how they participate in a HyFlex class.

Still, they say, institutions can learn from how HyFlex was used during this period, should they want to make it a bigger part of their offerings going forward. 

Pure HyFlex isn't an easy win

Colleges can deliver HyFlex courses in at least two modes: in-person and online. The online piece can be synchronous or on-demand, and some schools provide it both ways. 

Hyflex experts encourage colleges to keep a few principles in mind as they develop the courses: students should have a choice in how they participate, and they should have the tools and ability to access all course modes. It's also important that each mode offers an equivalent learning experience and includes many of the same course elements.

"If you consider (the principles) to be slider bars, none of them can be at zero" to call a course HyFlex, said Kevin Kelly, a higher education consultant and instructor at San Francisco State University. Still, Kelly added, "different flavors" of HyFlex emerge as campuses address their own limitations and considerations around offering the course model. 

During the pandemic, for instance, restrictions on in-person gatherings — or students' and faculty members' varied willingness to engage face-to-face — could hamper a school's ability to offer the in-person component of a HyFlex course.

Others include whether faculty members have enough pedagogical knowledge or instructional design support to produce a HyFlex class that fulfills the required learning outcomes and offers the same level of learning across modes.

Whether schools have the technology to provide students with a real-time online experience and whether learners have the internet bandwidth to access classes off campus are also concerns, though experts say they generally can be designed around while sticking to HyFlex principles.

Asynchronous online options are key

Before the pandemic, faculty using HyFlex tended to build an online, asynchronous version of the course and used that to teach in the classroom, sometimes adding synchronous online instruction, said Brian Beatty, a HyFlex pioneer who is credited with laying out its core principles.

But instructors and schools shifting classes online due to the pandemic have gravitated to synchronous online instruction, said Beatty, who is also a professor at San Francisco State. That's at least in part because it's not as labor-intensive as a fully asynchronous online course. 

"It's an easier approach to HyFlex in the minds of many," Beatty said.

Beatty urges colleges considering HyFlex for the long haul to invest in the asynchronous online component, saying it gives them more flexibility to serve students and prepare for situations in which synchronous instruction isn't possible.

David Rhoads, director of teaching excellence and digital pedagogy at Vanguard University, in California, recommends colleges start with an asynchronous online course based on the learning objectives and add the in-person experience, which would be mostly activities-based. This structure, he said, ensures all modes offer an equivalent learning experience

MSU Billings was piloting the HyFlex model before the pandemic as a way to give its largely nontraditional student body more options while streamlining course offerings.

"We were limping along trying to offer two sections of all these classes," said Joy Honea, a professor and president of the school's faculty association. "And what would happen is the online (section) would fill up immediately and have a huge waiting list, and then the face-to-face section would maybe have eight or 10 people in it."

The university plans to expand its use of HyFlex as more faculty are trained to teach that way. 

Already, online courses at MSU Billings must be asynchronous, and the school expects it will require HyFlex courses to include that mode, Honea said.

"There's not going to be a one-size-fits-all modality, at least for our student body," Honea said. "We're going to need to have a mix, and HyFlex is a model that allows you to mix several things."

Faculty need support

Instructors at MSU Billings must participate in course design training before they can teach a HyFlex class, which Beatty delivers and for which they get a $1,000 stipend. They can receive $2,000 to develop and teach their first HyFlex course, which is reviewed by a team of instructional designers. However, Honea notes, they can forgo the payment if they are concerned about their intellectual property rights to the course they develop.

As colleges moved classes online in spring 2020, many turned faculty development into overdrive, striving to help instructors understand at least the basics of remote teaching. Although many MSU Billings faculty have been experimenting with elements of HyFlex on their own, the institution wants a "much more systematic rollout" to ensure what they are doing is of quality and "that it's actually HyFlex," Honea said.

About four dozen MSU Billings professors completed HyFlex training as of winter 2020 — more than a third of its full-time faculty. The school used $51,000 from the first round of federal coronavirus relief money to fund the stipends, though Honea said administrators pledged financial support for such training before the pandemic.

Training early adopters to teach HyFlex classes could pay dividends. "With a small amount of faculty development and a little bit of support — some time or some money, right — they're willing to invest a lot more into this," Beatty said. "Once they've got that success, then it's easier for the institution and for other faculty to kind of piggyback on that expense or on that success."

That's the plan at MSU Billings. Honea said the university is developing a system through which faculty members with ample HyFlex experience review proposed courses that use the model. 

