The Pulse of Higher Ed

COLO Compass: Evidence and practical direction for chief online learning officers.

By Julie Uranis, Ph.D.

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 the Hallmarks, explained in our first Hallmarks webinar this summer, the largest change to Hallmark 1 was a shift from advocating for online learning to leading the institution through digital transformation.

COLO titles have become more senior, and online units increasingly report through the provost’s office. What remains less clear is whether that organizational recognition has been accompanied by the authority to make decisions about the resources, policies, and institutional priorities for which online leaders are held accountable. 

The role has risen

For over a decade, the CHLOE project has collected COLO titles in every survey, totaling more than 3,200 responses. Comparing the first five surveys, through spring 2020, with the five since, the share of COLOs with a director title fell from 34% to 25%, while the share with a Vice President/Provost title rose from 8% to 15%. In the 2024 COLO Profiles & Competencies study, which CHLOE 10 summarizes, more than two-thirds of COLOs report to the provost or another senior academic leader, and only 2% report to the CIO. About half sit on the provost’s cabinet, and one in five sits on the president’s.

UPCEA’s Benchmarking Online Enterprises (BOnES) research, which I coauthor, shows the same movement at the unit level. The share of online enterprises housed in the provost’s office has risen in each year of the survey: 41% in 2024, 51% in 2025, and 57% in 2026. Most enterprises (84%) remain academically decentralized, a figure that hasn’t moved in three years. The common model is now administratively centralized and academically decentralized: the online unit reports to the provost while courses and programs come from individual colleges and departments. The scope has grown with it. Online enterprises now commonly handle instructional design (87%), accessibility (72%), faculty development (72%), marketing (70%), and recruitment (70%). This year’s report concludes that the COLO role has become one of enterprise leadership rather than operational management.

Authority hasn’t kept pace

Eighty percent of COLOs responding to the 2026 BOnES survey say institutional leadership has named online learning a strategic direction. Yet strategic direction and governance was the barrier to success cited most often, slightly ahead of funding (21% as compared to 19%). Online education fees are a particularly good example. Just over half of responding institutions (51%) assess an online or distance education fee, but decisions about those fees most often rest with central administration (50%) or system administration (27%), rather than the online enterprise itself. Bruce Etter (2026) summarized the pattern in the title of his analysis of the report: the corner office comes with a view, not a vote. In many institutions, online leaders are accountable for financial performance without controlling some of the decisions that determine it. Fifty-five percent of responding COLOs agree that academic integrity and AI concerns are raised about online learning before other modalities, despite these being institution-wide concerns rather than risks unique to online education.

Chris Foley of Indiana University Online described the accountability side in our August webinar. Online units, he said, are often held to standards of transparency that few other units face. For example, when online units report the cost of acquiring a student, there’s rarely a comparable and all inclusive figure (e.g., including direct and indirect marketing and publicity, recruitment activities and staffing, leveraging scholarships and other financial incentives) for on-campus programs. As a result the online statistic gets judged in isolation. So, an acquisition cost of $1,000 per online student is simply something to be reduced, but it’s rarely compared to the investment in an on-campus student, whose holistic cost of acquisition could actually be higher.

Hallmark 1 calls on institutions to establish the COLO as a recognized senior leader with clearly defined responsibilities and authority for digital learning strategy, quality, compliance, and cross-institutional coordination. BOnES reaches a similar conclusion: declaring online learning a strategic priority matters little if institutions do not align authority and resources with that commitment. 

Leading as the integrator

Vickie Cook described the paradox this creates. The more fully online learning is woven into the institution, the less of it the COLO directly controls. Marketing, enrollment, financial aid, IT, academic departments, and student affairs may each do their own work well, and the learner can still run into friction between them. In her view, the question that matters now is who makes sure the pieces work together. Hallmark 1 gives that job a name: among the areas where it asks COLOs to hold formal authority is cross-institutional coordination. COLOs do not need to supervise every function involved in online education. They do need the authority to bring those functions together when decisions affect the learner experience.

Until that mandate is in place, much of the work runs on persuasion. Vickie recalled being told once that online leaders lead through influence alone. Chris said nearly everything he does depends on persuasion, through data or through personal connection. He also described how Indiana’s review of low-completion degree programs brought his online unit into conversations about academic strategy. Although Indiana University Online functions as a service organization rather than an academic unit, campus leaders increasingly sought its help in developing responses to the new requirements. 

Several Hallmarks authors described finding ways to bring the right people into decisions that previously lacked a clear institutional owner. Yakut Gazi of the University of Calgary said the Hallmarks help COLOs claim seats at tables where they belong, and discover tables they didn’t know existed. Rae Mancilla of the University of Pittsburgh described what happens when no table exists. Her institution needed an enterprise captioning solution ahead of the original April 2026 ADA Title II deadline, since extended to 2027, and no group was responsible for it, so her team convened one with enterprise technology, disability resources, and other offices. Melissa Vito of UT San Antonio makes a habit of doing online work in ways that lift the whole institution. When her team built faster response times for online applicants, every applicant benefited.

These examples have something in common, even though the institutions are organized differently: someone recognized a problem that crossed departmental boundaries and brought the relevant people together. At Mississippi State, Susan Seal described merging the instructional support in the teaching center and in distance education into a single center that serves faculty in whatever modality they teach. BOnES found the same pattern across institutions: successful enterprises in centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models alike. As the report puts it, organizational charts may describe how institutions are organized, but alignment determines how effectively they operate.

Sustaining the people who lead

The CHLOE project has collected COLO titles in every survey, more than 3,200 responses over a decade. Comparing the first five surveys, through spring 2020, with the five since, the share of COLOs with a director title fell from 34% to 25%, and the share with a Vice President/Provost title rose from 8% to 15%. 

