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…
National Adult Learner Coalition Addresses Tax Cuts and Jobs Act H.R. 1
The National Adult Learner Coalition, a group of organizations of which UPCEA is a founding member, wrote to Congressional leadership to express our concerns with H.R.1, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and its elimination of the Lifetime Learning Credit and Section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code. Our organizations are focused on how the…
Tax Reform – UPCEA signs Letter Against Higher Education Cuts
UPCEA joined with ACE and 44 other higher education associations to send this letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Ranking Member Richard Neal (D-MA) on the higher education provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (H.R. 1). The groups write that this legislation, taken in its entirety, would…
OPINION: 3 ways forward-thinking colleges usher in a new generation of students (The Hechinger Report)
Higher education has undergone a sea change. For most of today’s students, the iconic image of lazy afternoons on the ivy-covered quad couldn’t be further from reality. A growing portion of traditional-age students are first-generation and low-income students who often lack the support and guidance needed to successfully navigate college. More working adults are turning…
Systemwide Approaches to Online Programs (InsideHigherEd)
As online offerings have grown increasingly important to colleges over the past decade, large public university systems looking to launch or expand degree programs have been faced with a key question: To centralize or not to centralize? Systems across the country have adopted a wide range of approaches — creating a separate institutional entity for…
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…