Two Distinct Camps for the Role of Online Learning in Higher Education

The Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) has been tracking trends in online higher education for the last 12 years. One thing has become obvious to Jeff Seaman, co-director of BSRG: Every school falls into one of two camps in terms of how the institution views online education.

"There's the continually increasing, continually more positive story about online that you see," Seaman said. "And then there's the stubborn-that-never-change piece."

This divide has become more pronounced than ever before in this year's survey findings. This year's report marked the lowest growth rate in online enrollments since Babson began collecting data, and the first time ever that there was a drop in the number of academic leaders who described online learning as critical to their institutions long-term strategy.

Seaman said the three percent drop among academic leaders can be attributed to institutions that don't have any form of online learning, but may have considered implementing such programs.

"Among all of the institutions that have any kind of online program, or even just a course, their opinion did not change," Seaman said. "They are exactly as positive about online. It's important for their strategy as ever before."

To learn more about the findings of this year's report and the long-term trends of online learning in higher education, check out our video interview with Jeff Seaman above, or take a look at the text version of our Q&A below.

You've been tracking trends in online learning with your annual report for more than a decade now. Can you talk about the big trends you've seen in your decade-plus of research?

Yes, there's two sets of indicators we've been looking at. There's the continually increasing, continually more positive story about online that you see. And that's things like enrollment and the perceived level of quality of the learning outcomes every year gets a little better.

More and more of the institutions say it's important for the long-term strategy every year. So, for a decade plus, we've seen this class of indicators that show slow, but steady improvement that is always putting online in a big, better light, a bit more popular, a bit more accepted.

And then there's the stubborn-that-never-change piece. For that, there's a subset of institutions, who have always said, it doesn't matter to me, it's not important to me, it doesn't match my mission, I have no interest in it, I don't believe it in, it's no good.

They are unwavering in that belief and have been for over a decade. But then, even among the institutions for which there are large online programs, there are still levels of concerns that have not gone away.

The two biggest are faculty acceptance of online and retention of students in online programs. We've seen continual resistance to them for the entire 12 years.

One of the things that was making the rounds after your report was released a few weeks ago was that this year's report showed the lowest growth rate for enrollments since you began collecting data. While the growth rate still outpaces higher education enrollments in general, it seems to potentially signal a slowing down of an industry that's otherwise been growing pretty rapidly in the last decade. Given all of this: What does this new reality mean in terms of how universities—and the administrators specifically—should strategize around online learning?

From report number two, the question was: Is this growth sustainable? And the answer has always been 'no.' If you extrapolate it out 20 years, you've got more than 100 percent taking online—obviously impossible. So, the question has always been: When do you see the plateau? And where do you see it?

You don't expect that it's going to be universal, that enrollments are going to slow for all types of programs at all types of levels simultaneously. We'll begin to see that pattern emerge over time. And that's what we're beginning to see now, that online—at least in some components of higher ed—is reaching this equilibrium state, where it's not longer growing, but it's not shrinking.

You've got some programs that have grown a little, others that are dropping a little bit. But that pattern is not universal across all of online. So what we love is to delve into and start working at: Well, where is it beginning to level out? Where not? And it does differ by program.

Another slight decrease I wanted to address from this year's report is the number of academic leaders who described online learning as critical to their institutions' long-term strategy. That number was 69 percent in 2013. In this year's report, it was 66 percent. What do you think this suggests for the popularity and prominence of online learning in the year's ahead?

It's a really interesting number and it's not so much because of the number—and this has bent he biggest drop we've seen. Basically, this has been one of those continually increasing indicators that we've had for all of the years. So the fact that it went down and went down three percent is big news.

But the way in which it went down is the really interesting piece, which is, among all of the institutions that have any kind of online program, or even just a course, their opinion didn't change. They're exactly as positive about online. It's important for their strategy as ever before.

It's all of the schools that don't have online—a sizable proportion of them have been saying 'We're gonna move to online' and they're changing their mind. And they're a very interesting group of schools.

They tend to be very small, they haven't done a lot in online, primarily because of resource issues. We can speculate, maybe it's because they see that the market is matured and there's no longer any opportunity; maybe they're just getting tired of it; maybe they're seeing that all of the publicity about MOOCs is souring the market.

At this point it's speculative, but it's really interesting because if you have online, you are just as positive on every measure this year as you were last year. If you don't have online, you're more negative this year than you were last year.

Speaking of MOOCs, that's the last thing I wanted to hone in on with you. It's been one of the big buzz words in higher ed in the last few years, and this year's report shows that only 5 percent of schools are offering MOOCs and just under 10 percent were in the planning stages. So, given that there's all this buzz out there and all this talk about MOOCs, do those numbers surprise you?

No. There's a couple of things. MOOCs are such a high-leverage activity—the massive part, the 'M' of the MOOC. So the saturation of MOOCs doesn't need 4500 institutions offering them.

The fact that we have five percent of them only offering them, that's still a fairly large number and, especially given that they tend to be bigger institutions with the resources to do this, the number of potential students they get is quite high.

If we doubled or tripled that number [of schools offering MOOCs], we wouldn't substantially increase the potential reach. There's enough offerings, there's enough pieces out there.

The difference is: What's the impact on the higher ed community writ large? What we're seeing is: The MOOC impact is going to be on a small slice of higher ed, at least directly, and the rest of the institutions are just going to have the indirect effects of whatever the reputation issues for MOOCs are, how people think about higher ed, but not directly by having their own programs.