“The Chief Online Learning Officers’ Guidebook is now available for order. As one of the (many) contributors that Jocelyn Widmer and Thomas Cavanagh brought together to participate in the book, I was especially excited to receive my copy in the mail. Reading through the book, I’ve found it fast-paced, informative and sometimes provocative. To help spread the word about the book, I asked if its authors, Jocelyn Widmer and Thomas Cavanagh, would answer my questions.
Q: Can you share the book’s origin story with us? Why did you write it and what was your process from idea to published manuscript?
A: The COLO Guidebook started as a series of conversations. As conferences started to transition back to face-to-face, Jocelyn began connecting with colleagues she had largely met online during the pandemic. She found herself asking sitting COLOs the same seven-ish questions. These conversations were intended to inform her efforts to continue building a unit dedicated to academic innovation.
We connected during the pandemic over shared responsibilities around supporting student populations at scale and were able to sit down in person during the summer of 2022. From there, Tom hosted Jocelyn on his popular TOPcast podcast, where more insights were shared around the many conversations with COLOs that Jocelyn had been able to accumulate. Fast forward a few months and Tom was co-chairing UPCEA’s C-COLO group. He invited Jocelyn to present her findings from the conversations she had had with COLOs over the past year, which eventually became the foundation for the chapters in The COLO Guidebook. With Tom’s encouragement, we had ensuing conversations about turning those insights into a book.
We began to organize the content not only around the insights gleaned from the conversations Jocelyn had had, but also added another layer to focus these insights on the eight competencies that UPCEA had developed for professional and continuing online leadership. From here, the chapters really started to organize themselves into an introductory section, where we define the COLO role and trace its origins through a comparison to the evolution of the CIO role. Section two is the real substance of the book in terms of the strategic dimensions of the COLO role, and section three positions the COLO role on a future-facing trajectory with an emphasis on building a pipeline and also sustaining the role as one lever in safeguarding higher education’s relevance.
With the outline of the book solidified, we wanted to ensure our experiences and insights were complemented by the leading voices in the COLO and COLO-adjacent space. Given our collective networks, we started filling in names with an eye toward diversity of institution type, career experience and ensuring we were assembling the luminaries in the field. Somewhat to our surprise, nearly every individual we approached about participating in the book said yes!
From here, it was really a numbers game. We were up against a word count limit, so we distributed three to four expert perspectives across each chapter. We wrote the spine of each chapter (plus or minus 2,000 words) and our expert contributors had free rein to pen their perspective related to the chapter topic they were assigned. The end result is a 13-chapter book in three sections with 54 expert perspectives woven throughout. You’ll see a large swath of these expert perspectives coming from COLOs at various stages of their careers, as well as perspectives from CIOs, leaders in ed tech, a handful of university presidents and representation from each of the major online professional organizations. These perspectives represent a moment in time amidst the decade of the COLO, as Bob Hansen, CEO of UPCEA, writes in his foreword.”