The Online Distance Learning series - price

Welcome to the next instalment in our Online Distance Learning (ODL) blogs, where we’ll be looking into each part of our recent national research project. This research provides a comprehensive overview of ODL in the UK and the findings (from our panel of 3,500) highlight key areas of focus across the entirety of the student journey. Our original blog and link to white paper can be found here.

In this blog series, we’ll cover what we found and what this information means. From our national report, we mapped our research against the 7Ps of the marketing mix and each of our blogs in this series will focus on one of the Ps.

Here we will be focusing on Price – an important and complex aspect of any students journey into education. And with a strong connection between price and quality for a lot of students, it’s understandable why this is a crucial factor. Some courses are priced at a premium that might be based on the reputation of not just the university, but the tutors too. But this can cause confusion for prospective students, who are trying to find their future degree. The price of some courses is turning students away and creating a barrier to entry for online learners.

Price always impacts on enrolments, whether institutions charge a high price for high quality or low prices for affordability and presumably higher volume enrolments. We’ve learnt that a student’s experience does not necessarily match their expectations based on pricing. And whilst value for money is a significant driver for online learners, demonstrating the return on investment is essential in order to maintain premium pricing strategies.

This is a just brief snapshot of the sort of comprehensive insight you’ll get from the rest of this series, as our report takes a thorough look at each of the 7Ps and dissects them. If you’d like to learn more about our ODL report, you can download the white paper here.