Contents of the repository

• FOIA-2019: Contracts between schools and OPMs collected by the Century Foundation before 2022.
• FOIA-2022: Contracts between schools and OPMs collected through FOIA requests to the schools in the fall of 2022
• data.csv: Data on the partnerships including name of the university/college, OPM, invisitibility meassure and start and end dates for the contracts. See variable description below.
• contact_content.csv: Descriptions of the content of each contract. See variable description below. Only invisible partnerships are included.

Variables in data.csv

Header	Definition
partnership_id	Unique numeric id for each partnership.
institution	Name of the university or college.
provider	Name of the OMP company.
invisibility	Numeric score (0-2) of the invisibility of the partnership on the university/college's website. -999 means that the OPM provides an online learning platform.
start_month	The start month of the first contract.
start_year	The start year of the first contract.
term_primary_contract	The lenght of the first contract. 888 mean that the contract remains effective or is automatically renewed until terminated by one of the parties.
last_start_year	The start year for the lastest contract.
end_date_last_contract	The expiration year for the latest contract.

Variables in contact_content.csv

Header	Definition
partnership_id	Unique numeric id for each partnership.
institution	Name of the university or college.
provider	Name of the OMP company.
2019_contract	Yes/No to whether the database includes a contract aquired by the Century Foundation. If yes, it can be found in the FOIA-2019 directory.
2022_contract	Yes/No to whether the database includes a contract aquired by Columbia. If yes, it can be found in the FOIA-2022 directory.
2019_contract_content	Summary of the content of the 2019 contract.
2022_contract_content	Summary of the content of the 2022 contract.
keywords	Keywords categorizing the content of the contract: course development, course content, course material, course instruction, revenue share, academic support, recruitment, marketing, software, tutoring.
price_per_year	If the payment is a fixed amount, the yearly price is listed.
revenue_share	If the payment is a revenue share agreement, the companies share (in percent) is listed.
programs_courses	Specifict programs/courses included in the partnership, if they are listed in the contract.

Methodology

This document explains the process of data collection and data cleaning of this project.

Data aquisition

The original data was collected by Heather Daniels, Christian Smith, Laura T. Hamilton, and Charlie Eaton from the University of California, Merced. It can be aquired from this GitHub repository.

The file data.csv is based on their dataset but we have collected new rounds of data which are also included in the file.

A new round of FOIA requests was filed to the universities in the original data and as a result of the responses, new partnerships between universities and online program managers were added to the data.

Updating the data

The data has been updated as new contracts were obtained. If the contract has been extentet or renewed, new expiration dates, new contract content, new contracts were added.

Updated invisibility meassurement

The invisibility meassurement has been updated.

To see whether the partnerships would be visible to a student looking for information on the program, advanced Google searches were run in the Fall of 2022. This was done by scanning each university's web domain for any mention of the OPM's name.

0 - There is no mention of the partnership on University program website, may have 1 press 
    release from the provost, head of university, etc when the partnership began, but definitely 
    not clear to potential students. You would need to specifically look up key terms 

1 - The partnership is mentioned somewhere on the university website, but not clear that 
    there is an external partnership in place "available but not accessible".

2 - The partnership is clear on the university program’s website, clear differentiation between
    the university and an external tool

Cleaning the data

The sample includes to contracts that are still active or expired later than 2019. Contracts that expired before that are excluded to ensure that the project only include recent partnerships. By doing so, 104 partnerships were dropped.

Partnerships where the online program manager only provides an online learning platform - known as Learning Program Managers (LMS) – were excluded to make the cases in the sample more comparable. The LMS are coded as -999 in the invisibility column. As a result, 37 partnerships were dropped.