This article is the second post of my series about planning for digital learning in higher education. You can see the first one here. In this post, I investigate the first stage of addressing issues with your digital learning: clarifying your strategy.
I know that every higher education institution has a strategy. My goal with this post is to show the ways in which that usually somewhat lofty-sounding statement needs to be made concrete. It is not a simple translation from a standard strategy statement to what is described here.
The components of your strategy
The figure above shows the components of an institution’s strategic approach. Let’s briefly highlight each of them.
Differentiation strategy
Given a deep understanding of its target prospects, an institution should do the following:
- Design a program that is competitive with other programs in the market so that it provides superior quality in those features that those prospects value the most, and then
- Design and execute a marketing strategy that emphasizes those features to those prospects.
How will the institution win? Will it be by image, customization, price, specific learning pedagogies, technologies (or combinations of technologies) that uniquely support the institution, community building, career services, etc.?
Arenas of competition
Where will the institution be active, and what is the relative importance of each area? Answers here can be a specific degree or non-degree program (or related groups of the same), target clusters, geographical areas, underlying technologies, pedagogies, or learning experiences.
Success
What does success look like? How will you know if you have achieved success? How will it be measured?
Competition
Who are you competing against? Think broadly about this, including academic institutions (both degree and non-degree offerings as well as local, regional, and national institutions) but also online educational sites such as Udemy, MasterClass, and so on.
Partners
How will the institution get there? Will it be through online program managers (OPMs), internal development, fee-for-service external vendors, joint ventures, licensing, acquisition, or go-it-alone?
Stages of Moves
What will be the speed and sequence of moves? Which programs will be built, and in what order? Will non-degree certificate programs roll out after degree programs? What will be the rate of these moves? Will the focus be on one school at a time or rotate among several?
Goals
Before you start, you must be clear about where you are going, or you’ll never know if you’ve arrived. (This is not rocket surgery.)
- Scale: How big do you want the program to be? How many courses, how many enrollees, how many graduates, how much revenue, and how much profit?
- Pricing: What pricing goals do you have? What are the constraints that the market places on you (because of close competitors or substitutes)?
- Growth: What goals for enrollment and revenue do you want to reach in one year? In three years? In five years? Conversely, what are the lowest levels that the program has to achieve if it is not to be canceled?
Economic logic
Why and how will the institution obtain sufficient returns to undertake this effort? Will it be scale advantages (either per program or via investments that pay back across multiple programs) that will lead to lower costs? Or will it be through premium prices due to a difficult-to-match learning experience (via technology, pedagogical approaches, community building, student service provision, etc.)? Or will it be a superior marketing strategy and insights (and appropriate execution) that allow the institution to affect the value profiles of prospects significantly?
Marketing
What is your target market? Where do they hang out? What is your unique selling proposition? How will you reach your target market with your message? Who will manage the marketing campaigns, data, and leads? How will you convert leads into customers and customers into more leads? Finally, how will you increase customer lifetime value?
Completing your strategy
Again: all of our organizations have a strategy. The problem is that they are too generic, too all-purpose. We need actionable strategies that can be applied to the problem of digital learning. Even if you have a strategy, it will take several months of work and meetings to define the above. You will have to convene leaders from the faculty, finance, admissions, marketing, development, and possibly other areas. Further, you cannot allocate each component to separate subgroups for study as answers to one generally influences answers to the rest.
Doing this work up-front, before you embark on the process of creating the digital learning programs themselves, will take time; however, it will end up making your process more effective and less contentious.
