Why “online vs on-campus” is the wrong debate for universities

I’ve sat in a lot of rooms where this argument is happening. Someone makes the case for online — flexibility, access, scalability. Someone else makes the case for campus — community, serendipity, the intangibles. Both sides marshal evidence. Both sides have reasonable points. And then the meeting ends and everyone goes back to their desks without having answered the question that actually matters.

The online versus campus debate is one of the most well-worn arguments in higher education. It is also, I’ve come to believe, almost entirely beside the point.

The wrong binary

The assumption underlying the debate is that modality is the determining variable — that what matters most about a learning experience is whether it happens in a physical room or through a screen. Spend enough time designing and delivering programs across both contexts and that assumption starts to look very shaky.

I’ve seen campus-based programs where students sit in lectures, produce assessments that test recall rather than capability, and graduate without any clear evidence that the program changed what they could actually do. I’ve seen online programs where every element of the design — the activities, the feedback loops, the assessment tasks — is built around generating observable evidence of developing capability, and where graduates can point to specific things they can now do that they couldn’t before.

And I’ve seen it the other way around. Genuinely transformative campus experiences. Online programs that are little more than PDFs and multiple-choice quizzes with a discussion board nobody uses.

Modality doesn’t determine quality. Design does.

The distinction that actually matters

Here’s the question I think institutions should be asking instead: is this learning environment deliberately designed to generate valid, observable evidence of what learners can actually do?

Not “is it engaging?” Engagement matters, but it’s a means, not an end. Not “is it innovative?” Innovation for its own sake is one of higher education’s more expensive hobbies. The question is whether the design of the program — the sequence of activities, the nature of the assessments, the feedback mechanisms, the way content is structured — is built around producing graduates who demonstrably have the capability the program claims to develop.

This question cuts across modality entirely. You can answer it badly in a lecture theatre. You can answer it well through a screen. What matters is whether the question was asked at all during the design process — and honestly, in a lot of programs, it wasn’t.

Why modality became the proxy argument

I think the online versus campus debate persists partly because it’s easier to have than the harder conversation underneath it. Modality is visible and measurable. You can count contact hours. You can point to a campus or a platform. You can satisfy a quality assurance process with evidence of delivery without ever having to demonstrate evidence of learning.

The harder conversation requires institutions to be honest about whether their programs are actually producing the outcomes they claim. That conversation involves looking at graduate employment data, at employer feedback, at the gap between what a qualification signals and what a graduate can do on day one of a job. It involves redesigning assessments that have been running unchanged for fifteen years. It involves having difficult conversations with faculty about what their courses are actually for.

Online versus campus is an easier argument. So it keeps happening.

What the Australian context adds

This debate is particularly live in Australia right now, for reasons that go beyond pedagogy. Universities are under significant financial pressure — 26 of 39 are operating in deficit, international student revenue is constrained, and institutions are being forced to make decisions about their delivery models under conditions of genuine urgency.

In that environment, online delivery often gets framed primarily as a cost response — a way to reach more students with fewer resources. That framing is understandable given the pressures, but it’s dangerous, because it positions online delivery as the budget option rather than as a deliberate design choice. And when online is the budget option, it tends to get the budget version of learning design — which is where you get the PDFs and multiple-choice quizzes.

The institutions that will navigate this moment well are not the ones that go online fastest. They’re the ones that ask the design question seriously regardless of modality — and then make resourcing decisions that allow them to answer it properly.

A more useful conversation

I’d like to see the online versus campus debate replaced, or at least supplemented, by a different set of questions:

What capability are we actually trying to develop, and how would we know if we’d succeeded? What does valid evidence of that capability look like — and are our current assessments generating it? What learning experiences, in what sequence, are most likely to produce that evidence? And then — only then — what modality or blend of modalities best supports that design?

That’s a harder conversation. It takes longer and it produces less certainty than “online or campus?” But it’s the one that actually determines whether a program is worth the time and money students invest in it.

The modality question is downstream of the design question. We’ve been answering it first for too long.

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Meg Knight is Director of Learning & Operations (International) at Online Education Services (OES). She writes about online education, learning design, and the future of higher education.