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…
COLO Compass: Evidence and practical direction for chief online learning officers. National Distance Learning Week runs November 2 through 6, and one of USDLA’s themes this year is the “Sustainable Future of Distance Education.” For those responsible for online enterprises, sustainability means having the financial resources, operational capacity, and institutional support to continue serving learners. …
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…
UPCEA Supports Passage of FUTURE Act
UPCEA, along with ACE and other undersigned organizations representing Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), and the higher education community at large, we wrote to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the House and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority…
Deconstructing the Economic Factors Affecting Professional Learning
By SmartBrief Editors This post is produced in partnership with UPCEA. The desire to advance in a career field or life in general is not enough for individuals who are ready to learn more and better their circumstances. Disparity exists when it comes to post-secondary education, including traditional college, certification programs and other forms of…
Special announcement: UPCEA Membership Roster Changes
As chair of the UPCEA Membership committee, I am pleased to share some exciting news. If you are like my team at the University of Washington, you have more people who could benefit from your institution’s UPCEA membership than you have roster slots. For us, that has meant a constant rotation of staff through a…
Policy Matters | Increasing Partisan Divide in Views on Education (August 2019)
Welcome to the third installment in our monthly public policy primer, Policy Matters. Each issue has the latest updates and actionable items in public policy for adult and nontraditional education stakeholders. We’ve set up a form if you’re interested in learning more, and for continued updates from Policy Matters. Please note that you must sign up with this…
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…