Two research universities forge an $11.5-million online-ed collaboration
When the University of Tennessee at Knoxville began getting serious a few years ago about building out its online-education offerings, officials there first took a hard look around at several models they might follow to jump-start their efforts.
To be sure, there’s no shortage of those. In just the past five years we’ve seen private institutions like Simmons University betting big with online-program-management companies, public universities like the University of Arizona buying for-profit universities with big online footprints, a public university (the University of Massachusetts) acquiring a mostly-online nonprofit institution, and even a public system (the University of North Carolina) creating its own OPM.
But smashing successes, most of those have not been. In fact, some have become rather problematic and frustrating.
It didn’t take the Tennessee folks very long to determine they’d be better off with a new approach. “There were enough cautionary tales out there,” John Zomchick, the provost, told me.
So instead of buying an existing online-ed venture whose culture and values would be out of sync with the university’s, or agreeing to give away a big share of tuition revenue to an OPM, the Knoxville campus decided to create a partnership with another public research institution — one that already has a major presence in the online-ed world: Arizona State University.
ASU enrolls 95,000 students in exclusively online programs, and boasts 4,500 online courses and nearly 400 degree and certificate programs. Its on-campus students also can take some of their courses online. Enrollment in UT-Knoxville’s Vols Online program is much smaller — about 2,500 students over all, mostly in master’s programs. Online education “wasn’t a focus,” Zomchick told me.
If you know anything about ASU, you know “scaling” is one of its mantras. No surprise, then, that the collaboration’s prime goal, according to the contract shared with me this week, is to bring 30,000 new students to UT-Knoxville by 2029 — half in degree programs and half in noncredit and certificate offerings.
It’s hard to judge whether the deal — which involves payment of $11.5 million to ASU over five years — will turn out to be a worthwhile financial gamble for UT-Knoxville. But at the very least it does strike me as a smart match for several reasons, which I highlight below.
But first, some of the nuts and bolts of this unique model:
The most visible piece of the collaboration is the course exchange, which will begin this August with ASU providing up to 10 of its general-education courses to UT-Knoxville students. Over time, ASU will make more courses available, and UT-Knoxville will offer some of its courses to ASU as well. Students will remain at their home institutions and pay their respective tuition prices. The institutions will remunerate each other by paying a flat, per-credit fee for each student who enrolls in the other’s course (initially, $242 per credit for undergrad courses and $425 for master’s). So as with the OPM model, there is a revenue share, but it’s not based on a percentage of the tuition. The two institutions also expect to develop at least one shared degree program.
The collaboration differs from the OPM model in other ways, too. ASU is not developing online versions of UT-Knoxville courses or assuming responsibility for marketing the programs or recruiting students to them, as companies like Academic Partnerships or 2U typically do. Instead, people in ASU’s online operation, known as EdPlus, will work side-by-side with UT-Knoxville personnel to help the Vols Online operation develop that expertise for itself. The idea is to “rapidly accelerate” Knoxville’s digital knowledge, said Phil Regier, chief executive at EdPlus. ASU will advise and assist Vols Online on all aspects of online-ed offerings, but as UT-Knoxville’s Zomchick told me, the goal is to “build up our capacities here.”
UT-Knoxville will pay $3.5 million for those operational advisory services. It will pay an additional $8 million for access to innovative teaching technologies ASU has helped to create, such as its virtual-reality Dreamscape Learn project, and the asynchronous early-college Study Hall courses it developed in collaboration with Crash Course.
As part of the collaboration, the two institutions have also agreed to exchange insights, feedback, and lessons from the relationship in a “shared knowledge core,” which is meant to benefit both parties.
This collaboration intrigues me for several reasons.
First, because it involves two major research universities, it could bring more legitimacy to online education. That’s especially important for ASU, which is still sometimes knocked by its academic peers (or, at least, by faculty members at institutions it considers its peers) for its high profile in online ed. “We don’t want to be a unicorn in this space,” Regier told me. “There should be other universities that help us achieve a higher degree of adult completion.”
The collaboration also makes sense from a business standpoint. While ASU has been aggressively courting students beyond Arizona — especially in California — there’s not a lot of overlap between the two institutions’ markets. The ASU brand “is stronger west of the Mississippi,” said Regier, adding that there’s now no pre-eminent online university in the Southeast (though that’s not for lack of trying by the University of Florida).
And Zomchick said he’s optimistic that with the right underpinnings, Vols Online can attract students, especially some of the 900,000 Tennesseans with some college under their belt but no degree. The Tennessee name “means a lot to people in our region,” he said. Still, as Regier insisted, “market domination” isn’t the goal; it’s about getting more universities using online education to reach new students.
I also think it’s cool to see two major research universities from opposite sides of the country sharing expertise in this manner. I wonder why more don’t. It will be fascinating to watch, as both an academic collaboration and a business partnership.
A deal like this is a first for ASU. University leaders from around the country visit EdPlus all the time, Regier told me, but typically “they go back and nothing happens.” But this collaboration came together pretty quickly. Donde Plowman, the UT-Knoxville chancellor, brought colleagues to ASU in March 2022, and within a year, officials at both institutions were already working together — even before any money had changed hands. Zomchick said he’s convinced that faculty members at UT-Knoxville were more willing to get behind this new push for online ed because they have an academic institution as a partner, not an OPM. Vols Online will continue to employ its OPM company, Noodle, for some services, but Zomchick said he’s confident the arrangement with ASU will help it quickly gain self-sufficiency. “We’ve got the talent, and the opportunity now, to build it in-house.”
I also wondered how ASU was viewing the arrangement. Will this be a new line of “business” for ASU? Apparently, that will depend. There’s nothing in the deal that prohibits it from working with other universities. But for now, Regier said, the attention is on “really getting this one right first.”
An advocate for men and boys lands a grant for women’s empowerment
Melinda French Gates is going her own way in grantmaking, and among those receiving a share of the first $1 billion in grants to promote women’s health and empowerment from her new Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation is the author and scholar Richard V. Reeves. That’s interesting to me because, as I shared with you in March, Reeves’s focus has been primarily on how education is leaving men behind, particularly in areas he’s dubbed the HEAL fields.
Reeves was among an eclectic group of 12 global leaders granted $20 million each to distribute to charities doing urgent and innovative work to improve women’s health and well-being in the United States and around the world. If “gender gaps matter, they matter in both directions,” Reeves said in a thread on X after the gift was announced last week. “Broadening the gender-equality movement to include men will not hinder the progress of women. Failing to, just might.”
Yup, faculty members and administrators see higher ed differently
During a recent virtual forum I hosted, we talked about a new survey that compared opinions of faculty members and administrators. Two of the findings from that survey stood out to me: For the question “How optimistic are you about the future of your institution?” 56 percent of administrators said extremely or very optimistic; but just 23 percent of faculty members gave that same response. And for the question “How would you characterize the state of shared governance at your institution?” 58 percent of faculty members said not at all strong or slightly strong, while only 29 percent of administrators responded that way. You can obtain the full report on what faculty members and administrators want from one another via this link. If you missed the conversation live and want to watch it at your leisure, you can find it here.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on X, @GoldieStandard is my handle. Or find me on BlueSky Social, which I just joined with the same handle.
