Keywords

Introduction

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the market for borderless open, distance, and digital education (ODDE) has been in a period of accelerated and on demand growth. Every sector of education has experienced some form of change related to the emergence of advances in technology. Learning that was once confined to location, time, and brick and mortar buildings is now conceptually unlimited in terms of location, time, and design. It is entirely possible – and even common – to create curricula and learning environments in one part of the world using one language and deliver them in another part of the world using another language. With a few clicks on a keypad, a student can be sitting at home in Germany and enroll in courses delivered in Australia. Forms of ODDE are found across the traditional primary, secondary, and tertiary education sectors, but educational ventures opened by the digital age now include tutorial programs in all subject areas, self-guided language programs, formal credentialing, massive open online courses (MOOCs), continuing education or professional development programs, video conferencing, and growing podcast lecture series, and a number of learning apps.

The estimated overall growth in the ODDE industry is projected to reach US$ 350 billion by 2025 (Globe NewsWire, 2020; Li & Lalani, 2020). In 2017, North America “held the largest market share of global online education” with the Asia-Pacific market poised to be the fastest growth market in the coming years (Globe Newswire, 2020, para. 7). In February 2020 at the beginning of the global coronavirus pandemic, a quarter of a billion full-time students in China moved to online instruction and to date it is the largest online movement in the history of education (Li & Lalani, 2020). In the USA, a large ODDE market that includes the company of Asia and Europe, it is estimated that 2.7 million K-12 students are engaged in some form of digital learning (Twinomugisha, 2019). In 2017, the whole US education market, including online and residential instruction, was valued at US$1.3 trillion with an expected growth to $2 trillion by 2026 (Schroder, 2019). Schroder (2019) notes that the education market has recently been drawing attention from venture capitalists with a number of edtech investors raising funds to create start-up educational programs that focus on moving a greater proportion of the students into online learning environments. Other closely connected entrepreneurial opportunities include supportive technologies such as course platforms, interactive video, security, data analytics, and instructional design, all of which add to the industry’s market growth (Schroder, 2019). Globe Newswire (2020), a private research and market firm, points to the advances in cloud-based solutions, increasingly interactive software and investments in security development as drivers for developing huge volumes of content online, and the growing comfort by end users in embracing technology-based learning. Other changes in the education market further enhance industry growth, such as declining cost to use online programming, increased revenue from high tuition fees, reports of lack of competence in staff at brick and mortar schools, and government investment in education (Globe Newswire, 2020).

There are, however, some questions about what is drawing investors to the ODDE marketplace. Surprises in the market include Coursera’s US$7 billion valuation in its initial public offering in April 2021. Coursera, a company co-founded almost 10 years ago by two Stanford University professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, surprised many by selling much higher than expected shares at the initial public offering, catapulting the company to an industry leader in terms of highest valuation (McKenzie, 2021). It remains to be seen whether the high valuation of Coursera will pay off, but its recognizable brand, its business model of receiving direct payment from consumers, and having a history of partnering with government and businesses to deliver training and education to support the labor market seemed to be attractive features for those looking to invest in the online market (McKenzie, 2021).

The movement of educational programming to online platforms creates numerous opportunities, but it also calls into question the way in which online educational opportunity is translating with regards to equity and quality. A growing body of literature is illuminating the existing digital skills gap, access to the internet, special needs of at-risk learners, and the ability to transfer learning and skills globally as important issues for ODDE. Additionally, there are questions being raised regarding quality assurance, responsibility, and assessment of outcomes. Concerns raised by transnational educators in Australia reflect on setting effective price points, quality, training, academic supports, technical supports, and intellectual property (Croucher, Elliot, Locke, & Yencken, 2021, p.54). Both public and private entities have an interest in understanding how ODDE is being developed, delivered, and monitored to ensure that those seeking digital education are protected from bad actors and failed ventures.

Market Expansion and Attention to Access

The convergence of the technological age with the growing global concerns related to educational performance and student outcomes has undoubtedly contributed to the ongoing and rapid growth in the market for ODDE. With computers expanding opportunities even more than radio and television had, technologically assisted delivery of education assuaged the disquieted concerns about overcrowded schools, access to qualified teachers, provision of academic support or remedial course, accommodating students requiring alternative learning spaces, and the disparities created by geographic barriers in rural education settings (Cavanaugh, Barber, & Clark, 2009; Khan, 2012). As new educational ventures, curriculum models, and delivery methods were being discovered and tested, scholarly attention expanded significantly.

