Education was hugely transformed by the Covid pandemic, with some form of normality ensured by heavy investment in digital technologies that shifted teaching online. Universities were by no means excluded from this transformation, with many campuses shut and lectures moved online.

This transformation is largely not reflected in the ranking systems that do so much to assess the work universities do. Research from the Open University suggests that there needs to be an online dimension added to university rankings to better reflect the digital nature of academia and to promote competition in online learning.

New criteria

The researchers assessed both the existing criteria for university assessment as well as some potential new ones that allow online learning to be accurately measured. If these measures were adopted, the researchers believe that rankings could better reflect strengths in both online and face-to-face learning.

Their suggestions have already been integrated in the Times Higher Education rankings, albeit in a limited way, and the European U-Multirank system. The researchers believe that these are crucial steps towards accurately recognizing quality online education in academia.

“Most rankings do not take online universities into account when they make their assessments,” the researchers explain. “In this project, we didn’t want to create a new ranking for online universities, because it would have been of limited value. Instead, we set out to identify which criteria or indicators were useful for highlighting the value of these universities.”

Serving students

The aim of the new criteria is to better serve students and others who rely on the rankings to gauge the quality of universities. Rankings are crucial in positioning universities internationally, and are often central to any advertising campaigns undertaken by the universities.

“By and large, they benefit the leading universities, which are the ones that organize these rankings,” the researchers explain. “Harvard could be considered better than the University of South Africa because it decides which students it admits, the best ones, while at the University of South Africa all are welcome. This pre-selection affects the subsequent results.”

What’s more, after analyzing the existing criteria used to underpin the rankings, the researchers argue that they often fail to really take into account the interests of students themselves, which obviously undermines their ability to decide which university is best for them.

“Rankings should be structured to respond to students,” the authors conclude, “and that means focusing on the quality of the learning experience, which is, in fact, the criterion on which the UOC’s model is based.”