A New Policy Era for Higher Ed: How Recent Federal Laws and Regulations Affect Institutions
Federal higher education policy is entering a new era of stricter scrutiny following enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), and recent regulatory changes. For online and adult-focused education leaders, the implications extend beyond compliance into budgets, program design, and enterprise strategy. This session provides a comprehensive federal policy update including emerging frameworks related to Workforce Pell, evolving accountability and earnings-based metrics, and changes to federal funding and financial aid eligibility. Presenters will address what to watch next: timelines, unresolved issues, and anticipated changes, so attendees can strategically weigh risks and opportunities for their portfolios and institutional standing.
Access Isn’t Enough: Designing Online Learning for Learners with Limited Digital Skills
Online learning can eliminate barriers of geography, scheduling, and transportation, but it can also create new barriers for learners with limited digital skills. Using van Dijk’s digital divide framework and findings from a statewide study of Oregon’s homecare workforce, this session explores how learners with varying levels of digital experience navigate asynchronous professional education. Participants will examine real-world barriers and supports and leave with research-informed strategies for designing, onboarding, supporting, and delivering asynchronous programs that are more accessible to digitally diverse learners.
Adding Value Beyond the Degree: VRE, CPL, Credentials and Experiential Learning
How can institutions connect workforce learning, credentials, and experiential opportunities to create meaningful pathways for adult learners? This session highlights how National University is aligning stackable credentials, credit for prior learning, apprenticeships, and internships, guided by labor market data, to improve access, clarify pathways, and support workforce mobility.
Are You Data Ready? A Working Session on Outcomes Data Readiness
Knowing that outcomes data matters is one thing; knowing whether your institution is ready to collect, use, and act on it is another. In this hands-on working session, through a facilitated data readiness self-assessment, you will have the chance to examine your institution's current practices, identify gaps, and map the questions your institution most needs to answer to the data required to answer them. CredLens and two partner institutions add perspectives on data readiness in practice, including the work, investment, and return involved. Participants leave with a personalized readiness snapshot and a ready-to-adapt framework.
Better Together: Building Collaborative Ecosystems for Workforce Engagement
Beyond the Badge: Emerging Models for Demonstrating Workforce Readiness
How can online learners move beyond encountering skills content to developing and demonstrating meaningful capabilities? Presenters from Southern New Hampshire University will share two emerging approaches: AI-supported, coach-guided skills experiences and co-curricular online challenges grounded in authentic problem solving. Participants will examine how coaching, technology, assessment, and experiential learning can work together across professional and degree-seeking learner populations. Through guided reflection and peer discussion, attendees will identify adaptable strategies for strengthening skill practice, learner support, and evidence of competency within their own online, continuing, or professional education initiatives.
Beyond the Course: Designing a Connected Online Learner Journey
Beyond the Discussion Board: Designing Authentic, Engaging Learning in the AI Era
Beyond the Fall Cohort: Aligning Enrollment and Success Metrics with Modern Learner Pathways
Traditional enrollment and success metrics often center on full-time, fall-entry students, obscuring the diverse pathways of today’s online learners. Using Oregon State University Ecampus as a case study, this session explores how more transparent and inclusive metrics, including unduplicated annual enrollment, broader cohort definitions, and pathway-informed success measures, can better reflect online student participation and outcomes. Participants will consider how institutional measurement shapes what leaders see, how reporting blind spots affect strategy and resource allocation, and how more meaningful metrics can support defensible decisions about online growth and student success.
Beyond the Program: Connecting Operations, Pathways, and Non-Credit to Drive Growth
How can online and professional education teams move beyond managing programs to actively identifying and advancing opportunities across an academic portfolio? This interactive session introduces a Portfolio Engagement Framework that helps teams use structured conversations with academic partners to uncover opportunities related to enrollment, curriculum, student success, workforce needs, industry partnerships, pathways, and non-credit education. Participants will work through a realistic program scenario, identify potential opportunities and institutional connections, and apply the framework to their own portfolio. Participants will leave with a practical tool their teams can use to structure strategic conversations, prioritize opportunities, and establish coordinated next steps.
Budgets and Revenues and Fees, Oh, My! Insights on Financial Strategies and Frameworks to Grow Online
Today, online learning is more than an access mission. Online enrollment and tuition revenue are critical to your institution’s fiscal health. Join this panel discussion that will begin with a data share from the UPCEA 2026 Benchmarking Online Enterprises Survey (BOnES) related to budget and financial structures. Panelists will share institutional perspectives around their financial successes and challenges, including budget models, budget allocations, reserves and fee strategies.
