From the CEO

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 here.

 

I vividly recall hearing about a new addition to the president’s cabinet at my last institution. During a meeting of the academic council our provost announced that a faculty member with a strong affinity for technology was slated to become the institution’s first chief information officer. I was a bit surprised by this bold elevation of the role to a C-suite position, but in retrospect I shouldn’t have been. This was in the early 2000s, when the frenzied pace of technology had changed…well…everything. Institutions needed a CIO, both to signal the importance of the work of building the infrastructure of a modern university and to bring organizational coherence to this brave new world.

I also remember wondering (not out loud, but in time I would find my voice) why my division’s mission of serving adult and nontraditional learners was not similarly elevated to a major institutional priority. After all, the median age at many tuition-dependent institutions like mine was in the mid-twenties. A strong case could have been made that serving this population successfully should have been paramount. Yet that mission was typically an afterthought for a legacy culture almost entirely organized around serving a shrinking number of residential students. If the future of the institution depended on effectively serving nontraditional learners, what role could be more important than accommodating their complicated lives?

I thought the answer to that question should be self-evident. But it took a long time for most institutions to recognize this strategic imperative, and longer still to elevate online leaders to the level required to drive transformative change. Some have still not done so, but they are now the outliers.

Indeed, we are now witnessing a parallel development to the rise of CIOs, as more and more institutions have created chief online learning officers (COLOs). They often have titles like vice provost for online and graduate education, dean of the school for professional studies, executive director of academic innovation, or chancellor of the global campus. This is their time, their decade, just as it was for CIOs a generation ago.

A reflection on how we got here helps us to understand the special DNA of today’s COLOs. Apart from a few notable but lonely pioneers in the 1990s, the evolution of today’s COLO occurred in three distinct phases that more or less correspond to the three decades of the 2000s.

The first major cohort of online leaders came in the first decade of the new century. Few would have thought of them as chief online learning officers in the sense that we know them today. Like me, they were mostly leaders of professional continuing education looking for new and better ways to reach their core audience—adult and nontraditional learners who were unable to make it to campus for degree completion or professional master’s programs.

While those newer to online learning may not recognize the family resemblance to professional continuing education, both career orientations should be situated historically within what I call “the great tradition of expanding access to higher education.” Their common genes can be traced back more than a century to the novel idea that the benefits of the university should extend beyond the walls of campus to serve the needs of the state and nation. It was this revolutionary vision, often called The Wisconsin Idea, that fueled the founding of UPCEA in 1915. As Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin and host of the first UPCEA conference, wrote: “This then is the purpose of University Extension–to carry light and opportunity to every human being in all parts of the nation; this is the only adequate ideal of service for the university.”

The skillset required for building online learning units was a natural fit for those working in professional continuing education. These leaders collaborated with faculty and other academic deans to bring these programs online, and with IT on enterprise solutions. They developed online student services, marketing and enrollment management strategies tailored for the adult market, and new business models that were intentionally different from the rest of the institution.

In other words, they brought the same entrepreneurial mindset to the complicated business of online learning that had long defined their mission of expanding access to higher education. In fact, a common critique of online learning was that it was a misguided attempt to generate revenue and therefore suspect when compared to the core of the institution. The reality is that online was, and remains so today, primarily a means of stabilizing overall enrollments by expanding access for underserved learners.

The next major phase of online leadership took place last decade, from roughly the end of the Great Recession in 2010 to the onset of the pandemic in 2020. This is when the elevation of online learning to a major institutional priority often led to new organizational structures designed to facilitate growth and acceptance from faculty.

While many online operations remained under schools or divisions managed by senior leaders of professional and continuing education, many others were repositioned as separate, standalone online units. Still others moved to decentralized models, in which each college or school had its own online learning staff. Apart from some variations of this last model, the common denominator was the elevation of senior leaders to champion academic innovation.

The third and most dramatic phase of development began this decade, when exposure to emergency remote instruction during the pandemic evolved into a standard expectation for learners of all kinds. This introduced a new dynamic that would forever alter the landscape of higher education. All faculty and students experienced online education for an extended period of time, and it was impossible to un-ring that bell.

This current “decade of the COLO” could not have come at a better time for higher education. We face strong headwinds: the enrollment cliff, declining financial assistance from the states, and the devaluation of a college degree in public surveys. Now the question is not whether online learning should be a major institutional priority, but how best to fulfill its potential for strategic transformation.

This expansive vision of online learning and leadership is what excited me most about my role at UPCEA. I wanted to help elevate positions like mine to where I thought they belonged: vital partners in shaping the future of their institutions. During this inflection point for higher education and its evolving place within our society, I believe an effective chief online learning officer has more potential to transform an institution than any position apart from the president.

However unorthodox this viewpoint may appear to the academic establishment, the ability to attract and retain non-residential students is the single most important differentiator between success and failure among tuition-dependent institutions. If they are not able to attract online learners, they are likely to preside over a declining number of learners with the interest and wherewithal to become full-time residential students. Even elite private and flagship public institutions, which are far less tuition-dependent, have recognized two inescapable truths: academic innovation is essential to remain competitive, and most innovation is likely to be digital.

I’m honored to have been asked to write this Foreword to The Chief Online Learning Officers’ Guidebook. The contributors to this volume include many of the greatest architects of the modern online learning enterprise. I leave you now in their very capable hands.

 

Robert Hansen, Ph.D.

CEO, UPCEA

 

The Chief Online Learning Officers’ Guidebook: A Framework for Strategy and Practice in Higher Education is available now in paperback, hardback, and eBook formats from Routledge. Learn more and purchase here.