HyFlex advocates acknowledge that switching to the model creates more work for faculty, though they say most of that is in building the class.

"It's a paradigm shift," Rhoads said. "It's like two big huge things having to happen at the same time. ... They're flipping the classroom and seeing their lecture time not as lecture anymore but as active engagement."

Administrators, in turn, need to provide support, including money for training, Rhoads said. "They can't just say, 'Let's flip this school to HyFlex,' and give them a semester. They're going to have to have a strategic plan that includes HyFlex," he said.

What's next for HyFlex?

Several colleges have shared their experiences using HyFlex during the pandemic. But Erin Lynch, associate provost of scholarship, research and innovation at Winston-Salem State University, in North Carolina, sees an opportunity to figure out what are the core elements needed to make the model work. 

She and a research team plan to examine its implementation across a small group of minority-serving institutions, primarily historically Black colleges, that represent a mix of public and private, and research and non-research, schools. Winston-Salem State is one of them.

"We need to disseminate that information now so that people can use the model and the components ... that we know are the defining factors for HyFlex," she said. "That way you don't have everybody doing their own version of something and thereby decreasing the actual validity of the model and its efficacy." 

The pandemic has disproportionately impacted low-income households and Black and other people of color, raising concerns about diminished educational access for those groups. The majority of students at HBCUs receive the Pell Grant, which is given to students with the greatest financial need. Meanwhile, HBCUs are important drivers of college degree attainment for Black students, particularly in STEM fields.

"If we don't get this right, what does that mean for our students going out into the workforce? What does that mean for our national economy if our institutions," particularly MSIs and HBCUs, " ... have a dip or a lull in achievement because HyFlex was not done right," Lynch said.

Beatty thinks offering multiple modes of instruction, including an asynchronous online option, can help schools address equity concerns by enabling them to serve more students. Whether that happens comes down to implementation.

"There are issues of equity in every single one of those areas," Beatty said of the HyFlex modes. "And so the question is, well, what are the equity issues and do the alternative ... paths actually help solve those equity concerns ... or do they exacerbate the problems?"

Forced to move classes online quickly in the spring of 2020, colleges worked with what they had: the learning management system and generic videoconferencing software. Those tools did the job, but some in the education technology space saw an opportunity. 

That is reflected in a recent run of investment into new companies providing online platforms and programming, particularly videoconferencing tailored for education.

"Investors are looking to see whether there are long-term bets to make" across the ed tech sector, said Howard Lurie, principal analyst for online and continuing education at Eduventures Research. "All of it's governed by a realization that the remote learning pivot is not temporary. It will extend out to the balance of 2021."

And likely beyond.

Colleges were expanding online before the pandemic hit, and surveys highlight a shift to centralized purchasing and control of technology platforms and services, Lurie said.

The pandemic-induced move online is drawing attention to what colleges need to continue that transition. 

Investors are pushing companies to "fill a space that they can invest in," said Phil Hill, a partner at the ed tech consulting firm MindWires.

As for videoconferencing platforms for education, he said, "there's a big hole there."

Making Zoom better

The limits of traditional videoconferencing software in education applications were on display in 2020. Two companies emerging to address the need for tailoring are taking divergent approaches: tweaking an existing platform with add-ons or creating a new company entirely.

Dan Avida, CEO and co-founder of Engageli, a company borne from the pandemic, is taking the latter approach. 

"People are not using Zoom because they love Zoom. They are using Zoom because that's the only thing they had," contends Avida, who with his wife, a founder of Coursera, watched as their daughters feigned participation in online classes.

Avida searched the market in the hopes of finding a more engaging video platform to recommend to their school. Finding none, the pair and collaborators developed an alternative. Engageli combines active learning features such as polls, quizzes and small-group breakouts, called "tables" (top image), with videoconferencing. The system also keeps tabs on how much students are participating, which can help instructors decide whom to call on. 

"It allows universities to really scale up synchronous instruction," said Avida, who brings experience growing tech companies.

Other companies trying to improve "Zoom University" are building onto that platform.

That includes ClassEDU, whose co-founder and CEO Michael Chasen — who also co-founded and led Blackboard — cited Zoom's wide uptake and scalability as reasons that creating an add-on for the software, rather than building a separate platform, was "a no-brainer."

Chasen is undaunted by the potential risks of basing his software, called Class for Zoom, on that of another company. Chasen likens Zoom to Salesforce, which welcomes developers to create features and functions that augment its sales management software. 