Journals such as the Journal of Distance Education (now the International Journal of E-Learning and Distance Education), British Journal of Educational Technology, American Journal of Distance Education, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, Journal of Distance Learning (now the Journal of Open Flexible and Distance Learning), and the Journal of Online Learning and Research were some of the earlier peer-reviewed journals publishing the earliest scholars in the field on the study on digital and distance education (Arnesen et al., 2019). Scholarship populating the field included seminal works written by Micheal Barbour, Elizabeth Murphy, Charles Graham, Jared Borup, Cathay Cavanaugh, Maris Rodriquez-Manzanares, and Margaret Roblyer (Arnesen et al., 2019). By the mid-to-late twenty-first century, the Handbook of Research on K-12 Online and Blended Learning (Kennedy & Ferdig, 2014) and the Handbook of Distance Education (Moore, 2013) produced collective works on theoretical, methodological, technological, and pedagogical research with a primary focus on open, digital, and distance education.

It is not a coincidence that evidence of the interest and amount of scholarship increased in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The years of 2006 and 2007 have been noted as unprecedented years in terms of the largest market growth in the technology age to date (Friedman, 2016). It is during this time that the tech industry opened the world to digital platforms enabling connectivity and data storage at a faster and more expansive rate than had ever existed (Friedman, 2016). In September of 2006, the first six TED Talk series were released for free online and reached more than one million viewers, offering access to “some of world’s greatest thinkers, leaders, and teachers’‘(TED, n.d.). TED Talks popularity in reaching the masses with informative educational content drove the development of the TED Translator program ensuring that its content could be viewed in a variety of languages which boosted viewership to 100 million views in just 2 short years (TED, n.d.). The year 2006 also marked the launching of Facebook and Google’s purchase of YouTube. But these were only the beginning; Hadloop’s cloud computing, Palantir Technologies’ big data analytics, Intels’ non-silicon computer processing material, VMare’s translation software for Rosetta Stone, Twitter microblogging, and Qualcomm’s 3G technology enabling the release of Amazon’s Kindle were just a few of the technological advances in the market shaping ODDE (Friedman, 2016). In 2007, the Apple iPhone entered the market, creating a reported increase of mobile traffic on the AT&T network by over 100,000 percent between January 2007 and December 2014 (Friedman, 2016). With on demand access to information and educational content in the palm of the hand, many barriers previously restricting learning became irrelevant. However, despite the global expansion of the internet providing on demand educational opportunities to millions who otherwise would not have had access, challenges regarding access continued to exist. Some of the biggest challenges include basic access to electricity, access to computer hardware and hardware incompatibility, language barriers, and broadband internet access (Richardson, 2011). This is the digital divide that separates individuals and communities with the ready capacity to access the global information networks, from those who lack the devices and adequate internet services on which global knowledge systems increasingly rely.

Access and Inequality Related to Digital Access

Over 800 million students around the world do not have a household computer (UNESCO, 2020), and although global internet access has nearly doubled in the past decade, only 47% of people living in developing economies and 19% of least developed countries (LDCs) used the internet in 2019 (Garrity, 2020). There is a similar disparity in internet usage by gender. Fifty-eight percent of males and 48.4% of females use the internet globally, but those percentages decrease to 52.8% of males and 40.7% of females in developing countries and 24.4% of males and 13.9% of females in LDCs (Garrity, 2020).

In addition to infrastructure and availability, digital literacy remains a significant barrier to internet use for people residing in Africa, East and South Asia, and Latin America (Garrity, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has also highlighted the limited pedagogical support available for teachers who are interested in or required to move their educational materials online (UNESCO, 2020) and for students in already under-resourced circumstances (Czerniewicz, 2018; Devkota, 2021).

Disparities also exist between the markets for the providers and consumers of ODDE. For example, of the 52 primary providers of MOOCs, 48% are based in North America and an additional 25% are based in Europe. Despite the initial promise of MOOCs to increase access to education, a 2019 study of participants in MOOCs offered by MIT and Harvard found that the majority of enrollments and certifications were from countries classified as “very high” on the UN Human Development Index (Reich & Ruiperez-Valiente, 2019). Although course content from the Global South exists, it can be difficult to find among the large quantity of Global North material that dominates these platforms (Czerniewicz, 2018). Similarly, the majority of providers of virtual K-12 education have been located in the Global North, particularly North America (77%) and Europe (11%), resulting in the majority of highly cited research related to virtual K-12 educational outcomes being focused on these regions as well (Arnesen et al., 2019). In countries with developing economies, ODDE may exacerbate existing educational inequalities that exist between students who live in rural and urban areas. In Nepal and Ethiopia, reliable internet access is concentrated in urban centers, placing learners in rural communities at a greater disadvantage (Belay, 2020; Devkota, 2021). ODDE facilitates the development of innovative educational technologies, but not all students benefit from these solutions equally (Belay, 2020). Additionally, the limited availability of languages in which ODDE content is offered reduces access for many learners. Upwards of 80% of ODDE online content is developed in one of ten languages, though in order to reach the equivalent percentage of the world’s population, content would need to be delivered in over 90 languages (Czerniewicz, 2018).

