At some point in the last decade, almost every university has faced a version of this decision: do we build our online capability in-house, or do we partner with an organisation that already has it?

It’s a significant decision — financially, strategically, and culturally. And in my experience, it gets made badly more often than it gets made well. Not because the people making it aren’t smart, but because they tend to be asking the wrong questions when they make it.

The questions institutions usually ask

The make-or-buy conversation in higher education typically orbits a few familiar concerns. How much will it cost? How quickly can we get to market? What does the revenue-share look like? Who controls the student relationship? What happens to our brand?

These are not unreasonable questions. Cost, speed, and brand integrity all matter. But they’re the wrong starting point, because they focus on the commercial structure of the decision before the strategic one has been answered.

The strategic question — which needs to come first — is this: what do we actually want to be good at?

The capability question

Every institution has a finite amount of organisational energy. You can build genuine capability in a limited number of things. What you build, you sustain, develop, and improve over time. What you don’t build, you depend on others for — and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, provided you’re honest about it.

The question for any university considering online delivery is: do you want to be genuinely good at online learning design, digital marketing, student recruitment, enrolment management, retention support, and learning technology — or do you want to be genuinely good at the academic and intellectual work that sits at the core of what universities are for, and partner for the rest?

There is no correct answer. An institution with the scale, ambition, and existing capability to build a world-class online operation in-house should probably do so. An institution that is being honest about its current capability, its available investment, and its core strengths might find that a well-chosen partnership gets better outcomes for students faster, and frees the institution’s energy for the things it does that can’t be outsourced.

What’s not defensible is deciding to build in-house out of institutional pride — or deciding to partner because it feels like the path of least resistance — without having answered the capability question first.

What good partnership selection looks like

When an institution has decided that partnership is the right strategic choice, the selection process still matters enormously. And here too, the wrong questions dominate.

Procurement processes for online program management partnerships tend to focus heavily on commercial terms, technology platforms, and marketing reach. These things matter. But the questions I’d want answered first are different:

What does this partner’s learning design methodology look like, and does it align with how we think about developing capability in our students? What does quality look like to them, and how do they measure it? What happens when the commercial incentives and the academic ones come into tension — and they will — and how has this partner navigated that in other partnerships? What does a genuine partnership look like in practice, as opposed to a vendor relationship with a revenue-share attached?

The OPM market is maturing. The early days of long-term, bundled, revenue-sharing arrangements are giving way to more flexible, fee-for-service models that let institutions engage with partners for specific capabilities rather than handing over the whole operation. This is largely a positive development — it creates more room for partnerships that are genuinely strategic rather than financially driven. But it also means institutions need to be clearer than ever about what they’re actually buying.

The honest conversation about risk

There’s one more thing that tends to be underweighted in make-or-buy decisions: the risk of building badly.

The instinct to build in-house often carries an implicit assumption that in-house means quality control. But building an online operation from scratch is genuinely hard. It requires expertise in learning design, digital marketing, technology integration, student support, and data analytics — expertise that most universities don’t currently have sitting idle. The risk of building slowly, expensively, and without that expertise is real, and it’s a risk that falls on students as well as on the institution.

I’ve seen both sides of this. Partnerships that transformed what an institution could offer students, opened up programs to people who couldn’t otherwise access them, and freed faculty to focus on the intellectual work they’re best placed to do. And partnerships that were badly chosen — where the commercial incentives overwhelmed the academic ones, where the institution abdicated responsibility for quality rather than genuinely sharing it, where students ended up worse off than they would have been under a less ambitious but more carefully executed in-house model.

The difference, in almost every case, came down to how clearly the institution had answered the capability question before they signed anything.

What I’d suggest

Before any institution enters a make-or-buy process, I’d want them to spend real time on three questions:

What do we want to be genuinely excellent at, and is online delivery one of those things? If we partner, what specific capabilities are we partnering for — and what are we retaining and developing ourselves? And what does success look like for students in five years, and which path makes that more likely?

The commercial conversation can follow. It usually gets a lot cleaner once these questions have honest answers.

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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.