On a different note, e-learning also offers opportunities to tap entirely new markets both at home and overseas. Whilst global markets mean increasingly fierce competition for students, e-learning can facilitate diversification of the offering. The phrase ‘The Long Tail’ (Anderson 2004, 2006) is used to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com that can sell a greater volume of, otherwise hard-to-find, items at small volumes than of popular items at large quantities. The term Long Tail is also the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions which resemble the graph below. Figure 3. The Long Tail Curve
In these distributions a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually ‘tails off’. In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events, the long tail, represented here by the light blue portion of the graph, can make up the majority of the graph. In other words, the majority of Amazon’s sales come not from blockbuster bestsellers but from obscure books that are not available in the majority of bookshops. Brynjolfsson et al (2003) show that, while most of the discussion about the value of the internet to consumers has revolved around lower prices, consumer benefit from access to increased product variety in online book stores is ten times larger than their benefit from access to lower prices online. Thus, the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail. The principles of Long Tail economics may be equally applicable to the education sector in terms of the opportunities afforded by e-learning to tap into niche markets. This is particularly the case in postgraduate studies and we can see a good example of this in the Hull MALSO course where e-learning has made possible the creation of a highly specialist course attracting a worldwide customer base. The potential for other institutions to diversify in this way is evident.
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