The Old Online Course Playbook Is More Expensive

I read two pieces this morning that remind me how the technology and design logic behind expensive, centralized online course production is quietly but rapidly disintegrating.

The Inside Higher Ed piece illustrates how AI is turning hours of faculty prep (guided notes, rubrics, graphic organizers, accessibility supports) into minutes without sacrificing rigor. It's framed as a teaching-accessibility story, but I read it as a cost-mitigation story. If a faculty member can generate a semester's worth of course content in minutes with a well-built prompt, the same logic applies to full course development and ongoing maintenance.

A Times Higher Education piece on course "future-proofing," makes a similar point by suggesting that course design shouldn't be expensive. Courses become brittle and hard to maintain when every component is tightly chained to the next. The fix the piece suggests is designing in modular blocks (anyone remember Object Oriented Design?) each with a clear purpose, so any single component can be reviewed or swapped out without rebuilding the whole course. This is nearly diametrically opposed to how most universities are producing online courses in-house. Slickly produced, studio-shot video locked into proprietary authoring tools like Articulate is now a significant problem for these universities.

For years, the studio-and-Articulate pipeline was a reasonable model because faculty didn't (and still don't) have time to build accessible, well-structured courses themselves. AI has eroded the "faculty don't have time" barrier, and modular, block-based design is undercutting the case for locking content into closed and proprietary formats.

None of this means centralization of some online course design and development functions should disappear. Shared standards, instructional design support, and quality review still matter, and a fully decentralized free-for-alls create their own costs (been there, done that). But centralization course production around expensive studios and locked-in authoring tools is will never scale. Not now.

For mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities competing on price for adult and non-traditional learners, every dollar spent maintaining the old model of online course design and development is a dollar not spent lowering tuition. The universities training faculty now to build and maintain their own courses will have demonstrable pricing flexibility. The ones doubling down on a dated model of course production will keep hemorrhaging cash until their online enterprise fails.