"Zoom is the next platform for people to build on top of, we're just one of the first players doing it," Chasen said. Plus, he added, many schools have already invested in Zoom. 

Class for Zoom offers similar features as Engageli. And their makers both bring considerable industry clout. ClassEDU, in addition to its founder's ed tech pedigree, counts early Zoom backers among its investors. And Engageli has a Coursera founder and a former 2U executive in its founding ranks.  

Both companies are also beginning to work with colleges. Engageli in late 2020 began a pilot with a few institutions and planned to include one or two dozen by the end of that year. ClassEDU also planned to launch Class for Zoom in beta mode around that time, and Chasen said people from more than 2,000 schools across K-12 and higher ed have asked to sign up. 

Zoom, too, is making changes, a company spokesperson told Education Dive in an email. Those include the way the class is visualized on the screen, the ability to incorporate apps like Coursera, and better recording and transcription functionality. It also gave instructors more control over the classroom, and it says it has improved security on the platform to try to address the issue of intruders interrupting virtual classes and meetings, also known as "Zoom bombing."

Still, investors and others see promise in Zoom alternatives. ClassEDU raised $16 million in seed funding, and Engageli drummed up $14.5 million. 

They're not the only companies drawing financial support to try to enhance online learning. Headroom, which focuses on videoconferencing, raised $5 million. Podium Education, which produces online classes for colleges to use, raised $12 million. That company has been likened to MasterClass, which raised $100 million in spring 2020. 

Online course provider Udemy raised $50 million at the start of 2020. And online program manager Noodle Partners snagged $16 million in June 2020, while Coursera — which made its platform free to colleges for a time during the pandemic — raised $130 million.

In all, the U.S. ed tech sector raised $803 million in venture capital during the first half of 2020, EdSurge reported, which is on par with the prior five years.

Can colleges just drop Zoom?

The move online during spring 2020 disrupted the ed tech procurement timeline, accelerating decisions that typically take months or even years to process and execute. That means companies taking Engageli's approach will compete in a market in which many potential customers have recently increased their business with an existing videoconferencing provider.

But the pandemic has also left colleges anticipating more long-term online programming, which may have them seeking a tailored option.

"Making Zoom better has a very low barrier to entry," Hill said, suggesting schools could create custom add-ons. However, he continued, a from-scratch alternative could deliver a product designed for the education market. 

Whether the latter could overcome the barrier of schools having invested heavily in existing platforms is "a big open question," Hill said. "There's just a much bigger hurdle they have to jump over."

Trace Urdan, a managing director with investment bank and consulting firm Tyton Partners, acknowledges universities tend to be risk-averse. But he thinks instructors may be more comfortable navigating and switching user interfaces. 

"I ultimately am rooting for the companies that have a tool that's designed for this specific use case, and I'm hoping that those options will flourish and prevail in the market and that it won't be that Zoom just sort of crushes the oxygen from everyone else," he said.

But colleges won't likely all pick the same solution, said Jason Palmer, general partner at New Markets Venture Partners. He figures there will be three to five companies "blooming right now" that will succeed, including Zoom and possibly Engageli. 

"There will be multiple winners here," he said.

Simmons University, in Massachusetts, told students it would create online versions of hundreds of undergraduate courses for the fall 2020 term. School officials billed the move as a way to adapt to the challenges of the pandemic while growing its online footprint. 

But it didn't take on the task alone. To aid the transition, the private university tapped its longtime partner, 2U. The company has helped Simmons develop and manage six online graduate programs, which collectively enroll nearly 3,000 learners — accounting for roughly half its students. 

"I'm trying to imagine us doing that without 2U's help," said Russell Pinizzotto, Simmons' interim provost. "I don't think we would have been able to do that." 

Companies like 2U, called online program managers, typically front the capital needed to get a virtual academic program off the ground. In exchange, they get a share of its tuition revenue, usually between 40% and 60%. The expanded partnership brings that same model to Simmons' online undergraduate courses, though officials declined to share the revenue split.

The deal will also set up several online undergraduate degrees at Simmons targeting adult learners who haven't finished college, and they will be slimmer and priced lower than the campus-based versions. Pinizzotto said the school will debut five programs in May 2021 to start, including in computer science and social work. 