As technology continues to facilitate growth in ODDE markets, it is critical to consider the learners that are being excluded from participation due to limits in internet access, and infrastructure, and the availability of languages that programs are being offered in. It is equally important to recognize that there may be an inherent tension between the market orientation of ODDE and equality of access to the educational opportunities it provides (Czerniewicz, 2018). Although ODDE has the technological potential to expand educational access, market forces and profit-seeking service providers may ultimately reinforce existing access inequalities, thus prioritizing the expansion of established global consumer markets, rather than creating new ones.

Reskilling and Upskilling the Workforce in a Growing Technology Economy

Despite the justifiable concerns, there are a number of innovative uses of ODDE aimed to advance the overall education level and the development of a nation’s workforce. The ODDE market is both a resource for nations to build and sustain a knowledge economy and an avenue to meet what European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop)‘s Executive Director, Jürgen Siebel, refers to as the crucial need for “building and maintaining employability for learners and workers and competitiveness for businesses” (Cedefop, 2021a, para. 4). ODDE resources can assist in developing new businesses, training and retraining the workforce, and to augment basic education at the compulsory level to support vocational education training through adult lifelong learning needs.

It has become increasingly evident that ODDE is a valuable asset to gain, maintain, and ensure employability and to meet national economic development goals. The ODDE market is not only providing educational opportunities to the individual user but also creating educational capacity for government strategic planning and training for corporations. National strategies targeted at reducing unemployment rates and domestic labor shortages, adjusting for the disappearance of low-skilled jobs, preparing an influx of immigrants to transition to the workforce, and meeting the growing demand for skilled labor in healthcare and the tech industries have sought to include the use of ODDE to address existing gaps in the current education level and/or skills of its citizens (Cedefop, 2021c; Cox & Prestridge, 2020; López Soblechero, Gonzalez Gaya, & Hernandez Ramirez, 2014; Stevenson, 2014). Long-standing issues like automation, sustainable use of resources, and the aging population, combine with emergent crises like the global pandemic, to influence and refocus the ways in which education, training, and career pathways are supported (Cedefop, 2021c). The European green deal (EGD) alone is estimated to contribute to an additional employment decline of 10% through 2030, particularly in jobs associated with coal and fuels (Cedefop, 2021c). Companies competing in the global market where the skill and training needs are rapidly changing and employee mobility is required are using differing distance education modalities and partnerships to accommodate the workforce. The degree of adaptation is driven by both the market and for the market with attention to both reskilling and upskilling needs. Adult learners as well as those within the compulsory schooling years are benefiting from ODDE opportunities, often from within traditional educational sectors.

Australia’s labor market is largely dependent on the vocational education training (VET) sector, with more than half of all occupation qualifications requiring VET, making it the country’s largest education sector (Atkinson & Stanwick, 2016; Cox & Prestridge, 2020). The Australian VET sector is critical to the skilling and upskilling of its labor force by providing opportunities for both secondary and lifelong learning and shifting to online education offerings for some of the VET (Cox & Prestridge, 2020; Reeson et al., 2016). Reeson et al. reported current VET units being taught online in 2016 was around 14–20% and growing. International student enrollment is a significant driver in the need for online delivery of the Australian VET sector (Gao, 2020). Australia’s leadership in the delivery of VET and its proximity to Asia has resulted in a number of VET partnerships between China and Australia designed to meet the needs of China’s large vocational education market (Lawson, 2017). These cross border Sino-Australian educational developments suggest that ODDE in the VET sector is not only addressing national need but also needs across borders, particularly with nations in geographic proximity to each other. Countries such as Australia are responsive to the skill development needs outside of their country, which can also extend into the postsecondary sector. Memorandum of agreements between Australia and China have enabled the development of programs with private and public providers. Lawson (2017) notes that the number of students from China studying in Australia for VET is dwarfed by the number of students staying in China studying Australian VET qualifications; “for every Chinese student who came to Australia to study VET with a public provider, twenty Chinese students undertook VET training in China with Australian public providers” (p. 2). The partnership between China Electricity Council and Chisholm Institute of TAFE (Australian Technical and Further Education) is one such example of a Sino-foreign VET arrangement where Chisholm staff travel to China to provide training to students who will seek jobs in the electricity and supply industry (Lawson, 2017, p.7).

