Online education isn’t a technology problem – it’s a systems challenge
Over the past decade, universities have quietly crossed an important threshold. Online degrees are no longer experimental, peripheral, or niche. They are becoming part of the core program offering at leading institutions.
Across the UK alone, thousands of postgraduate programs are now delivered online, and hundreds of thousands of undergraduate learners study through distance or digital modes. What was once treated as an alternative pathway to obtaining a degree is increasingly a mainstream form of provision.
But the most important question for universities is no longer whether they should move to online provision. The real question is how that migration actually happens inside institutions.
The migration to online education is organisational, not technological
Too often, discussions about digital learning focus on platforms, tools, or artificial intelligence. Yet the reality inside universities is far more complex.
Moving a degree program online, or designing a program for online delivery from the outset, requires institutions to coordinate multiple systems simultaneously: academic governance, learning design, recruitment and marketing, admissions processes, student support, data infrastructure and quality assurance among others.
Online education therefore operates less like a single innovation and more like a multi-layered institutional system involving strategy, operations and pedagogy.
When these elements are not aligned, institutions often encounter familiar challenges: slow program launches, fragmented learner journeys, unclear ownership between academic and operational teams, and limited visibility over performance data.
In other words, online provision is not primarily a technology problem. It is a systems challenge.
Mediated delivery is now a structural feature of online education
This complexity helps explain why universities frequently work with external partners when launching online programs.
Online program management (OPM) firms and other specialist providers typically supply capabilities that universities may not yet have at scale: market intelligence, program design and production, digital marketing, recruitment engines, and operational infrastructure such as student support teams.
These partnerships can significantly accelerate time-to-market. Once academic approval is secured, programs can be designed, launched and recruited far more quickly than most institutions could achieve alone.
External partners do not simply provide services. They become embedded in institutional workflows, decision processes and data systems
But mediated delivery also introduces a strategic tension.
External partners do not simply provide services. They become embedded in institutional workflows, decision processes and data systems. Over time, these arrangements can shape program economics, governance structures, and the institutional learning that occurs around online delivery.
In this sense, intermediaries simultaneously enable institutional migration to online education while potentially constraining how universities internalise capability over time.
The next phase of online higher education
This tension is becoming more visible across the sector.
Following the rapid digital expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic, many universities have developed greater internal capability in areas such as instructional design for online learning, marketing analytics, and digital student services. At the same time, financial pressures and regulatory scrutiny are prompting institutions to reassess long-term outsourcing models.
As a result, the sector is entering a new phase in which universities are asking a more sophisticated question:
How can institutions use external partners to accelerate online program launches today, while also strengthening their own capability for tomorrow?
Increasingly, the answer lies in system orchestration rather than simple outsourcing.
Modern partnership models are evolving away from monolithic, bundled service arrangements towards more modular approaches that combine external expertise with deliberate capability transfer into university teams over time.
For institutions, this shift matters. The strategic opportunity is not simply to launch online degree programs faster, but to ensure that mediated delivery contributes to long-term institutional learning and digital maturity.
If online education is now structurally embedded in higher education, then the challenge ahead is clear: universities must learn not just how to deliver online programs, but how to build the organisational capability to sustain them.
Increasingly, forward-looking OPM providers such as Boundless Learning are positioning themselves as partners in capability building, helping institutions accelerate today while strengthening their internal capacity to compete over the long term in the global market for high-quality online degrees that deliver meaningful career outcomes for graduates.
About the author: Joël McConnell is a senior strategy and partnerships leader at Boundless Learning, working with universities to design, launch, and scale online degree programmes. His work focuses on the organisational systems, partnerships, and operating models that enable sustainable digital learning at scale. He is also a doctoral researcher at UCL studying the evolving role of online programme management providers in global higher education.
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