An article from Sponsored Beyond the campus: The digital shift helping higher ed grow smarter

As pressures mount, even the most established institutions are racing to reimagine digital learning for a new era.

Published June 9, 2025

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Despite delivering world-renowned learning experiences, higher education in the U.S. is facing one of its most complex periods in recent memory. Uncertain federal funding streams, political pressures, and a decline in the perceived value of a degree have left many institutions on edge. At the same time, demand for online and flexible learning pathways continues to soar, particularly among adult learners and working professionals looking to climb the career ladder.

This combination of at-risk budgets and shifting student expectations puts greater pressure than ever on universities to invest in their digital delivery. With the global online education market growing at an exponential pace, institutions must bring their digital foundations up to date, building learning systems that are adaptable enough to evolve and robust enough to scale.

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For edtech leaders such as 2U, which has been delivering online education in partnership with top universities since 2008, this isn’t a theoretical challenge. It’s a commercial need the enterprise has been solving in real time.

For the many institutions still operating with outdated systems not built for today’s learners, 2U provides the digital infrastructure, tools, and expertise to help scale online offerings efficiently via its global online learning platform, edX. Connecting millions of learners to more than 5,000 career-focused programs - from free courses to fully accredited degrees - edX not only supports a wide range of educational goals, but also enables providers to reach far beyond the traditional campus.

This model has proven so effective that 2U now powers digital learning for over 100 leading institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Maryville University, and continues to expand as global demand for inclusive learning rises.

From legacy to leading-edge

Supporting this level of reach requires a digital ecosystem that can scale quickly without compromising consistency or control. To meet that need, 2U partnered with enterprise WordPress agency Big Bite to consolidate more than 100 partner sites and landing pages into a single WordPress multisite environment, hosted on WordPress VIP - the fully managed, enterprise-grade platform.

The unified setup is designed around custom themes and modular content blocks that empower internal teams to publish and iterate at speed, reducing the time required to roll out new sites by up to 80%. Tailored integrations with platforms such as OneTrust, Optimizely, and Segment also ensure seamless workflows, eliminating manual processes and enabling asset and data reuse across the network.

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The result is more than a modern publishing solution - it’s a future-ready digital framework that allows 2U to onboard new partners at pace, maintain strong governance, and support ongoing expansion without increasing internal strain.

Future-proof foundations

In a sector defined by rapid change and rising expectations, higher education has a clear opportunity to re-evaluate the systems it relies on, and to invest in digital infrastructure that’s ready for whatever comes next.

That means prioritizing platforms that are not only scalable, but sustainable. Systems built to evolve with shifting demands, support diverse learner journeys, and remove the friction from content delivery and innovation. It also means equipping internal teams with the tools to move faster and work smarter, delivering learning experiences that reflect the realities of contemporary learners, as well as the demands of a changing education landscape.

Want to learn more? Read the 2U case study to explore how a flexible, enterprise-ready WordPress implementation is helping power digital learning for more than 100 universities around the world.

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