Data-Informed Decisions: Why You Need Data and What Data You Should Curate
In celebration of National Distance Learning Week, UPCEA is highlighting key resources each day that showcase how online and professional education leaders continue to drive innovation, resilience, and transformation.
Data is the language of modern leadership. In an era of constrained resources and heightened accountability, online and professional education leaders can no longer rely on intuition alone. Data-informed decision-making, the ability to interpret, analyze, and act on the right information, is what separates thriving online enterprises from those that merely survive.
Benchmarking Online Enterprises: A Deep Dive into Strategy, Structure, and Scale
UPCEA’s recent study, Benchmarking Online Enterprises: Insights into Structures, Strategies, and Financial Models in Higher Education 2025 (BOnES), provides a comprehensive look into how colleges and universities organize and manage their online units. Drawing from hundreds of institutions, the research explores the organizational models, staffing structures, budget allocations, and strategic priorities that underpin today’s most effective online enterprises.
The full 2025 report reveals how institutional maturity, scale, and strategic alignment influence performance. It highlights trends in leadership structures, reporting lines, investment priorities, and the evolving relationship between central online units and academic departments. These findings give leaders a rare opportunity to measure their own operations against national norms, and to identify actionable areas for improvement.For a deeper discussion of the findings, watch the October 2025 BOnES Webinar, where UPCEA researchers and campus leaders unpack the results and share practical insights for data-informed decision-making.
The 2025 findings build on the strong foundation of the 2024 Benchmarking Online Enterprises Report, which established baseline insights into the operational and strategic characteristics of online learning divisions. That report underscored a critical takeaway: data must drive design. Institutions that intentionally use benchmarking data to guide resource allocation, leadership structure, and academic programming tend to achieve greater scalability, agility, and long-term impact.You can revisit those earlier findings, and hear from leaders who applied them in real time, in the 2024 BOnES Webinar. Together, the 2024 and 2025 studies illustrate a clear trajectory of how data is redefining institutional success in online and professional education.
The Power of Curated Data: Turning Insight into Action
With so much information available, the challenge for online leaders is no longer access to data, it’s curation. The most effective COLOs and online enterprise leaders identify which metrics truly matter: learner outcomes, enrollment efficiency, program profitability, faculty engagement, and student satisfaction, among others. By integrating benchmarking data with institutional analytics, leaders can make evidence-based decisions that advance mission, efficiency, and innovation simultaneously.
UPCEA’s growing portfolio of benchmarking studies provides the foundation for that work, but partnerships are what bring those insights to life.
UPCEA + IDEBP: Advancing Data-Informed Strategy Through Collaboration
To strengthen the field’s access to actionable data, UPCEA has joined forces with the International Distance Education Benchmark Project (IDEBP), an initiative led by Dr. Kevin N. Shriner. IDEBP is a national benchmarking initiative designed to help higher education institutions enhance their distance education strategies through comprehensive analytics and comparative insights.
Through this collaboration, UPCEA and IDEBP are working to advance data-informed strategies and research in online and professional, continuing education. IDEBP combines publicly available data with confidential, institution-submitted information to produce interactive dashboards and key performance metrics that institutions can use to inform planning, accreditation, and program development.
Participating institutions gain access to confidential peer benchmarking, comparing enrollment, retention, and completion rates against anonymized peer groups, as well as enhanced analytics beyond national datasets like IPEDS. This initiative will help COLOs and institutional leaders better understand their performance, identify trends, and implement changes that lead to measurable impact.
As the exclusive partner in this effort, UPCEA is proud to support IDEBP in advancing our shared commitment to empowering members through data, leadership, and community—positioning both organizations as trusted sources for data-informed decision-making in online and professional education.
Stay tuned throughout National Distance Learning Week as UPCEA continues to highlight resources that help online and professional education leaders thrive through innovation, strategy, and informed decision-making.
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