Online and Professional Continuing Education News


See below for a listing of curated news articles of the day brought to you by Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA. 

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  • Google seeks partnerships lead to drive AI in higher education - Edtech Innovation Hub
    Role aims to advance adoption. Google is recruiting a senior partnerships manager to help shape its artificial intelligence work across higher education, according to a recent LinkedIn post by Alisa Sommer O’Hara, who leads Global EdTech Business Partnerships and Developer Relations at the company. The new Strategic Partner Development Principal Lead will focus on building […]
  • Penn State Smeal launches comprehensive artificial intelligence initiative - Smeal College of Business
    The Penn State Smeal College of Business has announced a comprehensive, college-wide artificial intelligence (AI) initiative. Smeal is integrating AI across its teaching, research and operations — ensuring students, faculty and staff are equipped to lead responsibly in an AI-driven economy. “AI isn’t a future possibility — it’s here, now,” said Corey Phelps, John and […]
  • The rise of micro-credentials in continuing education - BC Business
    Learn or be left behind. This is the imperative that’s driving many mid-career (and, increasingly, earlycareer) professionals to gain a competitive advantage in today’s tough employment market through upskilling. “Today, artificial intelligence is not a futuristic concept but a mainstream reality reshaping industries and professions,” says Jo-Anne Clarke, dean of Division of Continuing Studies at […]
  • Scaling the 21st-century leadership factory - Bob Sternfels, Daniel Pacthod, and David H. Berger; McKinsey
    In the wake of extreme uncertainty, CEOs should take a step back and reflect on the leadership traits and capabilities that will define their own and others’ success in the future and embed these traits and capabilities into their organizations. Our previous research on the art of 21st-century leadership, as well as our more recent […]
  • Kelsey Robinson: Reshaping the Marketing Landscape - McKinley Quarterly
    Across C-suites, there is growing interest in working hand in hand on everything from ROI and performance measurement to making space for bold ideas that drive growth. There is a lot of interest in the duality of rigor and inspiration. Another topic that’s dominating marketing conversations is agentic AI, autonomous AI systems that work independently […]
  • UPenn Expands Educator AI Training Program With Google - Government Technology
    A $1 million grant from Google will help scale a one-district pilot program on teaching with artificial intelligence, offered through the University of Pennsylvania, up to five districts and regions. A University of Pennsylvania program training K-12 teachers and administrators on artificial intelligence best practices is scaling up, thanks to a $1 million investment from […]
  • Use GenAI to slow down and reflect more deeply - Sam Illingworth, Times Higher Education
    GenAI is often presented to academics as a tool for acceleration. Marking can be automated, lecture slides summarised in seconds and drafts polished at speed. The message is clear: do the same work, only faster. Yet, this framing risks reinforcing an already unsustainable level of efficiency. What if, instead of speeding up, GenAI could help […]
  • Opinion: Higher education needs to catch up with AI, not run from it - Teresa Butzerin, Willamette Collegian
    Given that AI will only become more prevalent in our lives, universities should be taking more formal steps to make sure graduating students are literate in the practical uses of AI and leave college with a well-rounded understanding of the ethical issues surrounding it. While the threat AI poses to academic integrity has caused it […]
  • Teaching with AI: From Prohibition to Partnership for Critical Thinking - Michael Kiener, Faculty Focus
    However, banning AI will not prevent students from using it, whether for nefarious or appropriate purposes. Instead, it may deny students a chance to practice and engage with AI in an educational setting where they and faculty can explore its full potential collaboratively. This kind of restrictive thinking is based on two flawed assumptions: that […]
  • Transitioning to the Agentic University 2026–27 - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
    Most of us in higher education are now familiar with generative AI bots, where you formulate a prompt and get a reply. Yet, we are now beginning the advancement to agentic AI, the autonomous 24-7 project manager. The dramatic enhancement in the capability of AI as it moves from bots to agents will bring about […]
  • Agents for growth: Turning AI promise into impact - Kelly, Lisa Harkness, and Steve Reis - McKinsey
    As CEOs and CMOs ask where AI is moving from hype to real results, frontrunners demonstrate that tighter human–AI collaboration and sharper governance is required. Value comes from end-to-end change. Broad productivity wins are table stakes. Impact comes from prioritizing the biggest growth problems and then solving them end to end in a domain. Reimagine […]
  • Student Mental Health Challenges Persist - Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed
