Inbound Marketing Best Practices Take Over Higher Education

In late June the board of the University of Virginia (known by the rather creepy name of “Board of Visitors”) abruptly sacked university President Teresa Sullivan. All speculation aside, the Board was driven to this extreme action by a deep fear that the institution was not doing enough to embrace the now-fashionable free online learning model.

Needless to say, the move caused a huge uproar; after days of protest from students and faculty, Sullivan was actually reinstated. What makes this story interesting is that UVA’s Board is primarily made up of business professionals who likely have experienced the veritable tsunami that is the online evolution. They have come to know the power of the Internet as a change agent, respecting and even fearing it.

In her remarks hours after announcing Sullivan’s removal, UVA’s Board of Visitors Rector Helen Dragas tried to explain the reasoning behind the move,

“Higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions…we do not believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of incremental, marginal change. The world is simply moving too fast.”

Too fast indeed.

The controversy was in part fueled by the recent participation of a growing number of major universities in Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which offer free classes over the Internet that anyone can sign up for.  One such MOOC is the online learning site Coursera. Starting out as an experiment at Stanford, with over 1 million participants Coursera has quickly grown into a major force in online learning.

Coursera has enlisted a number of major US universities to offer free online learning courses to all anyone on the Internet. Participating schools include, University of Virginia, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and University of Michigan. Moreover, Coursera has added a small but growing roster of international schools, including Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, India Institute of Technology Dehli, and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in France.

At the time of writing, Coursera’s website boasted 117 online courses offering a wide array of topics ranging from biology to business management, mathematics to medicine. Students are encouraged to engage socially, collaborating to help foster deeper learning.

Increasingly cash-strapped universities like this model for two reasons: 1) offering online courses is ultimately cheaper than bricks and mortar classes, 2) they envision a collaborative future where participating schools can leverage other universities’ online courses to teach certain classes, freeing up institutional resources to offer higher-quality offline courses to their own students. Such a model would provide universities a chance to specialize, giving slimmed-down faculty a chance to teach courses in each person’s specific area of expertise.

The idea is a good one. It is more efficient, collaborative, and cost-effective, offering the proposition of a better education to students at a lower cost. It will allow universities to more clearly define who they want to be, to carve out specializations without the need to offer buffet-style course offerings for fear of alienating students and losing out on revenues. They can run leaner, meaner operations that spend more time doing what they do best: educating.

INBOUND MARKETING TAKEAWAY

Interestingly, the fundamental reasoning behind the burgeoning free online learning model is essentially the same as that of inbound marketing: using technology to give people what they really want more efficiently and less expensively.

Companies are employing inbound marketing best practices such as SEO, content creation, social media marketing, email lead nurturing, and closed-loop analytics to more-efficiently connect with their target audience and provide value.

The traditional higher education model is all about “pushing” learning out to students, forcing them to pay increasingly higher prices to follow pre-ordained curricula; the new online learning model encourages free collaboration and open exchange of information, recognizing that the power is ultimately in the hands of the students, not the institutions.

Recognizing this, students will gravitate toward colleges and universities that offer the best education at the best price. Like all of us, they’ll want to get the most bang for their buck.

Such is the case with the modern-day consumer. Bolstered by the Internet, social, and mobile, today’s consumer is in the driver’s seat. They want to work with brands that offer real value to their lives. People are gravitating to companies can solve their problems, cater to their wants, and complement their aspirations.

Much like universities, businesses that ignore this new reality are in for a rude awakening. Don’t take my word for it…just ask the Board of Visitors.