Is there an international market for Canadian online learning?

In the most recent national survey of Canadian post-secondary institutions (Johnson, 2019), institutions were asked the location of their online students (in-province, out-of-province, international). The results, for me, were very surprising:

• over one third of institutions were unable to answer this question because they do not track this data
• of the two-thirds that did track these data, over half reported less than 5% of their for-credit online enrolments were out of province. Only 18% of institutions have 20% or more of their credit students who live out of province, never mind internationally.

The report concluded that ‘ultimately, the majority of online students are from the same province in which the institution is located.’ This is despite the fact that over 85% of institutions reported that online education is strategically important for attracting students from outside their traditional service area. More...