Moderator: Bruce Etter, UPCEA
Build and Scale an Online Noncredit Open Enrollment Portfolio
Using in-house resources, strategic focus, and an iterative pilot-to-scale approach, the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing and Professional Studies built and grew a new portfolio of online noncredit professional development programs designed to meet workforce upskilling needs, moving from one course to more than 10 certificates over the span of 3 years. Learn how the team used design thinking principles to experiment, innovate, and expand the portfolio. Walk away with principles to inform your own path and a vision for building to scale when reality gives you a fog of uncertainty instead of an easy button.
Build, Borrow, or Partner? Rewiring Online Operations for Stop-Out Success
The nation’s 43 million stop-out learners represent a significant opportunity for enrollment growth, but traditional university workflows often aren’t designed to address the operational challenges returning learners face. This session brings together leaders from different size institutions to compare three approaches to serving this population: build, borrow, or partner. Attendees will explore the benefits and trade-offs of each model and leave with a practical benchmarking framework to assess their institution’s readiness, resources, and capacity to successfully reengage and support stop-out learners.
Building Capacity for Growth: Scaling Through Smarter Structures and Operations
Co-Authored Competency: The Art of True University-to-Business (U2B) Credential Design
Traditional degree pathways are increasingly challenged to keep pace with rapid technological disruptions. The Power of “And”™ (POA) addresses these demands by supplementing, rather than replacing, traditional degree programs with short-term micro-credentials. The core of FGCU's presentation focuses on developing strategies to meet regional economic development and state attainment goals. FGCU presents a paradigm shift in employer engagement, moving past passive advisory boards to active U2B partnership models. Presenters will share results from employer partnership case studies, FGCU’s internal quality review standards and course templates and how they successfully "braid" revenue through regional, Federal and private grants and sponsorships.
Consistency by Design: A Framework for Course Design Standards at Scale
Instructional design teams often span internal staff, contractors, and a wide range of technical skills, making consistency hard to maintain at scale. This session shares how a team at ASU's Learning Enterprise solved that with a practical, reusable framework for Articulate Rise 360 and Canvas LMS, including how to leverage AI to create editable Canvas HTML templates. Attendees explore real examples, including a consistency reference guide, a Rise block standards guide, and a pedagogy best-practices tool. Leave with a starter toolkit and a framework for shared design standards that hold up across your whole team, contractors included.
Moderator: Obiageli Sneed, Arizona State University
Creating an Accessible UTA: From Compliance to Culture Change
How does an institution move from accessibility compliance to a culture of inclusion? This session highlights UTA's accessibility journey, from foundational EIR policies and support services to current campus-wide efforts focused on digital accessibility, faculty training, content remediation, accessible course design, and the Digital Champions program. Presenters will share practical strategies, lessons learned, and recommendations for building sustainable accessibility initiatives that engage stakeholders across academic and administrative units. Attendees will leave with ideas they can adapt to strengthen accessibility efforts at their own institutions.
Creating Capacity, Preserving Connection: A Framework for AI in Online Education
AI can create capacity, but should everything that can be automated actually be automated? Join leaders from Marshall University and Penn State as they explore where AI should replace work, augment expertise, or leave human judgment essential. Drawing on Marshall’s HOME Quality Framework and Penn State’s AI Literacy Framework, presenters unpack real decisions across student engagement and learning design. Put the Automate/Augment/Protect decision framework to work on an AI use case from your institution and walk away with a practical tool to make intentional, human-centered decisions about the division of work between people and AI.
Cultivating Economic & Community Development: A High-Touch Student Success Model
Discover how UC Riverside Professional and Global Education (formerly UCR Extension) designed and launched the CalEDD-funded Farmworker Advancement Program to bring career-building education to underserved agricultural workers across California. This rapid-fire session highlights how professional and continuing education units can build high-impact workforce programs through community partnerships, tailored curriculum, and equitable, high-touch support systems. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on creating accessible educational pathways that empower vulnerable labor forces, foster regional economic mobility, and redefine the social impact of higher education.
Democratizing Durable Skills: An Open-Access Model for Credential Innovation
Durable skills like critical thinking, empathy, and collaboration are widely valued, but rigorous ways to teach and credential them are often expensive, putting quality credentialing out of reach for under-resourced institutions. In 2026, Education Design Lab and Axim Collaborative launched a partnership to migrate the Lab's full Durable Skills Framework to Open edX as free, openly licensed OER. This panel brings together the Lab, Axim, and an implementing institutional partner to share candid insight into building a shared, open-access credentialing model, from competency-based course design to the sustainability and governance work that determines how an open credential can actually scale.
