New trove of data suggests a bigger, more complex, more varied ecosystem of companies that work with colleges to take their academic programs online.
Trying to bring order and understanding to a market as transitory and diffuse as the business of online education can be a challenge. Important contributions have come in recent years from Parthenon, Eduventures, and the ed-tech analyst Phil Hill, among others.
A new dataset promises to give college leaders, company officials and others involved in the online learning landscape much more information about who offers what programs, how they manage them and where the money is flowing, among other factors.
And the company behind the new data, Holon IQ, published a report today that gives a new name to the large and diversifying category of providers that are working with colleges to take their programs online: OPX, instead of OPM, for online program management companies. (More on that later.)
Holon IQ, which was founded in 2017, describes itself as focused on “global education market intelligence,” meaning that it collects, analyzes and distributes data and other information designed to help companies, educational institutions and others understand the world they’re operating in. The mix of free and paid information it offers covers pre-kindergarten to corporate training, and its scope is worldwide.