Elite Universities End Venture to Provide Noncredit Online Courses,

This ariticle originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A nonprofit venture by the University of Oxford, and Stanford and Yale Universities to provide online noncredit courses to the public has closed, citing financial woes. The enterprise, known as the Alliance for Lifelong Learning Inc., or AllLearn, posted a message on its Web site this month saying it had folded because "the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was not sustainable over time."

S. Kristin Kim, who had served as president of AllLearn since November 2002, reiterated that message in an interview. "We know what it takes to offer top-quality online education and how much it costs to do that," she said, explaining that AllLearn officials had determined that the organization's costs were becoming unwieldy. AllLearn's federal tax form for the year ending June 30, 2005, shows it incurred a deficit of $783,410, with revenue of $2.5-million and expenses of $3.28-million.

The venture was formed in September 2000, during the dot-com boom. Its courses -- primarily in the humanities and social sciences -- were first offered to alumni of the three universities, but two years later the group expanded its clientele to include the general public. Ms. Kim said AllLearn had attracted 11,000 students from more than 70 countries. The students ranged from recent graduates to retirees, and their median age was in the late 40s. The organization, based in New York City, struggled to boost enrollment and established affiliations with other universities to market courses to their alumni. But professors who taught courses through AllLearn said it became clear to them that attracting students was a persistent problem.

"It didn't seem to me to be a really vibrantly successful enterprise," said David M. Kennedy, a Stanford history professor. He and a colleague had taught an AllLearn course on World War II, but it was eventually dropped from the curriculum for lack of interest. "You would think that would be the kind of subject -- given all the buffs out there that are interested in the topic -- that would have had an even larger and more sustained audience, and it didn't," Mr. Kennedy said. Nora M. Sweeny, a former production director at AllLearn, who is a fund raiser at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the venture failed to meet alumni's high expectations: Most who signed up for courses wanted to watch television-quality broadcasts online from professors whose talks were delivered just for them.

"We didn't get the faculty members to go into a studio and give a 40-minute lecture in a sound room," Ms. Sweeny said. "We went and audiotaped them in the classroom. It's very expensive to edit that stuff down to a sound bite." Still, Ms. Kim and Charles L. Junkerman, dean of continuing studies and associate provost at Stanford, who was a faculty liaison for AllLearn, said the organization's writing courses were popular. AllLearn stopped offering courses at the end of December, and Ms. Kim said officials are in the process of making its dissolution official.
Some analysts attribute AllLearn's demise to the fact that it offered only noncredit courses. Most people who consider taking online courses are seeking a degree, said Sean R. Gallagher, a senior analyst at Eduventures Inc., a consulting company that tracks trends and investments across the education industry.

"One of the major challenges associated with marketing online noncredit courses is how high the marketing and advertising costs are compared to the tuition revenue," Mr. Gallagher said. A college can spend thousands of dollars to recruit a student for a degree program, but at least the payoff is potentially tens of thousands of dollars in tuition revenue, he added. Commenting on AllLearn's demise, Mr. Gallagher said, "If Oxford, Yale, and Stanford can't succeed offering online noncredit courses, then who can?"

He noted that Global Education Network, a for-profit venture, also offers noncredit online courses partly developed by college professors, but its clientele includes high-school students.
Ms. Kim agreed that AllLearn's financial troubles were related to its business model of offering only noncredit courses. In general, institutions command a higher tuition for credit courses, she said. But Ms. Kim declined to comment on whether AllLearn's board ever considered offering such courses.

E-Learning—A Financial and Strategic Perspective.

Institutions can consider different options in shaping a long-term strategy for achieving acceptable financial returns from e-learning. Read this excellent article by Stephen R. Ruth oF EDUCAUSE by clicking here.

One of the conclusions of this article is, "Accept that e-learning is costly but crucial." They do not take into consideration the affordability of using third party content providers like Gatlin Education Services. No wonder more than 500 educational institutions worldwide are now partnering with GES.

Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress.

Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress - SAM DILLON, New York Times this great article was provided to us by Ray Schroeder's online learning update blog.