Then-President Helen Drinan said in Simmons' announcement that the new work with 2U would help the university "emerge from the pandemic stronger." And it highlights a two-pronged trend industry observers say the pandemic-induced move to remote education is intensifying: More colleges are creating online programs to expand their reach, and they're increasingly relying on third-party providers for help. 

Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., likewise enlisted Noodle Partners, another OPM, to help it launch an online master's of business administration during the summer of 2020, though the pandemic did not factor into the timing. School officials hope the new degree will help them attract more students. It also comes amid recent growth in online graduate management programs. 

"The trend had already begun before the pandemic," said Barron Harvey, Howard University's associate provost for academic innovation and strategic initiatives. "I believe the pandemic, though, has increased the awareness of students, scholars and administrators that online education is going to be a significant part of higher education from here on out."

Capitalizing on a crisis

It wasn't immediately clear how the pandemic would affect the companies that help colleges set up and run online programs. 

2U, one of the few publicly traded OPMs, disclosed to investors in late April 2020 that the crisis could "severely impact" its business by making it harder to find clients wanting to launch online programs or causing one of its partners to shut down. Companies commonly update potential risk factors in response to major external events. 

At the time, many colleges were struggling with the transition online. Students mocked their schools by calling them "Zoom University," and many said the education they were receiving wasn't worth the tuition they paid. Some even sued to get it back.

Several college officials, in turn, said the pandemic accelerated plans to beef up their online offerings so they can weather this crisis and be ready for the next. Some also said the pandemic turned up the heat on their existing goals to market their programs beyond their traditional geographic boundaries.

OPMs pounced on the opportunity to help. 2U CEO and co-founder Chip Paucek told analysts in July 2020 that the company was seeing "unprecedented demand" across its offerings and "historic highs" in enrollment. He also said the company was seeing increased interest in its revenue-share model from both new and existing partners. 

"Folks are getting more and more comfortable understanding that they can't just offer a live Zoom on their (learning management system) and consider that high-quality online learning," Paucek told Education Dive in September 2020. 

The OPM sector is booming. In the first six months of 2020, schools across the globe struck 85 new contracts with OPMs — 51 of which were in the U.S., according to a recent report from HolonIQ, an education market research firm. Worldwide, that's already more than two-thirds of the OPM deals made in 2019.

To drum up new business, OPMs are offering services beyond their usual scope. 2U, for instance, rolled out new offerings to help schools quickly transition online for the fall term. 

Amherst College, in Massachusetts, is using those services to move some of its most popular courses online, freeing up lecture hall space for smaller, in-person classes in fall 2020. Biddy Martin, Amherst's president, did not respond to an interview request from Education Dive. Simmons is also using this service for its online undergraduate courses. 

Wiley Education Services offered similar services to help its partners adapt to the pandemic. In one case, the company had only about two months to help Loyola Law School, in California, move an in-person summer program fully online. The company billed the move as an opportunity for the school to expand the program's reach to students in other states, including those studying at other universities. 

Another firm, iDesign, is partnering with colleges to bring instructional design support centers to their campuses. So far, several higher education entities, including the University System of Maryland and Vanderbilt University, in Tennessee, have signed onto use the service. 

Using iDesign's services has been part of the Maryland system's larger plan to help transition some classes online across its 12 institutions for the fall term, said MJ Bishop, associate vice chancellor and director of its academic innovation center. Some of the system's schools are underway with primarily or fully online semesters, according to data from the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College.

Although OPMs are mostly promoting these types of offerings as short-term services for colleges in light of the pandemic, industry experts say they have the potential to help the companies find clients and drum up new types of business. Simmons' expanded partnership with 2U, for instance, was born out of a need to prepare for the fall 2020 term and a desire to continue expanding online. 

And the Maryland system may explore offering centralized instructional design help even after the crisis subsides. "Not all of our institutions have access to as much instructional design support," Bishop said. "That's going to get even worse as we begin to really suffer budget cuts as a result of the pandemic." 

What's ahead? 

Sources interviewed for this story agree OPMs will play a larger role going forward in bringing programs online, a roughly decade-long trend the pandemic has accelerated. They disagree, however, about what those relationships will look like.

Simmons University has worked with 2U on a revenue-share basis for several graduate degrees, and their expanded partnership will use that same model. Yet this type of contract has caught the attention of federal legislators who question whether it's lawful and critics who contend it's driving up the price of education. 

