Tertiary courses post-pandemic will be whole new ball game

The Australian government recently announced the strategy for international education 2021-2030. One of the key actions in the strategy relates to diversifying offerings to capitalise on digital and offshore opportunities.

Australian universities have decades of experience offering offshore education through overseas campuses and partnership arrangements. The countries where Australian universities have established partnerships in the early stage of such development include Singapore, China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

In the later stage, we have seen a growth of partnerships in Sri Lanka, India and Mauritius. According to the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 39 universities and 43 non-university private providers deliver courses in face-to-face mode to 116,000 offshore students, mostly through partnership arrangements.

A few universities have large numbers of offshore students, including RMIT University, Monash University, University of Wollongong, University of New South Wales, Curtin University and Murdoch University. The two non-university providers, the Australian Institute of Business and S P Jain School of Global Management, joined the rank of institutions with large offshore footprints.

International student enrolments are holding up at elite universities.Credit: James Brickwood

Implementing an international education strategy focusing on digital opportunities will result in further growth. As universities introduce strategies related to offshore online opportunities, it is worth examining recent trends in the domestic online market.

Our recent analysis suggests that 33 out of the 42 universities offer more than 850 courses through online third-party arrangements. Most institutions offer their online courses to domestic students except for two institutions that already offer fully online courses to the offshore online market.

Further analysis of secondary data revealed that 14 third-party online providers have partnered with universities to offer fully online courses. The tuition fees for fully online courses offered in these third-party arrangements to domestic students are similar to the fee charged by the university.

Early adopters such as Deakin and the University of Queensland offer a small number of postgraduate courses with upGrad, FutureLearn, and edX at a price point that is attractive and affordable to offshore students in India and other countries. Among non-university providers, the Australian Institute of Business has one of the largest online MBA enrolments with domestic and offshore students.

With the new international strategy and desire of universities to recruit and diversify into new markets, universities will probably continue to partner with third-party institutions to increase their global footprint. Institutions need to gain better insights into the relevancy of programs to offshore online markets.

To ensure courses are attractive and relevant to the offshore online market, entry criteria, duration, structure of the programs and overall pedagogy will need to be different from face-to-face delivery. Offshore students studying fully online require different support levels than on-campus students. Therefore, academic and non-academic support needs to be well resourced, and personnel needs to be trained on cross-cultural issues and possible learning barriers.

The post-COVID landscape will demand innovative developments in program design, online teaching using innovative technology, new methods of assessing students and new forms of partnerships. As institutions embrace innovative developments, national regulators such as Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) and professional bodies that accredit academic programs must support innovative changes and provide flexibility so that institutions are agile in a highly competitive market.

We need to have a balanced view of growth and risks related to academic quality rather than an increased focus on compliance. Our focus on compliance-driven quality will significantly inhibit our ability to innovate at the speed and scale required in a post-COVID environment.

Institutions also need to establish strong governance and oversight of quality assurance. Third-party online providers may be able to market programs to prospective offshore students, but they would not have insights on program relevancy, local and regional regulatory requirements, and industry needs.

Professor Mahsood Shah is Dean of Swinburne University of Technology, Sydney Campus. Associate Professor Fion Lim, is the director of UTS Learning Centre (SILC), where UTS programs are offered in collaboration with SILC Business School in Shanghai.

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