Dear colleagues,
The Financial Recovery Group, which has staff representatives from across the University, is continuing a series of ‘deep dive’ discussions into the actions underway to ensure our return to growth. The focus of this week’s update is the development of our Online Education strategy. We are grateful to colleagues in the Schools and Directorates who have worked tirelessly to help formulate this strategy and pilot its earliest stages.
In summary the objectives are:
- high quality distinctive programmes
- targeting areas of highest demand
- limited design, development and delivery workload and costs for academic and professional services staff, by ensuring minimal new content development while offering maximum appeal to learners
- working with external partner organisations to minimise costs to acquire and retain learners through the development of less complex and fragmented approaches to applicant admissions
- a data-informed approach to student recruitment and retention
Expansion of online education over the next 5 years will be a key driver and enabler for delivery of the University’s Aberdeen 2040 strategy. Online will expand our educational provision, providing an outstanding education supported by advanced pedagogies, digital resources, and technologies. We aim to lead the sector and build on our current global impact.
Additionally, online will play a key role in our return to revenue growth. The University is committed to growing online fee income by 10% year on year, from £7.2 million in 2023/24 to £8.7 million in 2025/26.
Our Plan
- A bold and ambitious online offer that drives lifelong learning, global impact and dissemination of Aberdeen research and educational excellence.
- Market leadership in the UK and globally as demand for online learning continues to grow.
- Maximising the use of short courses and specialisations as pathways into online and on-campus degree programmes designed to meet the demand in global and regional markets.
- A diverse community of learners across on-campus, international and online formats by providing relevant digital resources (full degrees, standalone credit-bearing courses, professional short courses, top up degrees) for each stage of the learner journey.
- Fully online and mixed mode – e.g. some courses delivered online and some on-campus.
Portfolio
The strategy aims to deliver high-quality distinctive programmes, targeting the areas of highest student demand, with a portfolio including:
- Short courses: stand-alone courses that are non-credit-bearing as well as credit-bearing. Initial efforts will focus on further unbundling existing degrees to expand our offer of short courses to increase revenue. Additionally, short courses will be used as a recruitment tool for full degrees and as a means of implementing performance-based admissions where appropriate.
- Postgraduate taught degrees: Programmes designed to facilitate a stackable approach to obtaining a degree; from a single course, through PgCert, PgDip and Masters. Flexible study periods for learners as well as part-time and full-time study options. Full-time can be offered at year two of the programme running. The teaching model will be predominantly tutored and non-simultaneous. Programmes will be designed to have multiple entry points per year, reflecting the fact that the industry standard is currently 6 intakes per year, while being mindful this may not be appropriate for every programme.
- Micro-degrees: For example, mini-MBAs in a range of subject areas taking existing courses to create a range of specialisms.
- Mixed-mode degrees: Structures will be created to enable students to select from a mix of on-campus and online courses to stack credits towards a degree.
- Top-up degrees: Whilst the market for full undergraduate degrees is currently limited, there is opportunity for top-up degrees.
- Research degrees: Expand the number of research degrees offered to include taught PhDs, combining structured courses with independent research. The former would be developed from existing courses. This is also a recruitment tool for PGT programmes as it gives students an option for further study.
To promote our offering to as wide a prospective student market as possible, it is essential that our online strategy includes targeted and effective marketing and promotional activities, with an emphasis on digital marketing as well as pro-active engagement with prospective students. To achieve this, we will seek to engage with an external partner organisation that can provide those resources and capabilities, at least in the short term, whilst we build in-house resource and capability. The following factors are known to be the most impactful on a prospective student’s decision in selecting an online programme: tuition fee, time to start (from application to programme commencing), time to complete and time to receive an offer. Consequently, these are all areas that we will focus on streamlining and improving.
The Online Action Group has undertaken a portfolio review to assess programme performance in terms of recruitment. Further work is ongoing to evaluate fees, entry requirements, structure and content to assess whether any changes in these areas may improve student numbers.
Research has identified the following high demand clusters listed below. Some examples of potential high demand programmes are listed under each area:
- Business, Management and Law
- International Law
- International Business Management
- Digital Marketing
- Computing
- Computer Science (conversion)
- Business Analytics
- Health Informatics
- Health and Psychology
- Health Psychology
- Precision Medicine
- Counselling
- Education
- Digital Education
- Special Education Needs
- Educational Psychology
- Social Science, Arts and Humanities
- International Relations
- International Policy
- Global Business Communication
- Science and Engineering
- Environmental Sciences
- Environmental Policy
- Environmental Economics
We aim to maximise market appeal and ensure a focused approach to build reputation and critical mass. Within each cluster programme, areas have been identified and shared with School Directors of Education and Professional Services. However, this is not an exhaustive list and ideas for new courses and programmes are encouraged.
We already have a number of online programmes in high demand areas with the greatest demand seen for Renewable Energy, Clinical Nutrition, Business and Finance, Primary Education and Mindfulness. In addition, new programmes launched this academic year have also showed potential to be high demand, particularly for Health Data Sciences, with Philosophy and Society also looking promising.
Approach
Degree programmes and courses will be developed in high demand areas, targeting vocationally-facing, skills-based clusters to build reputation and critical mass. High demand areas will be identified based on robust, up-to-date market intelligence. Our online offering needs to be both academically strong and financially viable, such that programmes are able to generate a financial return.
The initial focus will be primarily on postgraduate degrees, maximising opportunities to use variants of core programmes, maximising the use of existing content, and minimising creation costs. To build reputation and expand market share, a commercial partner will be recruited for this initial phase to provide the upfront investment required. There are various partnership models available and while our focus will be on marketing and recruitment, we may need to draw on some additional resource around learning design and academic support.
Academic and operational delivery
The academic delivery model will seek to ensure targeted support in those prioritised areas of programme design and development, together with support for increased delivery capacity. We recognise that the areas of greatest opportunity may well align with subject disciplines where current academic capacity is very limited.
Colleagues across the university have already invested considerable time and effort in growing online courses and programmes and we will build on that work. Online education continues to grow globally, but it is also becoming increasingly competitive. As such, we must ensure that we are set up for success and longevity, which means continually reviewing our portfolio, fees, entry requirements and delivery model. For example, the majority of our peers offer online programmes with multiple intakes per year, typically six. This is done by what is referred to as a “carousel” model whereby programmes are designed in a non-linear manner, meaning the courses do not have pre-requisites and students can join the course that is running at the time of year they wish. This reduces workload by removing the need to run courses multiple times and also creates an opportunity to offer those courses as stand-alone options, further increasing income and flexibility. Our focus will be on creating the infrastructure required to scale our online delivery, which includes supporting staff development in this area.
Future Meetings of the Financial Recovery Group
As a group, we are now confident that we are working well together and have established a plan for future meetings that will allow us to consider in an informed way the wide range of financial recovery actions taking place across the University. We believe that there is still a need for us to meet regularly – but we recognise that our colleagues across the University need enough time to deliver on these activities so that we can keep providing you with meaningful updates.
Therefore, Financial Recovery Group meetings will now move to a fortnightly basis after this week’s meeting, where we focused on fundraising activities. We will continue to provide you with updates after each meeting and in the meantime, please continue to reach out to the Group with your suggestions and feedback via the confidential mailbox financialrecovery@abdn.ac.uk.
Karl Leydecker
Senior Vice-Principal