The University of Minnesota has prioritized the development of additional online academic programs in alignment with the University of Minnesota Systemwide Strategic Plan (MPact 2025). MPact 2025 includes an explicit goal to “Establish innovative, coordinated, and scaled systemwide distributed learning models that increase access and meet workforce needs”.

Further, the University has named a new Vice Provost for Distributed Learning and created an Office of Distributed Learning (ODL), under the Provost, to help coordinate and support online learning across the University of Minnesota five campus system.

The Provost and the Vice Provost for Distributed Learning have determined that it is in the best interest of the University to partner with an external vendor.

1) Building internal support capacity within the University; and

2) Providing an external option for University of Minnesota academic units to use for financing (shared-risk), design, development, implementation, and evaluation of online programs with both fee-for-service and revenue sharing options that would supplement our internal staff, expertise, and financing capacity and accelerate the development of online programs (credit, noncredit, degree, and certificate) that meet our educational mission. We see a growing need for these types of services and seek to engage private partners to support ODL in helping to provide these services.

We are interested in proposals that provide both comprehensive as well as specific areas of focus to support the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of online programs. Both fee-for-service and revenue share proposals will be considered (although for revenue share vendors must indicate how these would be converted to fee-for-service if U.S. Department of Education regulations prohibit revenue sharing arrangements in the future).

Our focus is on the use of a preferred vendor Master Services Agreement that would provide lower pricing and ease of use benefits for the Office of Distribute Learning and the academic units offering online programs. Each program or project that would use the services of the preferred vendor would only require an addendum detailing the specifics of a given work plan, and would thus be able to avoid issuing an RFP for every project. With this in mind, we encourage bidders to offer the best pricing and terms possible in this context.

Respondents are prohibited from contacting the identified department about this RFP while in process.

Before submitting questions about the RFP via the Questions Tab, read and review the Supplier Process and Information Attachment and ALL Attributes in the Attributes Tab, especially Background and Project Summary/Scope of Work. These provide valuable information and address frequently asked questions.

Remember to submit your response, including attachments, early to allow time to correct errors. The submission deadline is a hard close. The system will reject responses with errors and will NOT allow late submissions.