Drinan, now president emerita at Simmons, defends the use of revenue-share agreements. "How else are you going to pay them? Do you want to write them a check upfront?" she said. "We don't have a check to write upfront for things like the constant ongoing development of a highly sophisticated technology platform (and) the access to marketing, the likes of which we could not possibly replicate."

And industry experts say the revenue-share approach is becoming more attractive to colleges that want to quickly launch online programs but whose budgets are stretched thin by the pandemic. 

"There's no question that we've seen an increase in people interested in the revenue sharing, and is that a surprise to us? No," Paucek told Education Dive in September 2020. "COVID is having a huge financial impact (on) higher ed as a whole."

The University of New Haven, a private institution in Connecticut, struck up a revenue-share agreement with Wiley to launch six online graduate programs. 

To transition to remote learning during 2020, the university upgraded classroom technology and trained faculty to teach online, said Cynthia Gallatin, its chief of digital learning initiatives. "This collaboration at this time really allowed the university to move and expand very quickly without stretching all of the existing departments and resources," she said. "COVID demands I think helped move this through, but there had been conversations prior." She declined to share the value of the revenue split. 

OPM leaders and industry experts are quick to point out that other forms of financing are gaining traction. 

Deals in which colleges play a flat fee for a specific service, such as marketing or instructional design, have "ticked up" slightly as a share of transactions so far in 2020 as compared to 2019, despite the pandemic, said Brady Colby, founder and CEO of Thirty Two Edu, which tracks the OPM market. 

His theory? The new uncertainty over finances and enrollment could be making some colleges more cautious about entering long-term contracts. He also suspects negative publicity around revenue-share agreements and universities developing their own online capabilities are factors. 

Yet colleges with weaker finances may feel backed into a corner. "I'm particularly concerned about the smaller, tuition-reliant institutions like the small liberal arts schools that may have had to close their (campus) …. in response to the pandemic and so lost (a) tremendous part of their revenue stream," said Taela Dudley, a senior policy associate at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank that has criticized revenue-share agreements. 

Many colleges lost key revenue sources, such as housing and dining, during 2020. But they still need to stabilize their finances, and attempting to boost enrollment by contracting with a third-party provider for student recruitment could be an attractive option, Dudley explained. 

John Katzman, CEO and founder of Noodle Partners, put it more bluntly: "Schools that are not desperate are done with traditional revenue-share agreements." 

Katzman started Noodle Partners after he left 2U, a company he co-founded, and has since been a vocal critic of traditional revenue-share agreements. Noodle Partners offers fee-for-service contracts and a revenue-share model that switches to fee-based payments after a university pays back the initial investment.  

And some colleges may need more targeted help from OPMs. 

W. Andrew McCollough, associate provost for teaching and technology at the University of Florida, noted that the institution has used OPMs to start programs but learned over time how to provide some of those services in-house. When programs need help, it's often with marketing and recruitment.  

Likewise, Jerry Rhead, head of academic entrepreneurship at Michigan State University's HUB for Innovation in Learning and Technology, said the school has grown its capacity to run online programs and will carefully choose which services to develop internally and which they'll use an outside partner for.

"We don't really need instructional design support, we don't necessarily need upfront funding from an OPM to be able to bridge the development of those programs," Rhead said. "We need assistance in the marketing realm, and we need assistance in the student recruitment realm." 

Schools will need to be adaptable in the coming years and the pandemic may make them wary of being locked into long-term contracts, Rhead said. Schools may also want help offering more stackable or short-term credentials.  

"The need is changing," he added. "The service that OPMs provide has to change as well.

Nearly half (49%) of college faculty members view online learning as an effective method of teaching, according to an August 2020 survey of more than 3,600 instructors from Tyton Partners, an investment bank and consulting firm that covers the education sector. 

That's up 10 percentage points from faculty members surveyed by Tyton Partners in May 2020, suggesting the preparation over the summer for remote teaching during the fall of 2020 instilled greater confidence in online learning. 

The report sheds light on faculty sentiment about a wide-ranging set of issues related to the fall 2020 term. One of the most notable findings is that instructors' perception of online learning improved, even though some observers predicted there would be a "negative backlash" against it, said Kristen Fox, director of Tyton Partners' strategy consulting practice.

Four-year colleges were more likely to teach in-person and hybrid classes during the fall 2020 term, while two-year schools were more likely to teach online, the survey also found.

That could explain why two-year instructors were more likely to have confidence in their institutions' health precautions. Faculty members whose schools were primarily online for fall 2020 were more than twice as likely to trust safety measures than those whose colleges mostly held in-person classes. 

