Schools outsource course tools; marketing not a priority

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, April, 2000

Coursemetric (see previous article) has released their first report in a regular series designed for educational institutions and industry. This initial report is based on telephone interviews with 107 universities. Data and themes for subsequent reports will be drawn from the database generated by Coursemetric's users. Highlights include:

Technology

* The majority of institutions surveyed (72%) outsource development of software for course production and delivery

* Of those, 37% of institutions use online campus integrators (OCIs) with turnkey solutions. Examples include Collegis, Convene, eCollege, E-Education, FirstClass and UOL.

* 35% of institutions use "off-the-shelf" course development tools from learning platform providers such as Blackboard, Lotus Learning Space, TopClass, and WebCT.

Intellectual Property Issues

* 90% of institutions have a specific policy related to online course ownership.

* Although most institutions see content as the property of the instructor, more than half indicate that the institution owns the course as a whole.

Support Services

* 77% of schools provide faculty training in using technology for online courses.

* 74% of schools provide faculty with course production assistance.

* Assistance is typically only available from 9 to 5.

Marketing

* Marketing appears to be a low priority, even though schools define their target student population for online courses as nationwide or global.

* More than 30% of responding schools were not doing any marketing beyond their school's website.

* Less than 40% of programs were using any form of Internet marketing to reach new students.

Institutions participating in the survey can receive the report for free. Non-participating schools can purchase the report for $150, and corporations for $500.