Ireland’s recent 5-year reform of its VET sector, as part of its Further Education and Training Strategy 2020–2024 road map, is targeted to better meet and provide educational needs for its citizens. It is an example of connecting learners with more flexible learning modalities. Ireland’s ecollege, an online learning platform, now delivers courses to students who are in need of specific skills and training or those returning to the job market. Ireland’s national strategy to acknowledge differing learners’ needs combined with offering flexible learning modalities enables the use of innovative digital technologies to support learning for “people with disabilities, new migrants, the long-term unemployed, ex-offenders, and women” (Cedefop, 2021b, p.43). Similarly, Spain has been addressing the need for more flexible delivery modalities for VET as part of its economic recovery plans, as its citizens, with a high (41%) unemployment rate for workers with minimal qualifications, are contending with disappearing jobs across the European Union related to technological advances and increasing automation (López Soblechero et al., 2014). López Soblechero et al. (2014) note that online distance VET is needed for “its flexibility and ability to reach the largest number of students at a lower cost” (p. 1). This is significant in a country with 47% of the working age population having less than a secondary education level education, and an economy increasingly seeking more knowledge-based workers.

Reskilling the workforce through ODDE is evident not only in national strategic planning but also in the private corporate sector with partnerships being developed between companies and higher education entities to deliver new education and training skills to the currently employed workforce. Promoting this lifelong learning mindset is a central concern for many corporations as reskilling and upskilling employees will enable companies to adapt to the ever-increasing idea-to-product cycle time (Friedman, 2016). In a rapidly growing technological global economy, corporations need to adapt and provide flexible, fast education and training for its employees to remain relevant. AT&T, the world’s largest telecommunications company with approximately 300,000 employees, is a leader in corporate investment and strategy to upskill and reskill its employees (Friedman, 2016). By proactively assessing the skills its workforce would need to help meet their future corporate goals, AT&T, the “Big whale in the pathway of education to employment” (Friedman, 2016, p. 233), was able to seek out opportunities to partner with universities like the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Notre Dame, University of Oklahoma, and online providers such as Udacity and Coursera to grant their employees access to online degrees and certificates targeted at the specific needs of AT&T, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and predictive analytics.

Quality Oversight and Regulatory

As the market for ODDE grows, many have noted advantages to the alternative learning format. ODDE opens doors of opportunity to many students who would not otherwise have access, those who are not successful in a traditional face-to-face classroom, or for those who need the flexibility in terms of time and location constraints (Darby & Lang, 2019; Khan, 2012; Ortagus, 2020). For these reasons, in the USA, online education has become the main source of enrollment growth in higher education, seeing a jump in enrollment from 5.9% in 2000 to 42.9% in 2016 (Ortagus, 2020). The demand from students seeking online education is in part generating the supply of online education programming. However, as in all well-designed growth strategy scenarios, externalities exist and counterweights of checks and balances are needed to assure quality (Kinser, 2014). The rapid growth of ODDE is raising questions about the monitoring and evaluating of student outcomes, the quality of the online courses, and privacy concerns: particularly as education management organizations (EMOs) and online management programs (OPMs) increasingly promote and recruit students to ODDE formats. From a policy perspective, protecting vulnerable student groups is a key consideration in the development of online programs, courses, and the overall cost benefit of online education with attention to including quality oversight (Ortagus, 2020).

Kinser (2014) points out that the modern iteration of quality assurance for traditional higher education programs “emerged during a time of increased markets and competition” (p. 63). Quality assurance measures thus are one way to provide consumer protection, avail students of choices in the marketplace, act as a source of information for stakeholders, and signal legitimacy of an institution. The growth of global, cross-border, and online education has challenged existing quality assurance principles rooted in local values, questioned who is responsible for assuring quality and how it is measured in overlapping cultural contexts. Even though markets and competition have been such a significant factor in the expansion of quality assurance, students as customers have not historically been the primary constituents of these efforts (Kinser, 2014). There is some evidence, however, that this may be changing.