Fall 2020 was a flashpoint for faculty members, some of whom contended they had little say in their institutions' pandemic responses and had serious misgivings about teaching in-person classes. Some protested or even sued their universities. 

Many faculty members were also concerned about their colleges' financial health, especially if enrollment declined. Undergraduate enrollment fell 3.6% during fall 2020, with steeper losses at community colleges, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. 

Even so, more instructors said in August 2020 that their institutions were achieving "an ideal digital learning environment" than did three months prior. Overall, 57% of faculty members at two-year schools agreed with that statement, compared with 45% of those at four-year colleges. 

Yet the result signals that roughly half of instructors were unsatisfied with their schools' remote education. "Most institutions still have work to be done to achieve that ideal digital learning environment," Fox said. 

Colleges could improve in several areas. Instructors said they wanted more faculty development that included hands-on learning and discipline-specific support, as well as help with personalized outreach to students in their large classes, she said.

StraighterLine launched more than a decade ago as a way to offer students low-cost college classes online. It has steadily grown since then, but 2020 may have been a turning point for the company and others like it. 

Students generally pay $99 a month plus a per-class fee to access StraighterLine's courses, which are guaranteed to transfer for credit to colleges in its network. The company counts more than 100 institutions as partners, including online giants such as Western Governors and Walden universities. 

In recent years it has also been working with universities to offer pathways into degree programs under their own brands. For instance, StraighterLine partnered with the University of Louisiana System in September 2020 to create a virtual academy allowing prospective students to take college classes for $150 a month before they enroll in one of its institutions. 

"If you aren't successful, you haven't spent a lot of money, you haven't spent a lot of time, you haven't put your Title IV at risk, you don't have a black mark on your transcript and you haven't foreclosed other options," said StraighterLine CEO Burck Smith. "But if you are successful, awesome, you've now gotten credits prior to entry." 

StraighterLine is one of several companies that partner with colleges to offer students standalone online courses, often counting toward general education requirements. Although colleges usually want to retain control over their classes, the pandemic has made these arrangements more attractive to school officials, who are looking for new ways to recruit students, higher education experts said. 

Investors are taking notice. StraighterLine raised an undisclosed sum from a Boston-based private equity firm in spring 2020. Outlier.org, a startup that also offers online classes for college credit, announced in January 2020 that it netted nearly $12 million in a funding round. And Coursera — one of the largest MOOC providers in the world — garnered $130 million from investors in July 2020 after launching a service the prior year to offer online courses to colleges. 

"We're seeing as a result of COVID the whole industry advancing at least a year or two, with a real uptick in terms of the number of users that are coming to these platforms," said Julia Stiglitz, partner at GSV Ventures, which has invested in Outlier.org and Coursera. "You're seeing a lot of investors that are getting very excited about the education technology category."

Alternate pathways to degrees

Colleges tend to be wary of outsourcing classes because of concerns that doing so will hurt academic freedom and quality. It can also cost them important revenue, as many schools use these high-enrollment general education courses to subsidize smaller, upper-level classes, said Phil Hill, an ed tech consultant with the firm MindWires. 

But as competition for students heats up, Hill thinks it's possible more institutions will use online classes from companies like StraighterLine as a recruitment tool. "That gen ed revenue is not this sure thing," Hill said. For colleges, "it's like, 'I've got to have long-term students, and I need to reach them any way I can.'"

This wouldn't be the first time higher ed tried that kind of approach. Buzz grew around MOOC providers, which emerged a few years after StraighterLine's launch and were expected to bring college education to those who wouldn't otherwise have access. But enthusiasm waned when reports revealed they had low completion rates and served large shares of students who were already well-educated. 

Some of those companies have retooled with offerings closer to what StraighterLine delivers. And others have since emerged. Outlier.org partnered with the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 to offer credit for introductory courses in calculus and psychology. Since then, it has added several other courses to its slate. 

Pitt has a revenue-share model with Outlier.org, though the company declined to share the split, and its rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, campus provides some oversight on course curricula and instructors. However, a Pitt official said earlier in 2020 that the college does not encourage its students to take the classes. (And none have, to the company's knowledge.) 

Instead, the goal is to offer courses that nearly anyone can access and transfer to other institutions, Outlier.org founder and CEO Aaron Rasmussen said. The company and university recently created a scholarship for up to 1,000 frontline workers to take one course each for free. 

