COLO Compass: Evidence and practical direction for chief online learning officers. Throughout National Distance Learning Week, I’ve written about how much online learning leaders are now expected to handle: AI governance, the financial case for online education, relationships with policymakers, financial aid fraud, and operations that extend well beyond their own units. The question for…
COLO Compass: Evidence and practical direction for chief online learning officers. When UPCEA published its 2016 Hallmarks, online education was still moving from innovation to mainstream adoption, and a central challenge was legitimizing it. The 2026 Hallmarks of Excellence in Digital Learning Enterprises begin from a different premise. As Vickie Cook, a contributing editor of…
Clearly, many aspects of everyday living have begun to change in the emerging, evolving “Age of AI.” Higher education must acknowledge and adapt to those changes and anticipate the ones yet to come. Some faculty members fail to recognize that the world has changed and we must respond to those changes in how and what…
In a remarkable period of intense development of powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, leaders in the industry have called for a modest level of oversight to ensure safety and provide protections against misuse and abuse of the power of AI. Late last month, President Trump announced the formation of a “Superintelligence Force” to oversee AI…
The Seven Deadly Sins Of Digital Badging In Education (Forbes)
An academic institution’s digital badging initiative is getting off the ground and students are “earning” badges, or micro-credentials, but are they actually providing value to the student toward his or her future career? Many academic institutions are going through this evolution process in deciding to certify learning through credentialing, otherwise known as digital badging to help…
UPCEA Issues Comments on Proposed Negotiated Rulemaking September 2018
UPCEA recently commented on the vast undertaking of the rulemaking committee that was proposed by the Department of Education. We find that the proposed depth and breadth of the topics, and the amount of time provided to the committee, coupled with the complexity of those topics and the limited amount of seats at the table…
Letter to Dept of ED on Gainful Employment
UPCEA, along with ACE and 20 other higher education groups sent comments to the Department of Education (ED) on the department’s proposal to rescind existing Gainful Employment regulations. We oppose the Department’s proposal to rescind, instead of revise, the existing gainful employment regulations, and do not believe that simply replacing them with additional disclosures on…
The Commons: Next Generation Learning
A new study forecasts the next generation learning environment. From the creators of Virtually Inspired, a website that showcases pockets of digital learning innovation worldwide, comes “The Classroom of the Future” whitepaper. This downloadable document examines next generation learning. To reimagine education of tomorrow, we must consider new methodologies augmented with technologies that enable us…
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…
Over 80% of instructional designers reported using AI in 2025, and it’s safe to assume that number has grown this year. (At Six Red Marbles, all our designers use AI daily.) They’re using AI for everything from proposing guidelines for content development to formatting documents and creating visuals. At colleges and universities, instructional designers are…
What if a student uses AI to complete an assignment and does it better than they could have done manually? The instinct may be to say the student didn’t do the work. But the workplace may reward the student for doing exactly what the classroom penalized. That creates a different question for higher education: not…