[1] OPMs provide bundled products and services to private and public educational institutions in exchange for a revenue sharing arrangement.
A revenue-sharing contract[3] has allowed universities to enter into the online education business and gain market share without the need to build their own platform.
[4] Such predatory partnerships incentivise aggressive student recruitment (and revenue collection)[5] while outsourcers core edtech capability in an institution.
[7] In the face of scrutiny from educational institutions and regulators and competition in the sector, edtech market analyst Phil Hill said in 2023 that the OPM business model was now "on life support.
"[8] In the 2010s, OPMs grew substantially as universities recognized the financial benefits of reaching students beyond their geographical area while acknowledging their lack of skills in creating, maintaining, and optimizing online courses.
[10] In 1973, San Jose University professor John Sperling, created the Institute of Professional Development (IPD), a company servicing a few colleges.
[18] In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced colleges and universities to quickly move to fully online content, increasing demand for OPM support.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown called for five OPMs to disclose the terms of their contracts with colleges and universities to determine whether they were violating laws to safeguard consumers from predatory enrollment practices.
[20] In an analysis of 70 schools, the Century Foundation reported that "this growing private control—which is often hidden from public view—is jeopardising the quality of online programs, stripping control from colleges and universities, and putting students at risk of predatory behaviour and abuse at the hands of for-profit companies.
[25] An article in Slate referred to expensive online master's degrees offered by OPMs as higher education's "second biggest scam.
[28] In 2022, a survey of chief online learning officers found that OPMs weren't "meeting their expectations for marketing and recruitment, even though these are the services the college officials said they needed most.
They help a growing number of America’s most-lauded colleges provide online degrees—including Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, NYU, UC Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, Northwestern, Syracuse, Rice and USC, to name just a few.