Demand for Online Courses Surges Again: New Study

In 2023, we covered the Changing Landscapes of Online Education (CHLOE) survey of U.S. university chief online officers, the poll conducted each year by Eduventures Research and Quality Matters. The ninth annual edition of the survey, released in August 2024 and known as CHLOE-9 presents several interesting new findings.

The latest results present a greater surge in student demand for online courses and programs than reported in 2023, along with school revisions to course and degree program priorities. And for the first time, the report covers two important new topics: the likely causes for institutional resistance to the development of more online programs and the adoption of artificial intelligence within online higher education.

In the 2023 report, the authors concluded that increased demand for online and hybrid learning had “likely not yet reached its peak.” They were correct. The 2024 survey results illustrate that the two major drivers behind offering online courses and programs are boosting enrollments and meeting student demand—and the new survey reveals more student demand for online courses than ever before, especially among students on campus.

Almost half of the chief online learning officers (COLOs) within the sample—46 percent—reported that enrollment growth in online programs exceeds such growth in the campus programs, and 77 percent said that students on campus were asking for more online options. Moreover, 60 percent of the COOs said that the class sections to fill first were usually the online sections—not the campus sections. Dr. Bethany Simunich, Quality Matters’ vice president of innovation and research, told Inside Higher Ed that these days she usually hears frustrations from college administrators that digital enrollments outpace enrollments on campus.

In terms of changing priorities, 69 percent of the sample reported that their top priority amounted to converting in-person classes into online versions, and the second-largest group (65 percent) prioritized converting entire degree programs on campus to digital versions. This latter priority appears to have grown by 55 percent because the previous year’s study only reported 42 percent of COOs focused on converting campus programs to online versions.

CHLOE-9’s authors point out that although such conversions have traditionally risked cannibalizing enrollments on campus, today’s online programs are attracting new audiences. “Schools likely see this approach as an easier strategy for scaling online revenue, as it involves lower cost and less effort than developing brand-new, online-exclusive programs,” they write.

Concerning boosting enrollments, 92 percent of the COOs said online courses and programs enable their schools to recruit students within their regions. Eighty-seven percent also said that online offerings allow them to pursue students outside of their regions; although that’s theoretically possible, one wonders if all these COLOs are aware of the latest research on this point that we reviewed in our August 2024 feature article “Huge Surprises From the 2024 Online College Students Report.”

For example, although America’s largest universities, like Southern New Hampshire University and Arizona State University recruit many of their students across regions, the “2024 Online College Students Report” from Education Dynamics shows that most online students would prefer to attend a nearby school. In that study, only 5 percent of potential applicants were willing to consider a program offered by a school farther away from home than a two-hour drive—even though that program is online and available anywhere.

For the first time, the CHLOE-9 survey looked at institutional resistance to the development of online courses and programs. Potential students often wonder why a college they’d like to attend doesn’t provide more online offerings, and this portion of the survey offers the most likely explanations.

Resistance Because of Faculty Autonomy

Faculty autonomy was the primary obstacle to online initiatives, cited by 20 percent of the sample. What’s more, 42 percent of the COLOs say they’re currently addressing concerns by one or more professors about autonomy. That obstacle was closely followed in the listing of obstacles by tensions around the institutional mission or culture, reported by 17 percent of the respondents.

Faculty autonomy as a barrier tends to increase along with high enrollment in online programs; almost a quarter of the COLOs at large universities with online enrollments of over 7,500 reported this obstacle. Dr. Simunich suggests in a September 2024 YouTube video accompanying the CHLOE-9 results that although most administrations will give broad autonomy to professors who lecture before several hundred students on campus, admins become much more concerned with reviewing and editing course content when a professor lectures before a potentially huge online video audience of hundreds of thousands of students. As we pointed out in our August 2023 article, such a massive audience exists right now for the world’s most popular college course, Harvard University’s introductory computer science course CS50.

She also told Inside Higher Ed that faculty concerns about autonomy not only focus on teaching courses online, but also center around creating materials for their online courses:

A lot of the tensions that I’m hearing about now are faculty saying, “Well, I want additional compensation for this.” Or faculty fears if a subject matter expert comes in to design these courses at a cost savings, “What does that mean for me as a faculty member? What does that mean for my job? What does that mean for my identity? Am I always going to be teaching courses that somebody else designed?”

Conflicts Over Institutional Mission or Culture

The second-ranked obstacle—tensions around the institutional mission or culture—was the linchpin factor that until recently delayed the University of California’s approval of online undergraduate degree programs. After 13 years of resistance, in 2024 that contentious matter went all the way up to the university’s Board of Regents, who revoked the faculty senate’s authority to implement a new residency requirement that blocked online undergraduate degrees. We further discuss that case in our feature article “Analysis: University of California Lifts Ban on Fully Online Undergraduate Degrees.”

