Let’s Digitize It: Investigating Challenges of Online Education

This paper focuses on the challenges education providers face when trying to offer different types of online education formats as an extension to their already existing course portfolio. We investigated generic challenges concerning both small and closed as well as big and open online courses, where challenges include the development as well as the integration of new online content into course structures. Our analysis is based on an interview study with representatives of 14 Universities in the German speaking area. Results yield six concrete problem areas education providers have to deal with. Those include cost, and increasing student base, drop-out rates, teaching quality, certifications and legal challenges. While the penetration of online education in the investigated area is surely too small to realistically construct best practice examples, the presented work represents a snapshot of today’s challenges in offering online education, and therefore may be seen as a valuable starting point to work on future improvements.