In 2016, a class-action lawsuit related to the quality of courses delivered online was filed by students at George Washington University (GWU), prompting an overview of the online and hybrid delivery of courses at the institution (McKenzie, 2017). Findings from the report indicated that in some instances the same level of quality oversight was not given to the development and delivery of online courses at GWU as compared to the face-to-face equivalent courses and generated a GWU review of best practices for delivering online education (McKenzie, 2017). This case highlight that as ODDE has grown, the need for adequate resources specific to the delivery of ODDE to support educational institutions and protect students entering the ODDE market has also grown.

The development of the Online Learning Consortium’s (OLC) Scorecard is an example of an organization available for helping institutions evaluate and deliver online programs and courses. The Scorecard developed in the USA in 2011 is used by over 400 institutions and provides guidance on how to measure effectiveness of online programs with the use of handbooks, rubrics, and interactive dashboards (Online Learning Consortium [OLC], 2021). Colleges and universities can use the Scorecard for an “in depth review of instructional practices as compared to quality standards’‘(OLC, 2021). The Online Learning Consortium, in partnership with The State University of New York, the largest comprehensive university system in the USA, also offers a Course Design Review Scorecard, known as OSCQR. The course level design level scorecard is available for free, and consultants are available to assist with design, layout, technology, assessments, and interactive activities (OLC, 2021).

Quality assurance agencies monitoring and providing support services for the development of online learning are evident on a global scale. The International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) supports 250 quality assurance agencies in countries from Albania to Vietnam (International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education [INQAAHE], 2021).

Emergent Issues and Future Research

The growing ODDE market opens many doors for those who would not otherwise have access to educational content and resources. Moreover, technology-enhanced education expands the capacity of nonresidential learning models to effectively serve students. As ODDE is increasingly established as a core component of the provision of education globally, there are new issues, and new aspects of old issues, that need further attention and research. These include the privatization of the ODDE, especially through third-party management organizations; issues of security and privacy; and the changing expectations for educational flexibility and equity demanded in response to the global pandemic.

Privatization

ODDE has developed in large part through extensive public-private partnerships. Much of the instructional design software, course management tools, and communication technologies in use today are the commercial products of private companies (e.g., Hill, 2019). The homegrown systems that may have populated early efforts have largely been supplanted such that there are few areas left where the private sector has not found its niche. These partnerships were initially based on tools needed to deliver programs at a distance or scale content on widely accessible programs. More recently, however, management organizations have taken responsibility for the actual operation of these programs. For example, Miron et al. (2021) document the profiles of the number of public schools in the USA that are now privately operated and increasingly owned by EMOs. These have predominantly emerged from market-based school reform initiatives and “a much-needed entrepreneur spirit and competitive ethic to public education” where competition is theorized as the motivation to drive improvement (Miron et al., 2021, p. 9). The Century Foundation has focused on the under-the-radar expansions of Online Program Management (OPM) companies in the USA (Mattes, 2017). The recent acquisition of edX by the OPM 2 U (Shaw, 2021) is an example of even when technology is developed in house (in EdX by Harvard and MIT), the trend suggests it will be commercialized and a for-profit entity (in this case 2 U) can ultimately assume control.

While the pattern of management organizations like the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) or 2 U appear to be filling a void in the education market for some, Miron et al. (2021) and Carey (2019) highlight that challenges exist with the vast organization of privatizing public education, particularly with analysis of the organizations, as multiple corporate parties are involved and many of the owner’s or corporate headquarters are located at a distance or are “geographically distributed” across regions making monitoring and evaluating these entities difficult. The Century Foundation’s multiple reports show that that OPMs have evaded oversight because of their status as a third-party contractor (Dudley, Hall, Acosta, & Laitinen, 2021). Market-based school reform initiatives are not new but with the increasing prevalence and “players” in the market, consideration of benefits, outcomes, student involvement, and student demographics are a few of the areas where grounded empirical research on the market-based approach are needed (Gulosino & Miron, 2017). Additionally, determining how quality is measured and who is responsible for monitoring quality in the growing private market should be further evaluated.

Security and Privacy

The twin issues of security and privacy in online education, particularly for children, has become increasingly important. Remote monitoring of online activity – whether to measure time on task, establish metrics for learning modules, or guard against cheating – allows authorities to observe not only student behavior but also the personal environment where learning is taking place. Data on students and their families can be gathered by companies providing software and access to school materials and then used to enhance marketing or sold to third parties (Lieberman, 2020). Efforts to use technology to monitor students for cheating have been shown on the one hand to be an effective tool (Dendir & Maxwell, 2020), and on the other hand still result in false accusations that are difficult for the innocent to defend against (Singer & Krolik, 2021). As a regulatory issue, data privacy has received much attention in some parts of the world (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union), but global standards have not been established. Future research should examine how the security and privacy of ODDE students and teachers can be protected and assured.

