Education International
5. Online program management As MOOC providers have become more central to university and college course provision, they have begun to merge with a wider multibillion dollar online learning market.96 Online program management (OPM) refers to infrastructure services provided by vendors to enable universities to deliver online and distance education courses. OPM companies include 2U, Noodle Partners and Academic Partnerships, global education publishers including Wiley and Pearson, as well as MOOC providers that have diversified into the OPM market (Coursera, edX, Udacity, FutureLearn). OPM providers have positioned themselves to support institutions’ internationalization strategies, as universities seek out a share of the international student market, but now find themselves in a position to support the transition online for both international and domestic students too. A key aspect of the success of OPMs is that the companies usually cover the up-front costs of setting up an online degree program, and provide the technical infrastructure for university partners to build their courses on. This model saves universities having to front the costs or build the technical platform. The companies then take 5060% of the student fees as a return on their up-front investment, plus substantial management fees. In this sense, the programmed pedagogic environments of OPMs consist of networking technologies, assumptions about distance teaching methods, lucrative profit-making business models for the companies, and economic cost-saving models for HE providers.
The outsourcing business of OPMs Noodle Partners is a leading OPM that received $16 million venture capital investment in June 2020. Its business model is based on outsourcing and a complex of financial fee and borrowing structures: Noodle contracts with nearly 100 third-party companies that offer services from student recruiting and marketing to content management and course design. The company negotiates a rate on behalf of the university for the services, then manages the work. ‌ [C]olleges are outsourcing the work of outsourcing to Noodle, which helps cobble together and then maintain the different pieces they need to build and operate online programs. ‌ Noodle charges colleges $22,000 per month in management fees alone for the first program, and $12,000 96
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HolonIQ. 2019, 14 February. The Anatomy of an OPM and a $7.7B Market in 2025. HolonIQ: https://www.holoniq.com/news/ anatomy-of-an-opm/
