Licensing Accredited Qualifications

Ross Woods, July, 06, rev. 2018

 

What is course licensing?

In the Australian training sector, "course accreditation" is the process of getting courses approved by a state accreditor (in WA it is the Training Accreditation Council) to be run as Nationally Recognised Training. The owner of such a course can then license it by agreement to other Registered Training Organizations to offer it. It is an agreement between organizations and does not apply to individual students.

 

What does the licensee actually get?

The licensee gets a license to use provide the accredited course under its own RTO. The license may also include the use of training and assessment materials, with permission to make copies within their own organization for the licensed program. It isn't selling anything. Ownership doesn't change. The licensee is only paying for a license to use it.

The license must get up-to-date copies of the qualification guide, assessment guidelines and units. A copy of the accreditation certificate is also a reasonable request.

The licensee issues the qualifications to students. The licensee runs it under their RTO according to its policies and procedures of their RTO, and it issues the qualifications. Their government audits them on the way it is run.

 

Value

As a rule, do not agree to something considerably below its real value. It costs real money to gain the accreditation. The licensor needs to put a dollar value on what its worth and suggest a fair payment formula. It costs a lot more (mainly in time of staff with that level of expertise) than the prospective licensee probably thinks to develop a course and get it accredited.

How do you establish value? You want them to pay fairly but you don't want to unfairly pillage their coffers. You might want to ask a little on the high side as an incentive to recruit higher numbers of students. But don't be too greedy; it's easy to think it's more valuable than it really is.

On the other hand, no matter what the prospective licensee pays, it wouldn't actually own it and if the fee is too high, it might just say "too expensive" and walk away. Be careful to ask for enough but not so much that you cause offense.

I think that the way to value it is:

• Precedent
• Are they using it on a for-profit basis? What sort of profit can they expect to make out of it?
• Competition: Can they get this from anywhere else?
• What it would cost them to develop something of their own from scratch, if they could?
• Level of qualification. For example, a Graduate Diploma is intrinsically more valuable than a Certificate II.

It is much more complex if a licensee operates in different countries. For example, North American private college fees are very high and the US dollar is relatively strong. The pound sterling is quite strong. One student would easily cover all costs. On the other hand, some countries are economic basket cases and it would be unrealistic to expect them to pay much at all. To manage financial risk, specify the currency in which license fees must be paid.

Other kinds of value are associated with licensing. The main value can be in the development of associated intellectual property. For example, the licensor can ask to have rights to use (or own) any training and assessment materials they write that are derived from the course.

There are two competing interests in controlling the course. First, the licensee needs to retain its own identity and ethos. If a distance is involved, it may need considerable independence. Second, the licensor may also need to specify quality control mechanisms (e.g. moderation) to prevent the qualification becoming devalued.

 

Fee structures

As there is no standard charge, you can (and perhaps should) think about how you structure the fee. There are a number of options:

• A flat fee for the whole period of accreditation for unlimited numbers of students (very unusual)
• An flat annual fee for unlimited numbers of students (common)
• A site license, with a fee for each site, for particular locations regardless of the number of students at that location (quite common)
• A percentage of student fees (common)
• A flat per-student per semester fee (unusual)
• A flat per-student per year fee (unusual)
• A sliding scale (the more students you have, the lower the fee per student) fairly common

There may also be an establishment fee to cover the licensor's costs of setting up the agreement, in which case the ongoing fee would be lower.

 

The agreement

You can also write in any conditions/prohibition about:

• assessment tools and other materials
• validation of assessment
• feedback for continual improvement purposes (an annual review is usually required by the accreditor anyway)
• copyright matters, for example, a guarantee that ownership of any intellectual property (including derivatives thereof) would remain with the licensor and/or its staff
• use and ownership of derivative materials
• guaranteed provision of a copy of any derivative materials developed by the licensee
• definition of derivative materials
• on-selling of accreditation (e.g. sub-licensing to other providers at other sites)
• subject to a Consumer Price Index rise
• etc.

Note that some of these relate to academic quality.

 

Afterwards

What happens when the licensee wants to offer it through its own RTO? The licensee can't actually "accredit" it under its own name because they don't own it and may not pirate it in a derivative form. But they do have to register with their local department that they will run it. They may be asked to provide a copy of the agreement.

When the course accreditation period runs out, the owner can apply for re-accreditation. Under ASQA, course accreditation lasts for five years and then one must apply for re-accreditation. The licensee's program review goes into the mix of what changes need to be made, and would normally be re-accredited.