Thanks to my good friend S.L. Narayanan in Chennai for sending me a [thought-provoking article in the](https://www.economist.com/business/2018/07/19/universities-withstood-moocs-but-risk-being-outwitted-by-opms?frsc=dg%7Ce) [_Economist_](https://www.economist.com/business/2018/07/19/universities-withstood-moocs-but-risk-being-outwitted-by-opms?frsc=dg%7Ce). It looks at the market for OPMs—the Online Program Managers who work with academic institutions to help them get online.

Full disclosure: I've worked with one of the biggest, brought in by major US universities to produce fee-based online courses. For those that don't know, it's an interesting business model: the OPM doesn't just produce the course (videos, instructional design, platform back-end etc.) but funds the production. They also handle marketing of the course, and the transactional elements (matriculating students, managing enrollments etc.)

In return, the OPM takes a hefty percentage of the revenues: often over 60%. (That's _hefty_!) The business model has worked because it has been, in effect, easy money for the universities. They still get 40% of revenues from courses that cost the student tens of thousands of dollars. And without the OPM, they wouldn't know how to harvest that revenue source. So it's a win-win.

But. As the _Economist_ puts it:

> “Over time universities will surely try to take a larger slice of revenues themselves. It doesn’t take a master’s degree to work out what these developments will do to the OPMs’ margins.”

This has been said (not least by me) for a while: that the OPM's had a very narrow window which was likely to close soon. But it hasn't yet: the major OPM companies such as [2U](https://2u.com/) continue to fly high ("fly high" in terms of share price, that is: 2U is not profitable...and veterans of the dot.com bubble of 2000 will take note!)

So the question is, can universities (and other learning institutions) do more on their own?

I would say emphatically "YES." Production costs continue to fall (as we all know, perfectly acceptable video can be shot on an iPhone) and what's more it's arguable that students respond _better_ to more 'informal' type videos. In other words, they can relate to an instructor in a iPhone (or even web-cam) video more than to a slickly produced, TV-quality lecture.

The student recruitment (marketing) side of the OPM's business is perhaps something that universities would still want to outsource, but even this must surely come in-house sooner or later? A very interesting sector to watch. And even more exciting to be a part of!