UPCEA AI Hub: Applying Artificial Intelligence Tools for Online and Professional Continuing Education

Arizona Online faced a common challenge among institutions serving adult and online learners: the need for highly personalized student support at a scale that exceeded existing staff capacity. Student success coaches were responsible for large caseloads, approximately 1,200 students per coach, and often needed to manually gather information from disconnected systems, including the student information system (SIS), learning management system (LMS), and customer relationship management platform (CRM).

The team wanted to intervene earlier with students showing signs of academic or engagement risk, such as missed logins or academic difficulty. However, fragmented systems and manual workflows limited the team’s ability to prioritize outreach efficiently and provide timely, individualized communication.

The Universities of Wisconsin Office of Online and Professional Learning Resources developed an AI category within its public online teaching showcase to help faculty see how AI can be used in authentic, meaningful ways in online courses. Rather than presenting AI as a standalone innovation, the showcase offers concrete assignment examples that faculty and instructional teams can adapt within existing courses.

As generative AI became more visible in higher ed, many faculty members experienced anxiety about its impact on teaching, learning, and academic integrity. Some instructors viewed AI primarily as a cheating tool or as a threat to online learning quality. UW saw an opportunity to help faculty move from fear and uncertainty toward practical experimentation by showing real examples of AI-enabled assignments that support deeper learning.

Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), located in New Haven, Connecticut, is a public institution within the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system. Through its Office of Workforce and Lifelong Learning (OWLL), the university has expanded its portfolio of employer-aligned, noncredit programming intended to address regional workforce needs. Under the leadership of Amy Feest, OWLL has prioritized flexible curriculum development, industry responsiveness, and workforce partnerships.

The WorkPlace (a nonprofit workforce intermediary that provides career navigation, employer engagement, and intensive case management services for adult learners and job seekers) partnered with SCSU to implement the Tech Ready Career Training Program. The collaboration was intended to create accelerated pathways into technology careers for populations facing barriers to employment, including disconnected youth, formerly incarcerated individuals, and long-term unemployed adults.

Bay Path University piloted an AI-powered learning environment that embeds a Socratic AI tutor directly into the student experience. The model is designed to move beyond static content delivery by using AI to support personalized learning, faculty insight, and authentic assessment in online courses.

Bay Path sought to address a common challenge in scaling online education: how to serve more students without creating a “cookie-cutter” learning experience. As online programs grow and student to-faculty ratios increase, faculty need better ways to understand where students are struggling, what they are curious about, and when they need support. Bay Path also saw an opportunity to help faculty design and develop AI-native course experiences faster and more efficiently, while preserving the human mentorship that is central to effective teaching.

The Universities of Wisconsin developed the AI Skills Access Passport, or ASAP, as a free seven-part video series designed to build practical AI literacy for a broad public audience. The series introduces AI concepts, use cases, and safety considerations through short, accessible videos that focus on helping viewers understand, use, and protect themselves around AI.

UWs saw an opportunity to help the public make sense of AI at a time when many people were encountering new tools, media stories, workplace expectations, and safety concerns without a shared foundation for understanding them. The goal was to create a resource that would be short, engaging, and useful for viewers with varying levels of comfort with technology. Rather than producing an academic training program or a tool-specific tutorial, UWs aimed to create an approachable AI literacy resource for adults who may have heard about AI but were unsure how it works, how to use it, or how to evaluate its risks.