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

What Higher Education Leaders Can Learn from NGA’s Intersectional Policy Lab

September 8, 2025

In late August, I had the opportunity to join the National Governors Association’s Intersectional Policy Lab on Non-Degree Credentials and Skills-Based Practices in Minneapolis. This first in-person gathering of NGA’s Data and Non-Degree Credential Learning Community and Skills in the States Community of Practice brought together state leaders, researchers, foundations, and employers for two days…

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AI Payoff vs. the Web: What It Means for Higher Ed

September 3, 2025

When the New York Times ran a piece in August pointing out that companies are throwing billions into AI with little to show for it, I had déjà vu. It took me right back to the late 1990s, when everyone thought the web would change everything overnight. It did change everything—but not before years of…

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

AI Companies Roll out Educational Tools

September 4, 2025

Fall semesters are just beginning and the companies offering three leading AI models: Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI have rolled out tools to facilitate AI-enhanced learning. Here’s a comparison and how to get them. Each of the three leading AI providers has taken a somewhat different approach to providing an…

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AI Can Facilitate Mastery Learning in Higher Education

August 21, 2025

Learning in contemporary higher education is rooted deeply in calendars and time rather than mastery of the topic of the learning. With an inflexible semester or quarter calendar and an often-inflexible schedule and length of meeting times, learners are marched through the system in the orderly method of an assembly line. As long as I…

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

Why Do Students Leave College Before Finishing? New Study Looks at Common Scenarios. (EdSurge)

When a student stops out of college before getting a degree, the college should act fast if it wants to get them back. That’s because there’s a correlation between how long a student has been disengaged and the likelihood that they’ll return. “As soon as a student drops out or stops out or disengages, the…

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42% of stopped-out young adults cited financial reasons for leaving college, survey finds (Higher Ed Dive)

[…] For college administrators, reenrolling students starts with acknowledging that students are stopping out in the first place, said Jim Fong, founding director of UPCEA’s Center for Research and Strategy. “Colleges often don’t want to admit how many students leave school before graduating,” Fong said. “Institutions don’t want to tell the community, ‘Oh, we lost…

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2021 UPCEA MEMS Award Recipients Announced

2021 UPCEA MEMS Award Recipients Announced

11 Recipients Chosen For Three Award Categories WASHINGTON, D.C., December 2, 2021 — UPCEA, the leader in professional, continuing, and online education, has announced the recipients of the 2021 Crisis Management Marketing Award, 2021 Excellence in Enrollment Management Award, and the new Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness in Marketing, Enrollment, and Student Success Award. …

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New Research Answers Question Every College Wants to Know: Why Do Students Leave and How Do We Get Them Back?

BALTIMORE, MD and WASHINGTON, D.C. (December 1, 2021) – UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association) and StraighterLine conducted a critical empirical research study profiling the disengaged learner to better understand their situations and motivations in relation to higher education. The study focused on individuals who have college credits but are no longer attending college…

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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.

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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Building the Cyber Workforce the Future Can’t Live Without

August 11, 2025

Turn learners into the cyber pros every employer is chasing with stackable, multi-credential pathways The Cyber Talent Gap Is a Moving Target Picture this: the bad guys keep upgrading their playbook, but the good guys are still running last season’s plays. That’s the cyber talent gap in a nutshell. It’s not just about more people…

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