When universities offered the first online degrees, they served local markets because of limitations in the educational technology. The potential of the global market was yet to be recognized. Public universities and colleges followed the traditional routine of charging higher tuition for students outside the service area and much greater tuition rates for foreign students. Today, the new market is global. Universities that can adapt to the needs of international students will have unlimited market opportunities. The global market will be open. There will be no protected service areas. Degree quality, price, and student service will be the variables that students will use to choose their borderless online degree universities. This chapter identifies students' needs, borderless-degree variables, market barriers, and winning approaches for determining tuition, curriculum, and pedagogy. Innovations that will distinguish market leaders are reviewed.
TopIntroduction
At the start of online distance learning in the 1990s, corporations, not traditional universities, identified changing student market needs, created the new distance-learning products, added innovations, and marketed them without delay. The emerging borderless online degree market will be similar. Entrepreneurs will be the market leaders (Kuratko & Morris, 2018). Innovation will again create a competitive advantage. In this second distance-learning round, developing nations with rapidly growing populations are unable to educate their citizens to qualify for skilled employment. Due to weak national economies, these countries will not be able to achieve their educational goals by building more campuses and training more teachers.
The capability now exists for colleges and universities throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas to deliver customized borderless, online degrees to provide accessible, affordable education anywhere in the world – customized education that meet the needs of more than billion students to qualify for jobs. The teaching will be the simplest part. The larger challenge for academia will making the transition to educational innovation. Educators are well versed at lecturing audiences about the need to ‘think out of the box,’ but few have applied the principles within an international business venture. The successful providers of borderless online degrees will those that can create into work environments that foster innovative solutions for global problems. The borderless degree solutions will require new approaches for global student remediation, student services, and online pedagogy. Global distance learning must be more personal and achievable. The current approaches and student success rates will not meet the needs of the borderless market.
Corporations understand future thinking; academic spends more time looking to the past. Borderless degree leaders will be the ones that can look in both directions (Figure 1). Higher education prides itself on academic tradition. Implementation of borderless online degrees will be accomplished by entrepreneurs with a broad vision of international needs. Thinking like a business will be challenging. It will take more than convincing boards and legislators. The institution will need to establish a work environment that encourages innovation. It may take a few trips to Silicon Valley to understand what is involved.
Figure 1. Looking backward the role of universities was to graduate scholars; Technology now requires higher education to prepare graduates for the future without forgetting the learning of the past.
TopThe Borderless Degree Market
The market for borderless online degrees is sufficiently large to generate income and increase enrollment, providing autonomy that can be used to strengthen programs and open new initiatives. Here is the data to support that claim. The two largest markets for borderless online degrees are Asia with a population of 4.5 billion and Africa with a population of 1.3 billion. In both regions, countries are unable to provide the postsecondary education needed to meet their educational needs.