Universities are beginning to see the value of these companies, said Patrick Brothers, co-founder of education market research firm HolonIQ. "It took some time for StraightLine's model to mature," he added. "The emergence of Outlier, tackling almost the same problem with a slightly different approach, is evidence that there is demand and there is merit." 

Outlier.org is also working with a university to offer online classes directly to students there for credit. The company partnered with Florida Polytechnic University in fall 2020 after the school piloted its calculus course over the summer. 

Although this is a smaller aspect of the company's business, it could grow, said GSV Ventures' Stiglitz, who is also an Outlier.org board member. "With COVID, I think one of the things that we've learned is creating a great online experience in higher ed is actually really hard to do," she said. "Just having Zoom classes is insufficient, so more and more schools are looking for additional tools to supplement." 

A new business model for MOOCs

MOOC providers have taken similar steps in the pandemic's wake.

Coursera debuted a service in 2019 giving colleges access to its course catalog, which they can use to supplement their online offerings.

The company made the service free from March through September to help universities find their online footing during the health crisis. In the fall of 2020, it introduced a tiered pricing model, including two free plans that give students access to one course annually. 

Participation in the service has grown from about 30 campuses in February 2020 to 3,700 worldwide by the end of that year. In all, about 2.6 million students had enrolled in 24 million courses. Completion rates for campus programs was above 50%, according to the company.  

"We're really focused on really investing in this right now," said Coursera spokesperson Chandni Brunamonti in late 2020. The company raised the $130 million to grow its content catalog and expand internationally, she said. 

EdX, a nonprofit MOOC platform created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has made similar moves. In response to the pandemic, it launched Online Campus, which gives partner institutions free access to its courses, and a limited version of this service to other accredited colleges. Some 130,000 students have since used Online Campus to take more than 400,000 classes, according to a December 2020 news release. The company couldn't share data on what share of students completed the classes.

Cathleen Coyle Webster, edX's vice president of development, didn't directly answer whether the pandemic has made it easier for the organization to raise money but said in an emailed statement in late 2020 that there has been a renewed focus from potential funders on helping workers impacted by the pandemic access education. EdX launched a campaign in fall 2020 to raise $10 million to help learners pay for a certificate to prove they completed the classes, which are free. 

These new offerings could strengthen MOOC providers, Hill said. "They've always had huge numbers, but what they haven't had is a clear path to a sustainable business model," he said. "That's where I see the biggest improvements this year."

Eureka College, in Illinois, had a problem. Students behind on credits would take summer classes at the local community college to catch up. But their grades didn't count toward their GPAs, and the private liberal arts school had no way to vet what they were learning. Many students were falling off track as a result.

So in 2017, Eureka partnered with a technology company now called Acadeum, which hosts online course-sharing consortia. These arrangements allow a student at one college to enroll in an eligible online course offered by another participating institution and have it count fully toward their degree. 

Through the partnership, Eureka identifies early on students who may need summer classes to resume good academic standing. Campus staff help students select and enroll in courses they deem worthy of credits. During summer 2020, Eureka students had access to nearly 150 online courses. Many were in general education topics such as introductory psychology and algebra. But some were more advanced, like abnormal psychology and discrete mathematics; these are typically used as an elective or to support a second major or minor, according to Ann Fulop, Eureka's provost.

The vast majority — close to nine in 10 — of Eureka undergraduates who took summer courses through the consortium have either gotten off probation or avoided being dismissed from the college entirely, said Jamel Wright, the school's president. About 200 Eureka students participate in the shared courses annually; the college enrolled 513 students during the fall of 2019, according to federal data.

Wright attributes the trend to Eureka's use of shared online courses. All Eureka students, regardless of their academic standing, have access to them. And close to half of the students who take advantage of the offering are not among those deemed to need extra help, Fulop noted. 

Eureka hasn't noticed an uptick in its use of shared online courses during the pandemic, but officials there say its experience offers a teachable lesson for other institutions seeking to use such resources to work through the disruptions it has caused.

Course-sharing networks historically have tended to comprise small groups of neighboring colleges with similar curricular goals, such as the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts and the Claremont Colleges in Los Angeles County. While the early course-sharing happened in-person, newer initiatives let students take classes online from schools all over the country.

Eureka, which allows its students to take classes through Acadeum but doesn't share its own courses on the platform, was one of the first colleges to adopt such a model. Dozens of other small, private institutions followed thanks to the Council of Independent Colleges' Online Course Sharing Consortium, which was formed in late 2018 and as of fall 2020 was the largest of the dozen or so networks on Acadeum. Eureka joined the CIC's consortium when it launched.  

