Okay, parts of what I have written below feels a bit like Jerry Maguire’s mission statement, or at least how he felt the next morning after trying to retract it from going out. But here it goes.
For context, these ponderings were the result of reading the Inside Higher Ed February 15, 2024 article over the nation’s largest OPM, Online Course Provider 2U Faces Doubts It Can Continue.
The partners at Magellan Learning Solutions have never really connected with the term OPM (Online Program Manager). For my part, I had been heavily emersed in the higher education online space from 2002 to the early 2010s before I even heard the term. All that while helping build out one of the largest online programs in the country. During that time, I had also done consulting on the side to help institutions with various aspects of getting their online program established or improved upon, but the term never came up.
By the time we established Magellan in early 2017, we knew the term. How could one miss the barrage of OPM-related stories via Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle, or any number of other education-related articles? And let’s be frank, many of those stories were not very complementary. They were bad enough that more than once I pondered, “God, I hope people do not think Magellan is an OPM.” It just seemed a bit predatory, at least for the institutions that were already in a lean financial situation. And others, smarter and wiser than me have pondered this question in board rooms and in articles, such as Future of OPMs in Flux as Regulations Loom.
A Simple Plan
Our original business plan, a one-pager typed up in December of 2016 entitled The Carolingian Initiative (lofty name, eh?), included the main service lanes the big OPMs were focusing upon, and then some. This was based on the reality that in order to have a successful online program one must have at the most basic level online-focused marketing, quality enrollment processes, student support structures, uniformed courses, sound policies, data analytics, retention processes, and more. But our model was not about fronting an enormous amount of funding and content to institutions for a backend revenue share model that found most of the revenue leaving the institution. We did not have investors or loans. Magellan has never been in the red, and yet we have grown steadily. We have metered the growth of our team based on the existing revenue of active clients. Call it a mix of cautious or pragmatic, it just never seemed wise to live outside of our means. And that is the same boat our clients have sailed in as well. It was a simple approach. The thought was, we know how to do this. We have done it before. Let’s go do it for others or help them do it for themselves…only better.
Knowing what to do, what not to do, where the pitfalls are, where the open lanes are, and with a keen understanding that every institution is different and that within our client institutions that people know what to do, they just need some help. Well, sometimes a lot of help. I often joke about how humble I am, and that is the joke, but you have to go in the door knowing you know a lot about online “everything”, but that the people at the institution know more about their institutions than you do. From there it is about collaboration, communication, and consistency.
Our Approach
Our methodology is anchored to assessing the very specific needs of an institutional client, creating a tailored plan, and doing it with a manageable budget, via a straightforward fee-for-service model. While we are currently working on a few partnerships where there will be a revenue-sharing approach, to date 100% of program revenues have gone to the institutions we serve. And in our revenue sharing model we work to license our clients’ content to other institutions creating additional income streams for them…and us too.
We have had several clients that worked with firms in a traditional OPM model. When the relationships were over the institutions had no online marketing team, no online content, and no online operational infrastructure. The whole thing was outsourced. Another confession, I do not even know how that would work. Maybe I am slow, but it all reminded me of a home rental situation, or a leased car with no option to buy. Sure, maybe it was a mansion with a nice 2024 BMW in the drive, but it was not yours. And maybe it was not the OPMs either. As noted in the article above 2U, again the nation’s largest OPM is 900 million in the hole. Now I am not picking on 2U. They are an OPM giant with 250 clients, Magellan is a boutique Online Education Solutions Partner firm, but if we had 250 clients, built upon our model, well I should hope we would break even. And that reminds me of another article on this front, Your OPM Isn’t a Tech Platform. It’s a Marketing Firm.
Magellan is not a platform, an ed tech tool, or anything like that…
Once in a Request for Proposal (RFP) stakeholder meeting, I was asked, “Could you explain or show your platform?” Granted this was a huge project that required everything from the student funnel, content development, reporting, training, operational management, etc. Maybe there is an individual platform for all that, I don’t know of one. Well. Okay, there’s not one. So, I replied on the fly, “Our platform is our people.” And that is it, we have an in-house team and a huge network that simply knows how to do this work to a world-class level. And each time we do it, we learn the entrepreneurial lessons and do it better. We do it for you, with you, embedded with your team, your staff your faculty, and your campus culture, history, and vision. We are an experienced force multiplier across the spectrum of online services to help your institution be a viable player on the online marketplace. And when we are done with the mission you will have an online program, with systems, policies processes, and content that you will own.
The secret sauce to effective online education is not some new emerging technology or platform. It is not in some model where you lease the house until the landlord is done with you. It is about implementing systems and processes that drive the whole student experience, their ability to master content, and that help them persist until graduation. There are a lot of moving parts in that sentence. Those parts are what we do. And what is the Jerry Maguire line that we want to be more like as we do this work? “Show me the money!!!”? No, “Fewer clients more attention.”