Changing Expectations

The global impact of the coronavirus pandemic may not be fully realized for years to come, but the unprecedented demands in the ODDE market may very well point to the future areas of growth. As a result of the lockdowns and school closures, UNESCO’s global monitoring reports that over 210 million learners have been affected across all education levels: preprimary, primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, and tertiary (UNESCO, n.d.). Supporting “learning recovery” during COVID recovery has become a primary goal for UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition (GEC) in action (UNESCO, 2021). GEC notes that there is an “urgency to invest” and “create innovative partnerships” to further prevent losses in learning, increasing drop-out rates, potential downstream economic, labor market, and social impacts (UNESCO, 2021, p. 8). One key objective proposed by the GEC is to scale up distance learning and connect every learner to the internet and in this way pursue attainment of the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), ensuring “inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (p. 40). The pandemic has in many ways reinforced much of the already pre-pandemic national strategic initiatives focused on education as a path towards economic recovery and aligning workforce skill acquisition with the changing skill needs in the labor market. In other ways, the coronavirus pandemic has been a reminder of the value of partnerships and collaboration to bring about change to meet the needs of the globally diverse student populations. In this pursuit, future research should explore how the convergence of investment and innovative partnerships serves to produce ODDE models best designed at providing equity.

Conclusion

Removing the classic constraints of geography and time through ODDE opens up new possibilities for the variety of students seeking educational opportunity. There is growing evidence of developing collaborative partnerships both within geographic regions and also across borders in all educational sectors. These partnerships are growing out of a demand for upskilling, the need for reeducation of the labor force, a recognition of the lack of local resources, and the development of national strategic plans focused on diversifying the workforce, reducing unemployment, and competing in the global economy.

As the demand for ODDE continues and partnerships grow, so does the number of stakeholders. The sheer magnitude of the financial opportunity inherent in the ODDE market has prompted venture capitalists to increasingly support entrepreneurial endeavors in the education sector. Determining the outcomes, quality, and overall benefit to the students and society at large will continue to be a primary focus of study as the ODDE market evolves and continues to grow.

Developing parallel to the growth of ODDE markets is a growing need to understand the market trends and how organizations such as EMOs and OPMs are using these trends to further develop programs and unbundle services. Data analytics companies like HTF Market Intelligence and Market Data Forecast aggregate and analyze data on various market sectors of ODDE and then charge fees for other groups or companies to access the information. As countries and educational institutions seek to maintain their market competitiveness, the organizations with the greatest financial resources will predictably have greater access to and thus benefit the most from these data analytics. This reality draws further attention to issues of equity and access. Though education management organizations (EMO) are growing due to increased market demands, it remains to be seen whether or not these demands reflect the needs of all students and whether or not certain groups of students will continue to be excluded from the market.

Overall, the immense ODDE opportunities available to learners with access to digital resources is unprecedented, regardless of whether it is free or fee for service, sought for personal lifelong growth or required for the demands of the labor market. And while new players may enter the open and borderless education market without consideration for the importance of student outcomes and protecting at-risk populations, the tremendous benefits of envisioning and then offering new mediums for the delivery of education challenges the traditional ways in which education is delivered and provides a ripe environment for expanding educational opportunity. In any market in which independent producers and consumers exist, there will be trade-offs. Given the relative infancy of ODDE, identifying and labelling these trade-offs in ODDE remains challenging. If an understood goal of ODDE is to improve access to education for all persons, then a deliberate push for transparency through the elimination of information asymmetries should be a clear priority. Greater transparency, particularly in the world of ODDE, should lead to greater benefits to the individual student on both a personal and professional level, and in turn should also lead to greater benefits to society at large. It is not clear, however, whether the current regulatory structure is sufficient to compel such transparency. In the market for borderless ODDE, consideration for positive analysis (behavior of individuals or organizations with response to change) and normative analysis (value judgments) will need to be ongoing and responsive to the changing market with regard to the what, how, and whom of how students are choosing among their options in ODDE, and what type of content the producers of education choose to offer. This will be especially true with a rapidly changing educational environment in which ODDE continues to operate.

Cross-References

(To do later)