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Can online distance learning and shared services help the higher education sector withstand impending budget cuts?

The UK's higher education sector was struck with a brutal double whammy in October 2010.

First, Lord Browne's report on higher education funding and student finance recommended, among other measures, that universities raise fees from £3,300 to £7,000 – a move that many fear will reduce the number of people that can afford to attend university.

Second, the government announced in its comprehensive spending review that higher education funding will be cut by £2.9 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014.

These measures come at a time when publicly funded universities face increasing competition from private education providers and from a burgeoning higher education industry abroad. 

All of this has given rise to a prevailing realisation that the UK's higher education system cannot continue to operate as it has done for much longer. And with the encouragement of government, universities are now looking at ways in which technology might help them to adapt to these new circumstances.

Two approaches, both of which have been around for some time, are therefore gaining renewed interest: shared services and online distance learning.

Learning from afar

Distance learning is nothing new: The University of London has allowed students to earn degrees from abroad since 1852. However, as Andrew Bollington, chief executive of the university’s international programmes unit, explains, the Internet has dramatically improved the student’s experience of distance learning.

“A century ago, the student would have been sent a box with books in it, and then they would go into an exam room several months later to prove that they had digested them,” he says. “Now, that experience can be far more interactive.

“We can give students access to resources that we couldn’t possibly have sent to them by mail; we can give them access to journals that were printed last week; we can put them in touch with their fellow students. I don’t think any of these are earth shattering, but you put them all together and distance learning is becoming far richer and more interesting than it ever was before.”

Of course, distance learning is not reserved for students in other countries. It has long been a way for people with full- or part-time jobs to gain qualifications while still earning a living. This is an increasingly popular option, even at the undergraduate level. Last year, one in four registrants to the Open University, which only offers distance-learning courses, was under the age of 25.

According to David White, a senior manager at the University of Oxford’s Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) unit, the imminent funding upheaval will make distance learning a more attractive proposition for the universities too. “Any vice chancellor is going to be looking at doing more online distance learning for a number of reasons,” he said at the Association for Learning Technology’s annual conference in September. “It makes your education into an export, and although it’s not cheap, it is cheaper than building new buildings.”

For universities, online distance learning represents an opportunity to offer services to a wider audience at (arguably) a lower per-student cost. Little wonder, then, that through bodies such as the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the UK government is encouraging universities to pursue online learning. However, setting up an ‘online university’ is no mean feat, as the government learnt for itself in the early 2000s.

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