Every now and then I write this Digital Optimist column because it gives me an opportunity to be less formal and editorialize in the first person.

Between the many interviews I conduct with people working in the field and the pile of papers and articles I try to read and comprehend, I enjoy the opportunity to step back and attempt to explain some of the interesting trends and innovations I believe are happening inside distance education.

For example, I’ve been writing about the marketing of distance education on and off since Winter 2001. The latest information to hit my desk on this topic comes from two reports I received from UBS Investment Research. One is titled "Detailed Look at Online Opportunity: Do Prospects Justify Valuations," and the other is titled "Huge Market, Great Growth, but Competition on the Horizon." UBS is a global financial services firm that creates and distributes these reports (which are not available to the public) to its clients. I received these for agreeing to be interviewed by one of the UBS analysts who wrote the reports, and who also interviewed a good number of management-level experts in the field of online education from both the public and private sectors.

There are some pretty interesting claims made in these two documents. For instance, it’s noted that there were about 700,000 fully online students at institutions in the U.S (4 percent of total post-secondary enrollments), and that proprietary institutions owned a 23 percent market share of all 2003 online enrollments (a debatable figure). The number of fully online students was estimated to grow to 2.2 million by 2008 (12.2 percent of total post-secondary enrollments).

Proprietary institutions offering online programs that also had on-ground campuses were portrayed as key players, having entrepreneurial, market-savvy infrastructures that are successfully targeting and servicing adult learners. For instance, Career Education’s American Intercontinental University garnered an impressive 7,000 first quarter enrollments in 2003. Others in this category include the University of Phoenix, Strayer Online, DeVry Online, ITT Online, the Art Institute Online and FMU Online.

General education requirements for earning a bachelor’s degree online was cited as a high growth area, with proprietary institutions expected to "lead the charge here."

In a section titled "Detailed Discussion of Online Marketing and Advertising," UBS provided an overview on how prospective student leads are generated by institutions offering online education programs. Not surprisingly, online programs attract prospective students by taking advantage of online methods of advertising more than through broadcast and/or print-based methods. The online methods mentioned include mass e-mails, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and the institutions’ Web sites. Conversion rates for leads generated under each of these methods were categorized as follows:

• Mass e-mails: low conversion rates
• Search engine marketing: low to mid-single digits
• Search engine optimization: mid to single digits
• Institution’s Web site: mid-single digits

In my opinion, the two most important factors for attracting prospective students and converting them to matriculated students are:

1. An institution’s ability to create an easy-to-navigate, well-written, search-engine-optimized Web site with accurate information.
    
2. An institution’s ability to utilize a trained and efficient admissions and registration staff that understands how to handle inquiries coming from mostly busy adults who have discovered their online programs through a Web search.

This may seem quite obvious to many. However, I am no longer surprised when I see higher education online courses and programs presented on the Web in ways that are utterly confusing and not even updated in a timely fashion. Plus, I hear over and over again, from mostly public institutions, the complaint that they don’t have the right mix of admissions, registration and marketing support. In short, they don’t have business-like efficiencies in place. In the meantime, the for-profits are continuously redeveloping their online lead-generation strategies and building in more sophisticated electronic agents on their Web sites and live admissions-support capabilities to answer prospective students’ questions and serve these students with a smile, so to speak, when they come to them online or via the telephone.

I tend to disagree with the popular notion held by many well-established public and private institutions that offer distance education programs who claim that their historic name brand and academic integrity really carries them through the day, and hence the proprietary institutions we see advertised all over the Web are not really competitors. It is my opinion that many of today’s prospective adult distance learners are overly frustrated by constant encounters with poor customer service and ineffective bureaucracies in all types of businesses and consequently will enroll with the institution that serves them most efficiently and provides them with clear, easy-to-follow information, regardless of name brand.

One of my new beats, as evident in this issue and the past issue, is focused on the creation and implementation of blended teaching and learning environments, also called "hybrids," if you prefer that term. Although I have covered blended learning in past issues of EdPath (see June 2003 article, "CUNY Sees Increased Development of Blended Learning Environments as it Adopts Online Education), it seems to be really hitting the minds and hearts of distance educators in full force now. So, I’m very happy to be invited to the First Sloan Consortium Invitational Workshop on Blended Learning and Higher Education to be hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago from April 26 though 28, 2004. I’ll be reporting on some of the results of this workshop in future issues.