Putting AI into Action for Higher Education
UPCEA is the hands-on partner for leaders who need to translate AI from idea to implementation. We bring together practitioners, publish applied research on artificial intelligence in higher education, and deliver cohort-based learning so members can move from piloting AI tools to measurable results through strategic implementation. While postsecondary leaders gravitate to frameworks, innovators operationalize and pilot new initiatives, like AI.
This hub centralizes our primers, research briefs, training, and member spotlights on AI resources, with an emphasis on marketing and enrollment, learner support, credential innovation, and workforce alignment.
AI Primers & Insights
Short, actionable overviews to get your team aligned—plus starter resources from UPCEA.
Each topic includes a few UPCEA resources so your team can operationalize AI in your online and professional education departments. These AI resources for UPCEA members will grow over time as we add new guides, cases, and tools.
Implementing AI in our work - Enrollment, Student Success, Teaching
AI-Enabled Enrollment & Marketing
AI is rewriting discovery and conversion. Recent UPCEA research shows half of prospective students use AI-powered search weekly, so showing up in AI overviews (and the SEO that feeds them) determines visibility.
Student Success, Advising & Retention
AI is moving from content creation to tutoring and agentic systems, enabling responsive support and mastery-based progress—key for learner success.
Teaching & Learning Design
Generative and embodied AI are reshaping course design, assessment, and feedback loops across online and hybrid modalities.
Leading AI - Governance, Credentials, Institutional Strategy
Governance, Ethics & Operational Readiness
Responsible AI demands policy alignment, cross-functional coordination, and cultural readiness across marketing, enrollment, IT, data privacy, and academic units.
Credential Innovation, Program Design & Workforce Alignment
AI is accelerating employer demand, microcredentials, and stackable pathways—and reshaping learning mobility.
Institutional Strategy & Future-Proofing
AI influences revenue models, online enterprise strategy, and institutional resilience; leaders need a forward-looking view.
- UPCEA Senior Fellow Ray Schroeder's EduAI Advisor GPT
- New book: AI Applications in Online Higher Administration: Strategies for Maximizing Returns and Improving Outcomes
- Focus on the Future
What's Next + Engage More
Online: Trending Now
Insights on AI and the future of higher education from UPCEA Senior Fellow, Ray Schroeder.
What Deans and Department Chairs Must Do Before Fall
The spring semester is coming to a close with the normal host of routines. Yet, beneath those routines, something is unfolding in the labor market that will greet your new graduates who will face an incrementally tighter job market. I asked Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended Thinking to research the tasks relevant to preparing our new…
What to Teach Now?
Technologists, economists, and visionaries are warning us that in the next three to 18 months, we are going to experience rapid and pervasive disruption of our professional lives, workplace models, and distribution of income. Professional positions requiring college degrees will be lost, remade into highly-productive, cost-efficient, hybrid human-AI models where human contributions and compensation will…
What Three Leading Models of AI Say Are the Most Vulnerable Jobs in Higher Ed
I asked Gemini 3 Thinking, ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking, and Sonnet 4.6 Extended to tell me what jobs in higher education are most vulnerable to replacement by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next five years. I also asked for recommendations for current and prospective employees in the field. First, let me share with you links to…