Leadership in Online Learning
UPCEA is dedicated to advancing quality online learning at postsecondary institutions and is uniquely focused on excellence at the highest levels–leadership, administration, strategy. Learn from the experts as you network with our engaged community from leading universities who steward the online enterprise at their institutions.
UPCEA provides resources for online leaders ranging from industry-leading events, quality standards and best practices, research and benchmarking, and consulting.
News & Events
2025 Summit for Online Leadership and Administration (SOLAR) Conference
July 22-24 - Portland, OR
The Summit for Online Leadership and Administration (SOLAR) conference is an opportunity for senior leaders and practitioners in postsecondary online learning to convene in beautiful Portland, OR to focus on digital learning, innovation, and strategic leadership in higher education.
Digital leadership is integral to the access mission, commitment to excellence, and sustainability of today's institutions. SOLAR’s program focuses on the best practices, thought leadership, and strategy that institutional leaders need to embrace digital transformation in postsecondary education. The event, located at the Hilton Portland Downtown, affords us the opportunity to offer a more intimate and curated conference that lends itself to meaningful networking, fellowship, and idea sharing.
Join key campus leaders – presidents, provosts, deans, instructional designers, faculty, and others focused on digital leadership – July 22 - 24, 2025.
Online and Professional Continuing Education News
Get top news articles curated daily by Senior Fellow at UPCEA and Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois Springfield, Ray Schroeder.
Get Involved
Join the Online Administration Network
The Online Administration Network (OA) serves as a bridge between the administrative functions of online learning (marketing, online student services, program development, etc.) and the design of online learning. Participation in the OA Network provides access to authentic institutional online operational models, best practice trends in online management, professional analysis of learning design applications, and the formulation of best practices in the use of technology and learning design in online instruction.
Join the eDesign Collaborative Network
The UPCEA eDesign Collaborative (eDC) Network serves higher education instructional design teams (instructional designers, multimedia developers and team administrators) seeking networking and professional development. Participation in the eDesign Collaborative Network provides access to a community of professionals who are interested in best practices for online course creation.
Gain Knowledge and Advance Your Career with UPCEA’s Online Professional Development
Get the essential skills and knowledge you need with UPCEA’s Learning Center. Bringing you the leading experts in the field of professional, continuing, and online (PCO) education, these programs offer high-value and relevant content for practitioners at all levels. Learn from expert facilitators and connect with peers online as a part of UPCEA's Professional Development courses.
UPCEA offers stand alone courses focused on key PCO education topics, along with two PCO certificate programs: UPCEA PCO Professional Certificate and UPCEA PCO Leader Certificate.
Resources and Publications
UPCEA Hallmarks of Excellence in Online Leadership
Online education is critical for the future of America’s universities, and require institutional strategy and structure to accomplish this major undertaking. These Hallmarks focus on the features and principles that will create opportunities for students that far exceed anything already achieved in higher education, take pedagogy to a new level, and demonstrate the capacity of universities to be an even more vital force in our society.
Online: Trending Now
Unique, biweekly insights and thought leadership from Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA.
Embodied AI
We may be just months away from an influx of embodied AI robots (EAI). Those are, in many cases, humanoid bots powered by autonomous AI. Generative AI (GenAI) continues to advance with reasoning power, competing with Ph.D.-level knowledge in math and several of the science fields. We are beginning to see autonomous agents that can…
ChatGPT-4o Shows ‘Friendly’ Behavior
The app initiates personalized conversations and offers responses without a prompt. This signals a shift toward agentic AI, where models act more like colleagues. Perhaps this was merely a move to increase engagement with the OpenAI GPT-4o app. Or perhaps this model of AI is getting a boost in using contextual knowledge. Then again, OpenAI reported…
A Near Future Vision of AI in Higher Ed
The state-of-art of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is changing at lightning speed. Advances come by the hour, not just by the day. How might this play out in higher ed? As Senior Fellow at UPCEA, the online and professional education association, and Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois Springfield, I am fortunate to…
AI is Already Advancing Higher Education
The potential for Generative AI (GenAI) to further advance, enhance, and expand higher education in the future is enormous. Meanwhile, few realize how AI already is improving what we do today in a myriad of ways. Let me begin by noting that I have used GenAI tools to assist in ideation and the search for…
Upskilling, Reskilling, or Retiring: Responding to the Advent of AI
The anticipated replacement of human workers with Generative AI (GenAI) apps has begun. Earlier this year IBM announced about 8,000 layoffs amid an AI-powered initiative. As reported by Byte magazine, Cisco is among a group of other tech companies that most recently announced layoffs: “Despite tech conglomerate Cisco posting $10.3 billion in profits last year,…
AI in a Lingering Age of Loneliness Among Students
The COVID-19 Pandemic brought about greater awareness of an even larger epidemic, one of loneliness in America. In higher education, it is incumbent on us to help our learners with overcoming the pain and other ill-effects of this condition. The World Health Organization has staggering reports on mental health around the world: In 2019, 1…
Our Responsibility to Teach AI to our Students
Put aside any concerns you may have about student use of GenAI in your classes. It is our urgent responsibility to teach our students now how to use the technology in their discipline; their careers depend on us. It is not the academic integrity issue that looms the largest in higher education use of Generative…
The Synthetic Professor
We have reached a point in the development of Generative AI (GenAI) that synthetic AI professors are poised to enter academe. We have been following the rapid development of knowledge and abilities of GenAI over the past couple of years. OpenAI Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati recently gave some additional clarity on its capabilities.…
AI Reshapes Higher Ed and Society at Large by 2035
There are important steps to be taken in higher education as we prepare for the deep society-wide changes that will take place in the next five to ten years. In general, these columns have focused on the incremental actions that should be taken to benefit higher education institutions and their constituencies as they adapt to…
Higher Education Has Not Been Forgotten by Generative AI
The Generative AI (GenAI) revolution has not ignored higher education, a whole host of tools are available now and more revolutionary tools are on the way. Beginning with concern over the potential for plagiarism and cheating by way of the use of GenAI chatbots, higher education has paid attention to the development of this technology.…
UNBOUND is UPCEA’s e-publication in magazine format, designed to showcase thought leadership, case studies, research and other valuable contributions to the field. UNBOUND welcomes articles from all those who are involved in higher education, especially those who work with adult students.
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To learn more about how UPCEA can help you and your organization navigate the vastly changing landscape of online and professional continuing education please complete this form or email us at [email protected]