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…
New for 2018 – UPCEA Excellence in Enrollment Management Award
Enrollment management is central to the success of professional, continuing, and online units. In the last 40 years, enrollment management has evolved from a theoretical concept in undergraduate education to a highly sophisticated framework for attracting, retaining, and graduating students. The UPCEA Excellence in Enrollment Management Award recognizes an outstanding professional, continuing, and/or online (PCO) organization (unit…
Webinar (August 1): How UC-Davis is Assessing the Market for Non-Degree Programs Targeted at Career Advancers
Hosted by Emsi and UPCEA Identifying marketable skills is a key step in continuing and professional education program development. Job postings signal the skills and competencies employers and hiring managers expect in new hires. As such, jobs data is an important proxy for market demand for a skill. But what if a learning program is…
UPCEA’s National Council for Online Education Announces Four New Advisory Board Members
WASHINGTON, July 9, 2018 – UPCEA, the Washington, D.C.-based association for university leaders in professional, continuing, and online education, welcomed four new members to serve on the National Council for Online Education Advisory Board at the 2018 Summit for Online Leadership and Administration. “These exceptional leaders all have deep and varied expertise in the world…
Webinar (July 11): Designing Extended Education Programs and Marketing to Meet the Needs of the Corporate Market
Jointly hosted by the Community and Economic Engagement & Marketing, Enrollment, and Student Services Networks Programming and marketing for the corporate market need to be done differently than for open enrollment programs. This webinar will examine successful examples from the UC Irvine corporate programming and outreach and a survey of best practices derived from MindMax’s…
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…