Growing Access: Analysis of the Opportunity

John R. Bourne, Ph.D., Olin and Babson Colleges and The Sloan Consortium

In the summer of 2005, a working group investigating growth in online education took part in the annual summer Sloan-C workshop. This group investigated, discussed and wrote papers about ways in which online education could grow. Topics ranged from investigating growth of online methodologies in higher education to how retired populations of learners might employ online education in the future. This short paper provides an overview analysis of growth opportunities; more details can be secured from papers written about this topic that appear in combined papers from the workshop and in the online seminar that will be offered in May, 2006.

The key question about growth is whether there is an opportunity for having more learners secure their education online. From our research, the answer appears to be a resounding "yes." There are very significant opportunities for reaching more learners, both in the United States and abroad. Methods for capturing these learners and strategies for improving access will be examined in the workshop; in this paper, we highlight the areas of possibility and the attendant implications.

First, a major area for growth is in higher education. The annual Sloan-C report on online education found that somewhat less than 3 million learners were taking courses online in 2005. The growth rate was nearly 20% per year. Three million learners represent less than one fifth of the total learner population in higher education in the United States. However, the total population of learners in higher education is growing only at about 1.5%. Discussions reveal that researchers believe that a significant opportunity for increasing online learners is in the blended area - that is, in the traditional venues of higher education in which mixing face-to-face and online education can be beneficial. Learning situations on-campus can be augmented through blending, thus saving institutional space, student time while increasing the capability of the faculty to deliver high quality education to un-reached learners.

Second, K-12 is an area that deserves attention. If the fifty-five million K-12 learners in the United States were to be educated with online and blended methods, this change would dramatically affect what new students entering higher education would likely demand for as an educational delivery system. The rate at which K-12 progresses toward blended and/or fully online will enable us to gauge how higher education should respond.

Third, the retired (baby-boomer, Silver Tsunami) generation may show significant increases in use of the internet for continued learning. However, so far, these changes have not appeared. Perhaps as the first baby boomers transition to retirement, there will be some early evidence of change (e.g., in the numbers of people taking continuing education courses). If there is a significant up tick in boomer uptake, this change could represent a tremendous market for online education.

Fourth, online learners in the corporate world are increasing in number. One source estimates that it is possible to reach perhaps 25% of the total addressable population of perhaps 80 million to take online courses. At the same time, military, government and health care populations may see similar growth.

In addition to the four areas above, "the opportunity for growing access for minority institutions, laboratories access and retaining students" were identified as ways to provide additional opportunity.

Taken in aggregate, the research described in our upcoming workshop posits that it will be possible to grow online education ten times in ten years through the combining of all the potential avenues for growth. "10 in 10" is a slogan used sometimes in Sloan-C to provide a goal for the organization. To reach 10 times as many learners by 2016 will require significant effort; nevertheless, the opportunity is there and potentially reachable. Moreover, the assessment of opportunity for growth was developed for the US with a population of about 300 million. The world population is more that 20 times larger - a very significant opportunity as that population becomes reachable.

For their contributions to this work, we wish to thank: Jacquie Moloney, Burks Oakley, Linda Ettinger, Melody Thompson, Devon Cancilla, William Booth, Olin Campbell, Bob Ubell, Mary Niemiec, George Otte and Tony Picciano, Janet Moore, John Sener and Kathleen Ives.

(From May 17 - 26 John Bourne, Tony Picciano, Burks Oakley, Janet Moore, Richard Garrett and Kathleen Ives will be hosting a workshop: Opportunities for Growth in Online Education )

The Problem With Success:
Successful Marketing of Your Online Program Could Have a Downside

Keith Bourne, Chief Operations Officer, The Sloan Consortium

You are starting a new online program and you successfully launched a marketing campaign that has produced 10 times more leads than the number of students that you plan to have in the program. How could this possibly be a problem? Because now you have to do something with the leads before they can actually become students. This probably seems straightforward, but you may be surprised to know that many institutions become completely overwhelmed when they actually have their first successful marketing campaign for an online program.

Sloan-C has been involved with a number of initiatives in the past few years aimed at helping universities and colleges improve the marketing effectiveness of their online programs. A common theme in many of our events though has been that a program needs to prepare itself for success with an adequate infrastructure. If you flip the switch on your outreach program and receive 1000 student leads overnight, who is going to respond? How will you track your conversion rate from lead to student? Is there a system in place that allows you to understand the actual cost of obtaining a student so that you can improve your cost efficiency in the next campaign?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to establishing an adequate infrastructure for processing student leads. It depends on the size of your program, your budget, and a host of other factors. But simply understanding this challenge and preparing for it, especially preparing in a way that allows you to improve and refine your efforts in the future, is a big step towards a truly successful program. I recommend these basic steps to get you started:

1) Define what success means to your organization in a set of measurable metrics. As two examples, this could simply be a number of enrollments, or it could be a number of factors that relate to the quality of the student body of that program.
2) Establish a tracking system, even if it is rudimentary, that will allow you to measure success based on how you define it in step #1. Be sure to check your existing resources for this step. For example, check to see what your IT department or other marketing departments at your institution already have that can help you track your marketing program.
3) Build a flexible plan that will allow you to keep up with the success of your outreach program. Adequate planning includes maintaining the proper personnel on hand that can track down leads. If you plan to use Internet marketing as a cornerstone of your plan, be careful not to base your estimated number of leads on current marketing efforts that are not Internet-based. Studies have shown that campaigns on the Internet can be much more successful, and you will want to plan accordingly so that your department is not overwhelmed.
4) Once you have gone through a cycle of implementing the plan, use the tracking system to improve and refine all of your activities.

(Keith Bourne is the Chief Operations Officer for the Sloan Consortium and will be hosting a workshop June 14-23 called "Living With Success" that is focused on improving student lead conversion and increasing student retention.)

Learn From the Experts - Managing Growth in Online Education

Take advantage of these two innovative workshops coming in June. Also, where's future growth in ALN going to occur? The deadline for "Opportunities for Growth in Online Education" is coming up. Don't miss this workshop.

Opportunities for Growth in Online Education - May 17-26

In 2005, a team of Sloan-C researchers set out to identify opportunities for growth in online education and asynchronous learning networks. This first workshop out of a three workshop series on growth outlines the areas found. Each market is described in terms of size of opportunity, underlying trends driving each market and examples of how institutions are already taking advantage of each market. Markets include: baby-boomers, K-12 - AP courses, international, corporate/industry partnerships, underserved undergraduate degrees with high demand, blended learning.

Details and registration.

Living with Success- Turning Leads into Students Profitably - June 14-23

Conversion: Once you have identified great opportunities and marketing efforts have started to generate leads, how do you convert them into actual students? How do you set up a program to make sure it is cost effective, but still receives quality leads?
Retention: Getting a student through the door is just the beginning. Research conducted by the Lumina Foundation found an estimated 60 percent of students at public institutions fail to complete degrees within five years, half of these students leave during the freshman year. These findings beg the question,"How do I retain them students for the lifetime of their student careers?" This second workshop in the three workshop series on growth will explore these issues.

Details and registration.

Scaling Your Institution to Meet Growth - June 21-30

In the other two Sloan-C workshops on growth (Opportunities for Growth in Online Education and Living with Success- Turning Leads into Students Profitably), opportunities were developed and seized. Ultimately your organization may experience growth that may cause more problems. This third workshop addresses how to scale the entire institution efficiently to manage growth from your successful endeavors. Several successful model institutions are examined for how they have managed growth.

Details and registration.

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is composed of institutions and organizations dedicated to continually improving the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs, according to their own distinctive missions, so that education becomes a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.

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