Based on the new CHLOE-9 poll results, conflicts over the institutional mission or culture that block online initiatives—like the conflict at the University of California—might actually be more frequent in practice than previously thought. Almost half of the COLOs reported they were currently in negotiations with faculty over such concerns, and 22 percent said their colleges had resolved at least one such issue during the past year.

The CHLOE report series is late to the party in their coverage of online higher education’s adoption of artificial intelligence platforms. Last year’s CHLOE-8 survey inexplicably omitted a section covering AI adoption, even though the ChatGPT revolution had already been in full swing for about nine months by the time that report had been released.

Because the latest report is the first in the series to provide this coverage, using it to analyze trends in AI adoption over time isn’t possible. Nevertheless, because good data on AI within online education is still relatively sparse, CHLOE-9 provides a welcome addition to our understanding of how institutions offering online programs have started to adopt artificial intelligence.

As one might expect, CHLOE-9’s data depict a transitional period for artificial intelligence in online higher education. Overall, AI appears to be gaining some traction, but continues to face widespread adoption challenges within and among colleges, as well as potentially growing dissatisfaction and resistance from faculty.

AI Adoption Challenges

There appears to be a large and uneven variance in the use of AI within online learning. For example, the COLOs told the pollsters that only about one-third of their colleges directly incorporate AI as a coursework topic to a great or moderate extent. Within coursework, roughly half of the schools encourage students to critique AI-generated content (52 percent), use AI to edit or refine their original work (48 percent), or support their learning through prompt engineering (34 percent). About 29 percent of students also appear to be using AI platforms to write or edit programming code in computer science courses, and about 27 percent are “using Al-powered adaptive learning tools,” although the report doesn’t specify what that category represents.

Fewer institutions use artificial intelligence for learning-related functions. For example, only about a quarter of the schools use AI for course design. Moreover, only about 15 percent require students to use AI for activities, and even fewer test their students’ understanding of AI on quizzes or examinations.

Continued Faculty Resistance to AI

Faculty resistance to artificial intelligence is nothing new. We first covered this reaction a year ago in our January 2024 feature article, “Are College Faculty Boycotting Artificial Intelligence Tools Like ChatGPT?”

Like all our reports, that one compiled original reporting and research from several sources. In this case, an important source was an October 2023 Tyton Partners survey that revealed only about 20 percent of U.S. college faculty had ever bothered to try AI tools more than twice—even though 75 percent of those users and 50 percent of nonusers believed their students wouldn’t succeed in the labor force without understanding AI. Another source was a professor who complained of depression when thinking about the prospect of grading symbolic output generated by AI platforms that students had submitted instead of their own writing.

The CHLOE-9 poll suggests that faculty resistance to AI could be gaining momentum. It cites almost two-fifths (37 percent) of the COLO respondents who reported negative or very negative faculty opinions about using Al for teaching. Moreover, 20 percent reported similar negative opinions about using Al for course design.

These are very different opinions from the chief learning officers’ views. Fifty-two percent of these administrators expressed positive or very positive views about using AI for teaching.

And none of the various other uses of AI in online learning had received less than 78 percent positive or very positive ratings from the COLOs, including the use of AI to help design courses and other instructional content.

CHLOE-9’s Showstopper Finding

Now, here’s the report’s showstopper finding: A surprising result this survey discovered is the striking and never-before-reported lockstep correlation between increased online enrollment size and more of the COLOs’ reports that their schools encourage students to use AI. By contrast, “respondents from institutions with lower online enrollment were more likely to say they discourage online students from using Al tools,” write the authors.

For example, 62 percent of the online officers at schools with online enrollments greater than 7,500 students said their students critique AI-generated output, but only 38 percent reported that result at schools that enroll less than 1,000 online students. Moreover, 57 percent at the largest schools said their students use AI to edit or refine their original work—but only 27 percent from the smallest schools said that. And schools with the largest online enrollments are much more likely to encourage AI use within every other coursework category measured by the poll.

Instead, 30 percent of COLOs at the smallest programs agreed with the statement, “Students at my institution are not being encouraged to use Al for their coursework.” But only 7 percent of the COLOs at the largest programs agreed.

Clearly, students enrolled in the smallest online programs are likely to end up disappointed if they expect to learn as much about artificial intelligence as students in the largest programs. And at smaller programs that discourage online students from using Al, many of those students could end up entirely out of luck. The report’s findings emphasize the substantial role that institutional size plays in the adoption of AI technologies within online higher education, and this relationship underscores the need for strategies to ensure equitable access by students to AI-enhanced education across institutions of all sizes.