The 2024 COLO Profiles & Competencies study, whose findings are also summarized in CHLOE 10, raises a related succession question. The COLO Profiles study also raises a succession question. Fourteen percent of respondents identified retirement as their anticipated next step, and another 4% envisioned moving to a different institution. The survey didn’t establish when those transitions might occur, and the CHLOE 10 summary notes that this rate compares favorably with turnover in other senior leadership roles. Still, the authors urge institutions to plan for retention, development, and succession. Almost 60% of COLOs were promoted from within, so developing leaders internally is part of the answer.  Hallmark 1 also calls for succession planning, cross-training, and documented workflows so that compliance and institutional knowledge don’t rest with one person. Hallmark 7 asks institutions not to expand responsibilities without matching support, role clarity, and resources.

The webinars also surfaced aspects of COLO leadership that deserve more attention, particularly the human demands of leading institutional change. Yakut argued that effective change management depends on emotional intelligence, and she made a case for compassionate leadership toward learners, faculty, and the community. John McKenzie of UNT Health Fort Worth encouraged COLOs to include work in their portfolios that restores them, such as small community partnerships tied to their own sense of mission. He described a partnership with one local non-profit organization that results in training single mothers in career transition to become pharmacy technicians. Anthony Piña of Illinois State pointed out that COLOs, who often have no counterpart on their own campus, don’t have to solve every problem alone. Professional associations let them learn from what other institutions have already tried.

A mirror and a map

The 2026 BOnES report describes benchmarking and the Hallmarks as a mirror and a map. BOnES shows institutions how their current practices compare with their peers’, and the Hallmarks provide a framework for deciding what to strengthen.  

These findings suggest two practical questions for COLOs to raise with their institutional leadership. The first comes from Vickie Cook: where does the online learner experience depend on several parts of the institution working together, without anyone clearly responsible for coordinating them? The second comes from BOnES: if online learning is a strategic priority, how are the budget, decision-making authority, and reporting relationships structured to support it?

Recordings of all four Hallmarks webinars, featuring the authors quoted above, are available to UPCEA members in CORe. The Hallmarks are available to download at no cost.

References

Cook, V. (2026). The COLO as institutional integrator: When online learning is everyone’s business, who leads it? UPCEA.
https://upcea.edu/the-colo-as-institutional-integrator-when-online-learning-is-everyones-business-who-leads-it/

Etter, B. (2026, August 24). The corner office comes with a view, not a vote: What the 2026 BOnES report reveals about online enterprises’ seat at the table. UPCEA. https://upcea.edu/the-corner-office-comes-with-a-view-not-a-vote-what-the-2026-bones-report-reveals-about-online-enterprises-seat-at-the-table/

Fredericksen, E. E., Simunich, B., & Uranis, J. (2025). COLO profiles & competencies 2024: A national research project about chief online learning officers. Online Learning, 29(3), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v29i3.5017

Mancilla, R., Silberman, E., Austin, M., Rutigliano, K., McClelland, S., Miller, D., Dawson, R., Kokkala, I., Suzadail, P., & Parscal, T. (2026). Professionalism, ethics, and stewardship. In J. Uranis & V. Cook (Eds.), Hallmarks of excellence in digital learning enterprises (pp. 88–96). UPCEA. https://upcea.edu/hallmarks-digital

McKenzie, J., Kopp Miller, B., Palsole, S., McCarty, M., Hogue, L., Brafford, C., Shriner, K., Gazi, Y., Westrick, N., Piña, A., Woods, J., Mumphrey, K., & Widmer, J. (2026). External advocacy and leadership beyond the institution. In J. Uranis & V. Cook (Eds.), Hallmarks of excellence in digital learning enterprises (pp. 78–87). UPCEA. https://upcea.edu/hallmarks-digital

Simunich, B., Garrett, R., Fredericksen, E. E., & Gay, K. (2025). CHLOE 10: Meeting the moment: Navigating growth, competition, and AI in online higher education, 2025. Quality Matters, Eduventures Research, & EDUCAUSE. https://qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/resource-center/articles-resources/CHLOE-10-report-2025

United States Distance Learning Association. (2026). National Distance Learning Week. https://usdla.org/events/ndlw/

Uranis, J., & Cook, V. (Eds.). (2026). Hallmarks of excellence in digital learning enterprises. UPCEA. https://upcea.edu/hallmarks-digital

Uranis, J., Etter, B., & Sullberg, D. (2026). Benchmarking online enterprises: Insights into structures, strategies, and financial models in higher education. UPCEA.
https://upcea.edu/2026-benchmarking-online-enterprises-survey/

Uranis, J., Ives, K., Etter, B., & Sullberg, D. (2024). Benchmarking online enterprises: Insights into structures, strategies, and financial models in higher education. UPCEA.
https://upcea.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Benchmarking-Online-Enterprises_November-2024_UPCEA.pdf

Uranis, J., Ives, K., Etter, B., & Sullberg, D. (2025). Benchmarking online enterprises: Insights into structures, strategies, and financial models in higher education. UPCEA.
https://upcea.edu/2025-benchmarking-online-enterprises-study/

Virasak, M., LaTorre, D., Frasciello, M., Horn, D., Colby, W., Foley, C., Bouchey, B., White, D., & Haines, A. (2026). Internal advocacy and leadership within the institution. In J. Uranis & V. Cook (Eds.), Hallmarks of excellence in digital learning enterprises (pp. 8–20). UPCEA. https://upcea.edu/hallmarks-digital

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