Online learning comes in many forms—some better than others, as we learned in 2020. Leveraging effective tools is essential to making it work well for students and schools. In the past decade, North Carolina universities have tested various programs, with varying degrees of success. In doing so, the state has come closer to realizing the large potential benefits of flexible online learning.
In 2012, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University began paving the way for online education in North Carolina, using Online Program Management (OPM) partners to reach students at home.
In the past decade, North Carolina has come closer to realizing the large potential benefits of flexible online learning.Duke University has partnered with Coursera, a massive open online course (MOOC) provider, since 2012 to broaden its offerings beyond what would be practical to operate on campus. In 2023, Duke announced a milestone of 10 million enrollments worldwide since launching. Today, students, staff, faculty, and alumni have access to thousands of free courses and specialization programs.
Meanwhile, UNC partnered with OPM provider 2U from 2012 until 2014 in a multi-university venture called Semester Online. Pre-pandemic, large numbers of students were not yet ready to take courses online, but many were. Starting in 2016, UNC began to offer a Coding Boot Camp through 2U’s Trilogy Education Services, which remains successful. Today, according to UNC Online, 2U serves more than 46 million people across 230 businesses and institutions of higher education. 2U continues to provide education opportunities to UNC students.
In January 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill’s objectives for student success in its strategic framework included choosing an “Online Program Management partner to fast-track the digital residential and non-residential needs of UNC-Chapel Hill.” UNC’s idea was to “expand digital technologies to increase access and opportunities for all North Carolinians and beyond.” Expansion was the right concept for UNC. Other North Carolina universities have done similarly.
The environment for online education has changed significantly since 2012, not just because the pandemic response required online courses to grow quickly and exponentially. For one thing, the U.S. Department of Education has sought to interfere with and regulate a wide variety of partnerships between universities and “third-party servicers,” leading to uncertainty in the online-education space that has inhibited innovation, ultimately hurting students. The department’s effort is part of a broader departmental animus against for-profit actors of all kinds in education.
Here is what a 2018 alumna of a 2U-partnered UNC program argued in a March 2023 comment against the department’s third-party servicer interference:
2U supports UNC’s ability to deliver their top-ranked MBA in an online format, which enabled me and thousands of other students to advance our careers without having to move or quit our jobs to earn an advanced professional degree.
Without this program, I would not have been able to earn an MBA at all. […] My experience at UNC with 2U was overwhelmingly positive. UNC was transparent about 2U’s role as a technology and OPM partner. At no point was there doubt about the quality of the experience or the role 2U played in helping deliver this top-ranked program. […]
Because of the revenue share model used by UNC and 2U, 2U was incentivized and invested in seeing students not just enroll but also complete their online programs.
UNC produced a confidential audit of the partnership in March 2024. The Wall Street Journal reviewed it and reported various concerns. UNC ultimately ended some of its 2U contracts. But the director of UNC’s Master of Public Administration (MPA) program described only positive experiences in a recent newsletter, pointing instead to UNC’s internal capabilities to support its own programs now:
When we decided to move into the online space it was still an emerging area, and we did not have the expertise and experience to build the program that we needed. […] We have enjoyed a robust, decade-long partnership benefiting students who need the flexibility of an online MPA. 2U brought significant expertise, capacity, and technology to this partnership. Working with 2U allowed us to create an exceptional online experience. I believe that, had we tried to do that work alone, we would not have been able to overcome the hurdles in entering online education.
We are at a different point in time now, one in which we have an opportunity and the skills and resources internally at the School of Government that can support a transition in the operating model of the online format.
A large institution is better poised than a small one to bring its online program management in-house. Yet UNC maintains relationships not only with edX (now owned by 2U) but also with Coursera, which partners with more than 300 businesses and universities and has partnered with UNC since 2013. UNC also received third-party services from K16 Solutions to facilitate the shift of its learning management system for online courses from Sakai to Canvas by Instructure.
Other universities in the UNC System have OPM or other third-party partners. UNC Charlotte’s School of Professional Studies partners with 2U. UNC Greensboro’s Esports program for high-school students uses a curriculum delivered by Esports Integration, which has 16 or so educational institutions as clients. Across North Carolina, the provider Ed2Go (owned by Cengage Group) is partnered with NC Central University, North Carolina community colleges, Winston-Salem State University, East Carolina University, and more. An exception is UNC Wilmington, which offers highly ranked online bachelor’s and MBA degrees. UNCW provides its offerings entirely in-house and uses outside vendors only for some marketing services.
The Department of Education has sought to interfere with and regulate a wide variety of online-learning partnerships.A third change from 2012 is that the UNC System has developed a centralized, home-grown OPM affiliate. In January 2022, the UNC Board of Governors provided significant details on Project Kitty Hawk (PKH), a public-private partnership (PPP) incorporated as a nonprofit organization to provide OPM services. As with many OPMs, PKH’s optional services for UNC System universities now include not just technology but also support for marketing, enrollment, and student advising. (See p. 20 of the Board of Governors presentation for a list of dozens of OPMs.) PKH’s original financing model was a revenue-sharing plan like those that for-profit OPMs often use, but “the project dropped the model” in 2023 due to the pending Department of Education interference. Instead, journalist Pam Kelley reported, PKH “would charge campuses fees for services.”
For its part, Duke University’s Coursera for Duke boasts more than 70 Duke courses online and provides anyone at Duke with free access to more than 2,000 Coursera courses overall. It makes sense for even the largest universities to be on joint platforms so that students can earn sub-degree credentials from institutions that may offer instruction in topics not available at their own colleges.
The life cycle of an online education facility can be short. As in the examples above, Duke has experimented with different ways to serve online students and course creators. In 2016-17, Duke launched Open edX with a company called OpenCraft. The facility became known as Duke Extend. It functioned not as “a tool to fill in the gap between Sakai and Coursera [but] a tool to help fill in the gap between the for-credit course and the MOOC.” Whatever that meant in 2019, it seems quaint today. Today, Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education, the latest iteration of Duke-based services, has called for “proposals to support Duke faculty incorporating generative AI” into their courses.
Online education continues to evolve rapidly. Smaller universities can keep up by finding technology partners to provide OPM services. Regulators, though, cannot keep up and should not try. The best thing for regulators and legislators to do is stay out of the way and let facilities—public, private, for-profit, non-profit, or PPP—adapt, fail, or succeed on their own merits.
Adam Kissel is senior fellow at the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy. Jenna A. Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.