COLO Compass: Evidence and practical direction for chief online learning officers. Online learning now sits at the center of institutional strategy. The leaders who run it are stretched thin — bigger portfolios, less time, authority that rarely matches responsibility. UPCEA and Quality Matters are coordinating the research schedules of two national studies: UPCEA’s Benchmarking Online…
Artificial intelligence is becoming part of the everyday work of higher education. From enrollment management and student services to academic administration and continuing and professional education, AI is creating opportunities to rethink how work is accomplished. Much of the discussion has focused on what AI can do. For institutional leaders, however, a more important question…
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…
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…
Membership ROI Calculator: A Simple Framework to Justify UPCEA for Your Team
When a budget review lands on your desk, line items for professional association memberships are often the first to draw scrutiny. The question from leadership is reasonable: What do we actually get for this? For online and professional continuing education units, the honest answer is usually “a great deal” — but only if you can…
From Silos to Systems: A Practical Guide to Cross-Campus Partnerships for Adult Learners
Adult learners have gradually become one of the most important populations in higher education. Roughly 3.9 million students over the age of 25 were enrolled in undergraduate programs in fall 2023, and adult learners now make up at least 40% of total higher ed revenue. Yet many institutions still serve them with structures built for…
With New AI Requirements and Courses, Colleges Eye AI Fluency (Inside Higher Ed)
“As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the workforce, several colleges and universities are introducing AI requirements to general education curricula, majors and certificate programs this fall. Some institutions—for example, Miami University, Ohio State University and the State University of New York system—are embedding AI competencies into pre-existing majors and coursework. Others, including Northwestern University and the Wentworth Institute of Technology,…
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…
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…
AI tools now play a big role in which online and continuing education programs make a prospect’s shortlist, and that shortlist has room for only three. Search Influence and UPCEA’s 2026 AI Search Research Study shows what it takes to earn one of those spots. Key Insights 56% of prospective online and continuing education students…