But demand for course-sharing services has soared since the pandemic began. Forced to quickly adjust to remote instruction, some colleges looked to consortia for help filling out their online program offerings. 

For example, more than 70 institutions have joined the CIC's consortium since mid-March 2020, and enrollment in its shared online courses has grown by 150%, said Carol Schuler, CIC's vice president for state council programs. As of fall 2020, the consortium boasted more than 200 members. In all, Acadeum added some 147 colleges since the pandemic started as of fall 2020, including through new consortia that emerged during that time.

Some higher ed observers think interest in the model could be lasting.

Colleges are tapping into "any and all resources" that can help mitigate disruption while still providing a quality education, said Eureka's Wright. "Now more than ever, students are graduating into even more unknown circumstances, in terms of the marketplace and potential career opportunities. And we can't let them down."

More consortia emerge

The concept of online course-sharing has gained traction among a broad range of institutions that see these partnerships as one antidote to the academic disruption caused by the crisis, said Alicia Policinski, the cofounder and CEO of Quottly, a software platform that allows students to earn transferable credits from other colleges. 

The Big Ten Academic Alliance, which includes large, public research universities such as Michigan State and Pennsylvania State, announced an online course-sharing consortium meant to give students more academic opportunities amid the pandemic. 

The University of Massachusetts announced a similar initiative. Through its Inter-campus Course Exchange, students enrolled at one of its four undergraduate institutions can take online courses through the other campuses. UMass President Marty Meehan in a press release called the exchange a "silver lining" of the pandemic that will benefit students "long after COVID-19 is a distant memory."

Various minority-serving institutions and community colleges are exploring similar partnerships, said Robert Manzer, Acadeum's chief academic officer. 

Strategic Education, which operates Strayer and Capella universities, is offering a consortium through Acadeum that lets students at participating historically Black colleges use classes from the for-profit schools to complete coursework interrupted during the spring term. Students can access more than 900 courses, though their schools may limit the number of credits they can take. 

In March 2020, Acadeum developed a separate consortium geared at helping students recover credits lost to the spring disruptions. While Acadeum's other consortia are limited to colleges in specific industry groups or regions, the Higher Education Course Recovery Consortium is open to public and private colleges across the country. They can use it "on a moment's notice to get their students the courses they need during the pandemic," Manzer said.

California's Menlo College, for example, joined in late July 2020 to use Texas Wesleyan University's business courses, which are accredited by AACSB International. 

'A great piece to a puzzle'

Advocates argue the curricular flexibility and diversity such consortia afford are especially vital now, as colleges cut or curtail courses and students adjust their college plans in response to the pandemic. 

Many colleges have had to eliminate low-enrollment courses to maintain their bottom lines, said Jo Ellen Parker, CIC's vice president for communications and the former president of Virginia's Sweet Briar College. Using consortia allows these schools to "identify trusted partners" and ensure that "what students are doing online is productive and appropriate for them," Parker said.

Through the CIC consortium, where membership costs schools $1,000 a year to use the courses or $3,000 to use and provide them, institutions can facilitate credit transfer and even coordinate financial aid, Schuler said. Schools directing students to the consortium can also be sure learners will earn credits and that transferring them will be easy, she said. 

The teaching institutions determine how much they charge a students' home college for enrollment in their shared courses, though it's typically between $500 and $800 a seat, according to Acadeum's Manzer. 

Schools are having to operate more nimbly as a result of the pandemic's impact on their budgets. And finding ways to integrate courses from other schools within a consortium framework to support students is part of that, Manzer contends. But institutions new to consortia will need to figure out how to use the online courses to support their curricular priorities and campus populations, such as by figuring out when it makes sense to refer students and for what types of classes.

Before the pandemic, institutions may have shied away from sharing courses because of the related logistical and financial burdens. Navigating the online platforms can be intimidating for schools unaccustomed to virtual education. And such partnerships may require extra fees and support within the participating institution.

They are also incumbent on trust among participating colleges — a difficult feat in an era of hyper-competition over prospective students. 

But Eureka's Wright encourages colleges to take advantage of available resources to help mitigate disruption. Course-sharing is "a great piece to a puzzle none of us has put together before," Wright said. "We've never had to put a puzzle together that includes a pandemic."