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Perspectives on Online and Professional Education
from UPCEA’s Research and Consulting Experts

Preparing Four-Year Institutions for Workforce Pell

September 23, 2025

Institutions must begin preparing now for 2026 implementation.  On July 4, 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), a sweeping legislative package that reshapes federal student aid and accountability policy. Among many consequential provisions for higher education is the creation of Workforce Pell, which will extend Pell Grant eligibility to some short-term,…

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How AI Is Rewriting the Playbook for Enrollment Management

September 22, 2025

Introduction Enrollment managers face a paradox: students demand personalized service, yet resources are shrinking. While AI is exciting, it is also an expensive endeavor for enrollment management divisions already stretched by staffing and resource challenges. Traditional methods—manual file reviews, siloed systems, and lagging indicators—simply can’t keep up. The solution lies in determining how to leverage…

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Unique biweekly insights and news review from Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA

AI Hallucinations May Soon Be History

October 2, 2025

An artifact of the race to the top in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that mistakes inevitably occur in refining the models that are under continuous development. One of those many mistakes apparently led to hallucinations in outputs. We all are witness to the incredibly frenetic race to develop AI tools that publicly kicked off on…

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AI Teaching Learners Today: Pick Your Pedagogy!

September 18, 2025

University budgets across the country are broken. Overall revenue and accumulated financial support appear to be declining at most universities for a wide variety of reasons. New funding policies, administrative reorganizations such as those at the Department of Education, lean fiscal times for states, diminished regard for higher learning, fewer requirements for degrees among employers…

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Your one-stop shop for the latest Association happenings, policy updates, plus thoughts from the desk of CEO Bob Hansen.

No One Rule Fits All (InsideHigherEd)

The Online Learning Consortium, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) — three organizations that deal primarily with online education — previously commented to say the proposed rules focused too strongly on face-to-face programs. The department, they wrote, had not “sufficiently considered the ramifications for the…

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UCLA’s Dean Of Continuing Education And Extension Smutz To Serve As UPCEA President-Elect

SAN DIEGO, CA – UPCEA, the Washington, D.C.-based association for university leaders in professional, continuing, and online education, welcomed Wayne Smutz as the association’s 2016-17 President-Elect during the 101st UPCEA Annual Conference. Smutz is Dean of Continuing Education and Extension at the University of California, Los Angeles. Smutz deeply believes that continuing and online education organizations…

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UPCEA Announces 2016 Association Award Recipients

13 Individuals and 5 Programs Receive Association’s Highest Honors WASHINGTON, DC – UPCEA, the leader in professional, continuing, and online education, has announced the recipients of the 2016 Association Awards. The UPCEA Association Awards program includes recognition of both individual and institutional achievement across the UPCEA membership. Since 1953, UPCEA has recognized its members’ outstanding…

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Dive Brief: Coalition advocates for ’21st century’ HEA rewrite (EducationDIVE)

The Online Learning Consortium, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies have joined together to release a common set of guiding principles for Congress as it considers reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Read the full story.

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Musings on trends and updates from UPCEA CEO Bob Hansen.

Foreword by Bob Hansen Featured in The COLO Guidebook

July 10, 2025

We are pleased to share the foreword by UPCEA CEO Bob Hansen from the newly released Chief Online Learning Officers’ Guidebook: A Framework for Strategy and Practice in Higher Education. The guidebook, now available from Routledge in paperback, hardback, and eBook formats, provides a comprehensive framework for today’s online learning leaders. Learn more and purchase…

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A new direction for the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference

November 7, 2024

Over the last three years, UPCEA engaged in an innovative partnership with the University of Wisconsin–Madison to enable the latter’s Distance Teaching and Learning (DT&L) conference to continue under UPCEA’s leadership. The partnership’s goals included making this valuable event for the distance learning community more sustainable and accessible to online practitioners focused on teaching and…

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Valuable insights from UPCEA's trusted corporate partners.

Cybersecurity as a Strategic Priority for Universities

September 22, 2025

Protecting students, data, and credentials starts at the top, because hacks don’t take holidays. Cybersecurity Is Now a Leadership Issue Universities aren’t just academic institutions anymore. They’re digital enterprises. Student data, research, and online platforms are valuable targets, and attackers know it. That’s why cybersecurity has moved out of the IT basement and into the…

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Building Better Learners, Educators, and Outcomes with Scenario-Based Learning

August 25, 2025

Since the 1980s, higher education has steadily shifted from passive lectures to more active, student-centered learning. As Bonwell and Eison noted in Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom, this shift not only reinforces content mastery but also fosters critical thinking and problem-solving. Cynthia J. Brame, writing for Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching, defines active learning…

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