Changes to Online Education in the COVID era — Adam Arnold // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “At Searchmetrics, I basically work with a lot of our education partnership so Im talking about a lot of different universities throughout the country to figure out how we can help support them in increasing their overall organic search.” -Adam

• “Theres a whole host of companies that work in the online education space. You have Udemy and theyre not just targeting students but they can target different companies whether its B2B or retail companies. And youre also looking at strictly online universities and you also have the typical mix of in-person learning and online offering.” -Adam

• “The coronavirus obviously changed the way that we are able to interact with our educators. Were not sitting in classrooms.” -Ben

• “The coronavirus impacted the online education in a number of different ways. One is that a lot of companies who faced these issues are about budget cuts and the reason why universities are facing issues with budget cut are the students financial ability to just pay for a tuition so some are actually starting to delay college at the moment because of the pandemic.” -Adam

• “Lots of universities are also not getting an income in the housing that they provide within the dorms so thats been a big impact as well. Of course theres also lower enrollment numbers especially because the international students are not coming over as much. Also, a lot of them are scrambling to switch to the online space.” -Adam

• “It seems like the online portion of the education has really been supplemental for traditional education but then you get to the post-educated, and Ill throw myself in this bucket where Ive already gone through the schooling but I want to develop my skill set so I go in YouTube, Udemy and all these training programs to harness my skills.” -Ben

• “I dont know if the content has more or less of the demand necessarily but theres definitely a focus that I have been seeing recently with a lot of universities. Some of them are focusing on graduate programs, and some of the degrees that theyre offering.” -Adam

• “One challenge that theyre having right now is the declining highshool graduation numbers. So one way to increase enrolllment and keep that tuition running is to focus on some of those graduate programs to get people that are no longer at that high shool age back to the school and get a degree that could actually help them forward.” -Adam

• “There are also a lot of contents out there that are geared towards parents especially parents within the junior and senior high school and then theres a big target towards transfer students as well.” -Adam

• “Given the fact that the competition is just getting more and more challenging for universities, its really important that they understand where they sit in the competitive landscape for the different degrees that they offer.” -Adam

• “They have to make sure that they understand how their graduate degree pages are performing, their undergraduate or associate degrees and that competitive landscape is going to change based on those different categories. They have to understand how theyre stacking up and what market share they have.” -Adam

• “Another big problem that they face is that their blog content most of the time is actually cannibalizing some of their degree pages.” -Adam

• “If youre searching for classes and offerings, it has definitely gotten more competitive just because now that universities dont have that much leverage to get people in person. One thing that universities did really well in the past or they tried to is getting this much tour on their campuses as they could.” -Adam

• “Its interesting that you think of universities for the most part being geographically restricted.” -Ben

• When you think about UC Davis, they are primarily going to be recruiting students from California and now that all of a sudden everyone is moving towards an online model, since we cant be in person, they actually have a much wider reach.” -Ben

• “Theres an interesting change in geography which makes the online education industry a rapidly growing industry.” -Ben

• “What I think that a lot of universities need to make sure they are doing in their online presence is making sure that students and people applying are assured of the quality of the education that they are going to get is going to be the same online versus in-person.” -Adam

• “One of the biggest mistakes online education is making right now is the cannibalization of their pages. I think the biggest issues people have had is just blog pages cannibalizing their degree pages.” -Adam