    Students’ mental health and overall well-being continue to lag, finds Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice survey, even as campuses expand support services. Just 27 percent of undergraduates describe their mental health as above average or excellent, according to new data from Inside Higher Ed’s main annual Student Voice survey of more than 5,000 undergraduates at […]
  • Can creativity still exist in a world of Artificial Intelligence? - Bailee McLeod, Avondale
    Our relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ever evolving. The continual advancement of the technology means our interactions with it can change, almost daily. What started as asking Siri to ‘call mum’ evolved to asking Google to ‘turn down the air conditioning’, to now asking Chat to make an itinerary of our three-week Euro vacation, […]
  • Redefining Learning: How Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Education - digitalLEARNING Network
    We are living through one of the most profound transformations in the history of education. The industrial model of learning is being replaced by a new paradigm that values experience, adaptability, and creativity. For decades, education has been structured around the transfer of information; now, we are moving toward the cultivation of intelligence itself — […]
  • Explainable artificial intelligence for predictive modeling of student stress in higher education - Rasikh Tariq, et al; Nature
    Student stress in higher education remains a pervasive problem, yet many institutions lack affordable, scalable, and interpretable tools for its detection and management. The objective of this research is to develop a cost-effective, survey-based stress classification model using multiple machine learning algorithms and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to support transparent and actionable decision-making in educational […]
  • Opinion: Ray Kurzweil’s Predictions — AI Today and Tomorrow - Jim A. Jorstad, GovTech
    To prepare students for a world so saturated with technology, it has arguably never been more important to speculate on the possibilities of our future, and how we can prepare for it. In business, science and education, we are now continually searching for clues about the future of artificial intelligence. In October 2006, I had […]
  • Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities - Rachele Dini, LA Review of Books
    The Guardian published “A Machine-Shaped Hand” on March 12, a day after Altman first shared it on X. A callout link at the top of the page directed readers to Jeanette Winterson’s response, “OpenAI’s Metafictional Short Story About Grief Is Beautiful and Moving”—a not-so-subtly titled piece that, while making an unconvincing case for the story’s […]
  • EDUCAUSE ’25: 3 Questions to Guide Higher Ed AI Strategy - GovTech
    Many colleges and universities see the need for an institutional AI strategy, but there are so many variables involved that it can be hard for IT leaders to know where to begin. Addressing an audience of such leaders at the 2025 EDUCAUSE annual conference in Nashville this week, Managing Director Alexander Brown of technology consulting […]
  • President Aoun outlines roadmap for higher ed in the age of AI - Cyrus Moulton, Northeastern
    Artificial intelligence can do your research and write your term paper. It cannot, however, interpret your professor’s expression when you hand that paper in. Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun said higher education’s role is to teach how to navigate such a situation. “The value of higher education is to raise those questions about the […]
  • How Strategy Champions win - McKinsey
    Only one in five companies believe they have high-quality strategy. What do such Strategy Champions have in common? They excel at designing bold strategies—and are even better at mobilizing their execution. Crafting a strategy—the process of making coherent, hard-to-reverse choices under uncertainty with the aim of building long-term value—has always been demanding. In 2010, only […]

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Vaccinate Against Cheating With Authentic Assessment

Vaccinate Against Cheating With Authentic Assessment

University faculty members are discovering that students are using the internet to cheat on exams. Online sites sell test questions, answer keys, term papers and other assessments to students. There is a cure for this. It’s not news that students cheat to pass classes, though…

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UPCEA Welcomes Nine New Board Members

UPCEA Welcomes Nine New Board Members

WASHINGTON, February 22, 2021 – UPCEA, the Washington, D.C.-based association for college and university leaders in professional, continuing, and online education, is pleased to announce the election of two new officers and seven new directors to serve on the UPCEA Board of Directors. Elected earlier…

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Time for Reinvention, Not Just Replication or Revision

Time for Reinvention, Not Just Replication or Revision

With enrollments falling, college budgets under strain and employers dissatisfied with the relevance of graduates’ learning, now is a time for more than replication or revision — it is time for reinvention. We are at the confluence of massive economic, technologic and social changes that demand…

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