Moving 2U’s OPM business outside the United States was no small challenge.
When we began seriously pursuing international degree partnerships, nearly every part of 2U’s business was concentrated in the United States. Our only significant international presence was in short courses, powered by our acquisition of GetSmarter in South Africa.
The question was straightforward:
Could the OPM model that had worked in the United States work elsewhere?
The answer, as I would discover, was both yes and no.
The First Attempts
Our first serious attempt at expanding the degree business internationally was with IE in Spain. Negotiations were completed to move its MBA program online with 2U. My flights were booked. I was preparing to travel to Spain, sign the agreement, and begin implementation. Then, at the last moment, the deal fell through.
That is the nature of international business development. Until the agreement is signed, nothing is certain.
Our next opportunity was with University College London. This partnership was particularly interesting because we were not simply taking an existing MBA online. At the time, UCL did not have an MBA program. We were working with its engineering school to create one from the ground up.
From there, international degree partnerships began to take off.
We expanded with Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. We partnered with the University of Sydney in Australia. And then came significant growth in the United Kingdom, including partnerships with the University of Birmingham, the University of Surrey, Lancaster University, and others. In many ways, it felt as though we had been transported back to 2015 in the US context.
OPM was new. OPM was vibrant. And institutions were eager to explore what online education could make possible.
For a time, the United Kingdom became one of the hottest OPM markets in the world. Our expansion went far beyond degree programs. Short-form and executive education grew rapidly through partnerships with institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.
We also launched our first undergraduate programs at LSE. The international business was growing. And it was getting more complicated by the day.
Partnerships at a Different Scale
These were not easy partnerships to win. Negotiations sometimes took years, particularly during the disruption and uncertainty of COVID-19. But the partnerships themselves could be enormous. A single agreement might include ten or fifteen postgraduate programs, along with their postgraduate diploma and postgraduate certificate counterparts. Increasingly, those offerings were also connected to stackable microcredentials.
This was not simply a matter of selling one online degree. It was about creating a portfolio strategy with a university.
And I learned very quickly that success depended on having the right people in the right countries.
In Australia, that person was Riley Batchelor. In the United Kingdom, it was Isabele “Izzi” Drury. In Mexico, it was our own Ken LaOrden. In South Africa, we had the tremendous advantage of the GetSmarter acquisition and a deeply talented team that already understood the market and the academic landscape.
There was a common denominator in each of these markets:
Local knowledge mattered.
A great deal.
We Were Speaking English—But Not the Same Language
One of the most important lessons I learned internationally came from a meeting in Australia.
I was speaking to a group of academics—not “faculty,” as I quickly learned to say there—and walking them through the typical 2U course-development process. I explained that developing a course generally required approximately 150 hours of an academic’s time over a nine-month period. As I looked around the room, everyone was nodding. But their expressions suggested shock.
I thought I had done an excellent job of explaining the process. Later, I discovered the problem.
In the Australian academic vernacular, a “course” often referred to an entire course of study—the full postgraduate program. I was talking about a single course as Americans understood the term. They thought I had just told them that building their entire postgraduate degree would require only 150 hours of academic effort.
The issue wasn’t that they didn’t understand me. The problem was that I didn’t understand them.
I had to change.
And it wasn’t simply a matter of changing a few words in conversation. Our language had to change throughout the organization—from our sales collateral to our course-development materials, enrollment practices, and student-support approaches.
Learning the Local Academic Vernacular
Learning the academic language of each country became essential. A course might be a program, or better yet, a programme. A unit might be a course. Modules meant different things in different places. Credit hours became credit points. “Faculty” became academics. A learning management system might be called a VLE, or Virtual Learning Environment.
The list went on.
And terminology was only the beginning. The deeper challenge was understanding the context behind the language. How did academic governance work? Who actually made decisions? How were programs approved? What did quality mean in that particular country? How did students think about online education? What role did government funding play? What were the expectations around student support? What did a university mean when it said it wanted “growth”?
Those questions could not be answered from DC or New York.
For me, success increasingly meant doing the translation in my own head before anything came out of my mouth. I needed to immerse myself in each country’s academic culture before I could truly earn a seat at the table. Otherwise, I was simply another American trying to sell a bag of tricks.
Where We Succeeded—and Where We Didn’t
On the front end, we were very successful.
We could build relationships. We could develop a compelling partnership strategy. And we could win over academic leaders.
Where we struggled, honestly, was attracting students at the scale required to make the model work. In my opinion, we made a fundamental mistake. We took a sophisticated marketing and lead-generation machine that had been built for the United States and attempted to apply it in fundamentally different markets. We needed to become Mexican. We needed to become Australian. We needed to become British. We needed to become South African.
But we were not agile enough to do that.
We understood how to sell the partnership. We did not always understand how to market effectively to the students.
Did we enroll students? Absolutely.
Did we enroll enough students, consistently and at the economics required to support the scale of our degree partnerships? Not always.
That distinction matters. And it reinforced a lesson I had begun learning years earlier:
A business model does not travel as easily as a product does.
The more a business model depends on local culture, consumer behavior, regulation, and institutional relationships, the more it must adapt.
The edX Acquisition
During this period of international expansion, 2U made another transformational acquisition: edX.
Founded through a partnership between Harvard and MIT, edX was a truly global learning platform. It was primarily filled with non-degree credentials and learning opportunities, many of them available at no cost.
The strategic vision was compelling. Millions of learners were already coming to the platform. What if some of those learners could eventually become degree students at 2U’s university partners The idea was to create a pathway from free or low-cost learning to professional credentials and, ultimately, degree programs.
It was a powerful vision. But it did not unfold as planned. The conversion of large numbers of platform learners into degree students proved far more difficult than expected. And that challenge would become an important part of 2U’s larger story as the company eventually moved toward its pre-packaged Chapter 11 restructuring.
The lesson was another reminder that scale alone does not guarantee conversion. A learner taking a free online course and a student making a long-term financial and professional commitment to a degree program are not necessarily the same customer.
The distance between those two decisions turned out to be much greater than it appeared.
The End of This Part of the Journey
Across these first four articles on the evolution of revenue share in higher education, I have tried to take you on a personal journey.
I began with Revenue Share 1.0: photocopied curriculum, three-ring binders, satellite centers, and degree-completion programs for working adults. Then came Revenue Share 2.0: the rise of the OPM, online learning at scale, massive capital investments, and partnerships in which companies increasingly assumed the financial risk of launching and operating programs. Finally, we took that model global. And discovered that global expansion requires far more than translating a successful business model into other geographical contexts.
In my next—and final—article in this series, I will offer my perspective on the model itself. What did revenue sharing get right? Where did it fail? What are its inherent strengths and weaknesses?
And perhaps most importantly, where might Revenue Share 3.0 emerge?
Because despite the disruption, criticism, and failures surrounding the OPM industry, I believe the underlying question remains as important as ever:
How can universities and external partners combine their respective strengths to create something neither could build alone?
The answer may not look like Revenue Share 1.0. It may not look like Revenue Share 2.0. But I suspect the next version is already beginning to take shape.
The Lesson
Understand the context in which you are operating before you promise results.
Things are rarely as they first appear. The language may sound familiar. The business model may look transferable. The partnership may seem straightforward.
But context changes everything.
Listen carefully. Learn the culture. Understand the market.
And never assume that what worked somewhere else will automatically work here.
