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

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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Expanding Institutional Capacity for Credential Innovation through Business and Community Partnerships

August 25, 2025

Higher education is rapidly changing. The 2025-26 academic year will be the first in which the number of fully online undergraduates surpass those who are fully residential.1 In particular, interest and innovation in workforce-related programming and credentials continue to surge, with this market emerging as one of the fastest growing in higher education. Two-thirds 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.

UPCEA Welcomes Six New Board Members

WASHINGTON, April 18, 2019 – UPCEA, the Washington, D.C.-based association for college and university leaders in professional, continuing, and online education, welcomed one new officer and five new directors to serve on the UPCEA Board of Directors during the 2019 UPCEA Annual Conference. “The Board’s newest members are an impressive group, and the Board Development…

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Ray Schroeder: “Universities Have to Change To Meet Students’ Needs” (IBL News)

Professor Emeritus Ray Schroder finds it difficult to stop working. As the Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning at the University of Illinois Springfield and the founding director of the National Council for Online Education at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), he has a lot on his plate. IBL News recently got in…

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Department of Education Negotiated Rulemaking Committee Reaches Consensus

As part of the Department of Education’s recent and wide-ranging negotiated rulemaking, negotiators reached consensus on all of the topics discussed during their sessions. With only three minutes remaining in the time allotted for negotiators to do their work, before the entire process would have been for naught, all negotiators agreed on changes to regulatory…

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University of Washington Continuum College Vice Provost Rovy Branon to Serve as UPCEA President-Elect

WASHINGTON, March 29, 2019 – UPCEA, the Washington, D.C.-based association for university leaders in professional, continuing, and online education, welcomed Dr. Rovy Branon as the association’s 2019-20 President-Elect during the 2019 UPCEA Annual Conference. Branon is vice provost for the University of Washington Continuum College. As UPCEA President-Elect, Branon will lead the UPCEA Membership Committee…

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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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