Uni axes services fee for onliners

UNIVERSITIES should be allowed to compete globally by stripping academic offerings back and cutting fees, a vice-chancellor says.

UNIVERSITIES should be allowed to compete globally by stripping their academic offerings back to the bare minimum and cutting fees for students, University of New England vice-chancellor Jim Barber says.

Professor Barber said the university would axe a campus services fee for its 18,000 online students, saving part-timers up to $1120 for a degree.

"This must be the first time ever that a university has lowered its prices," he said.

He hoped that taking a lead in discounting fees would give his Armidale, NSW, institution an edge in the competitive market for online university study.

In the past few years, universities such as Swinburne in Melbourne and Curtin in Perth have made a big splash in online-only degrees.

Educators worldwide are watching the development of free courses -- known as "massive open online courses" and backed by top names such as Harvard and Stanford -- to see whether they can mount a challenge to costly on-campus study.

Professor Barber said fairness was also behind the decision to axe the amenities fee for online students at UNE, who outnumbered those on campus by more than four to one.

He said a study suggested the 4000-odd on-campus students had "the lion's share" of benefits from the student services fee levied since 2012.

Such fees have a contentious history. The Howard government abolished compulsory student unionism, saying it underwrote activism, a change bitterly opposed by Labor, which went on to restore the present, better targeted amenities fee.

Professor Barber said the challenge facing the Abbott administration was to deregulate universities so they could fend off international competition by offering students different levels of academic services at different prices.

"The absolute minimum service that a student requires is assessment, end of story," he said. "When you think about it, what we sell is credentials -- everything else is ancillary."

Not only the familiar amenities, such as student clubs, but also academic services such as tutorials could be "unbundled" so that students paid only for what they wanted, he said.

And he asked why the growing number of students who could master the content without coming to lectures should have to pay for capital investment in lecture halls.

He said that government-backed regulation of quality and standards was still based on a traditional model of on-campus study. Capital investment requirements were one example.

"We're all obsessing about the domestic market but the far bigger threat is coming from cyberspace," Professor Barber said.

He gave the example of a new online masters in computer science offered by the well-regarded US institution Georgia Tech and online education outfit Udacity, which grew out of a free online education experiment at Stanford. In effect, Georgia Tech had unbundled its degree, allowing it to charge $US6000 ($6600), compared with $20,000 for a similar degree at his own university.

He admitted the loss of amenities fee income at UNE meant the budget of the students' association would "take a haircut". It would be up to the students' association to decide what services it dropped.