The UPCEA AI Study Group pilot confirmed something we heard consistently from participants: institutions are ready to move beyond simply exploring AI and toward building practical, responsible approaches for putting it to work. Across the pilot, participants discussed AI implementation, governance, institutional readiness, use cases, change management, student support, faculty development, and the practical work…
The first two articles in this series explored how the updated UPCEA Hallmarks of Excellence in Digital Learning Enterprises reflect the evolution of digital learning from a specialized initiative into an institutional opportunity and responsibility, and how institutional intentionality creates the conditions that support learner success. Those ideas begin within the institution, but the work…
The spring semester is coming to a close with the normal host of routines. Yet, beneath those routines, something is unfolding in the labor market that will greet your new graduates who will face an incrementally tighter job market. I asked Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended Thinking to research the tasks relevant to preparing our new…
Technologists, economists, and visionaries are warning us that in the next three to 18 months, we are going to experience rapid and pervasive disruption of our professional lives, workplace models, and distribution of income. Professional positions requiring college degrees will be lost, remade into highly-productive, cost-efficient, hybrid human-AI models where human contributions and compensation will…
Post-Pandemic, Online Ed Has ‘Staying Power’ (Inside Higher Ed)
“The surge in online enrollment forced by the pandemic is leveling out. And the modality is now far more popular than it ever was during the 2010s, according to newly released federal data. The Education Department published fall 2024 online enrollment data last month, covering more 5,615 institutions. The data shows nearly 54 percent of college students…
Unlocking Opportunity: How Tax Policies Like Section 127 Can Drive Employer Partnerships
By Chelsea Miller, UpSkill America, and Amy Heitzman, UPCEA This piece was originally published in July 2025. It has since been updated to reflect changes to Section 127 as a result of the 2025 tax reconciliation bill. Updated September 1, 2026. Partnership is a key driver to unlocking opportunity in America. This is why UPCEA and UpSkill…
Building Tomorrow’s University Today
How continuing education leaders are turning institutional pressure into possibility Higher education is under no shortage of pressure. Enrollment volatility, strained financial models, rapidly changing technologies, and evolving learner expectations are forcing institutions to reconsider whom they serve, how learning is delivered, and what sustainability will require. But pressure does not determine what comes next….
ED Releases Proposed Accreditation Rule; Comments Due September 21 | Policy Matters (August 2026)
Major Updates ED Releases Proposed Accreditation Rule; Comments Due September 21 The U.S. Department of Education published its proposed accreditation rule, Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization: The Secretary’s Recognition of Accrediting Agencies, on August 20, following the AIM negotiated rulemaking committee’s consensus agreement in May (which we previously covered in our May Policy Matters newsletter). The…
In 1915, UPCEA’s founders built this association on a simple idea: carrying knowledge to the people. That founding purpose never had an expiration date, and it does not have one now. It is why, more than a century later, the question in front of us was never whether professional learning needs to change. It is…
The tagline for Convergence, Credential Innovation in Higher Education, raises two important questions: First, what kind of credentials are we talking about? Is the scope of credentials unlimited, blue sky, or confined to incremental changes on the margins of the status quo? And second, who is leading that innovation, and what do they need to…
At UPCEA SOLAR 2026, OES Learning Solutions joined Stevie Rocco of Penn State University for a session that asked an important question about how we should be thinking about inclusivity in higher education: What changes when accessibility is treated not simply as a compliance requirement, but as a catalyst for better learning? For PSU, said…
Three years ago, I joined my first UPCEA event without knowing many people in the room. Today, Drieam is a UPCEA Silver Partner, and I’ve lost count of how many Coffee Chats, webinars and conversations that partnership has led to. What has stayed consistent across those three years is not the format of the conversations,…