Designing for a Lifetime: Strategy, Intergenerational Learning, and the Lifelong University
Designing for the Next Online Learner: What Must Change Now?
Online learners’ expectations for flexibility, support, technology, and connections to work are evolving quickly—but not always in the same ways across institutions or learner populations. Leaders from four distinct online education environments will compare what they are seeing, what they believe represents lasting change rather than passing trend, and how those signals are shaping decisions about learning design, delivery, and student experience. Through cross-sector perspectives and audience input, the session will identify areas of emerging consensus and offer practical questions institutions can use to assess whether their online learning models are ready for what comes next.
Moderator: Deb Postlewait, Macmillan Learning
Designing the Work Behind the Learning
What if we designed the systems behind digital learning as intentionally as we design learning itself? Using real examples and Smartsheet demonstrations, this session explores how connected workflows can transform scattered requests, manual processes, unclear handoffs, and limited visibility. Attendees will see practical approaches for connecting intake, project tracking, automation, communication, dashboards, and reporting while strengthening collaboration across digital learning teams. The focus is not on one tool, but on transferable design strategies that reduce administrative friction, make information more useful, and create greater capacity for innovation and meaningful learning experiences.
Doctorates on the Job: Leadership Lessons from the Doctoral Journey
Leaders in online and professional education spend their careers designing programs for working adults. Many of us become those students, earning doctorates while doing the job. The paths differ in many ways, but what we share is what the degree changed about how we lead. Being a tired student in someone else's course gave us empathy for our learners that no dashboard provides. Rejected drafts taught us to treat team failure as revision. Advisors showed us coaching. Participants leave with a fillable worksheet: their own map from student growth to workplace practice, plus a plan for staff in programs now.
Don’t Build a New Degree, Build a New Partnership: Adapting Graduate Programs to Meet Workforce Need
In 2023, Framingham State University created one of Massachusetts' largest employer-based pathways to Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) licensure, enrolling 346 working behavioral health professionals, graduating students at an 85.7% rate, and creating a model capable of producing more than 300 new clinicians by 2029. Using Framingham’s example, this presentation will assist participants in identifying opportunities to adapt existing programs to address emerging community needs through exploring partnerships. The presentation will take participants through the evaluation of operational and financial considerations to implement programs and provide them with a framework to adapt current degrees to match local or state workforce needs.
Doubling Down on Mission: Accelerated, Online Degrees for Adult Learners Inside a Liberal Arts University
A 30-year-old accelerated adult-degree program had to move online or shut down. Whitworth Online and Six Red Marbles walk through what got cut, what didn't, and why. Attendees receive a checklist to run the same decision process on their own programs.
Moderator: Tiffany Chapman, Six Red Marbles
Everyone Owns Growth: Turning Enrollment Goals into Organizational Plans
A growth goal is only the beginning. The harder question is whether it is attainable and what the organization must do to achieve it. Ambitious enrollment targets require coordinated organizational planning. Using Purdue University Online's (PUO) Student Acquisition Plan process as a case study, this session explores how enrollment planning can move beyond the forecast to inform staffing, budgeting, investment, resource allocation, and organizational priorities.
Extending the Academy: Governing Continuing Education at Research Universities
How do research universities organize and govern adult and continuing education? Drawing on the forthcoming Oxford University Press volume Extending the Academy, which will be published open access with sponsorship from UPCEA, this session presents comparative findings from 15 case studies written by more than 35 UPCEA members who lead ACEUs in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Presenters will examine how governance, financial arrangements, and institutional positioning shape access, academic mission, and responsiveness to changing learner needs, offering a rare cross-institutional view of where continuing education fits within universities.
Faculty Buy-In Is Just the Beginning: Building Leadership for Lasting Change
From “Where Do I Click?” to “I Am a Scholar:" Designing Online Graduate Orientation for Confidence, Connection, and Success
Graduate students know how to be students—or do they? The transition to graduate education brings new expectations, technologies, responsibilities, and identities that traditional orientation can overlook. Discover how one centralized online orientation moves beyond links, policies, and checklists to help students become confident members of a scholarly community. We’ll share first-year student-success findings from an approach that integrates academic identity, integrity, technology skills, resources, time management, and research across diverse graduate programs. Come explore what happens when orientation focuses not only on what students need to know, but who they are becoming—and leave with ideas you can adapt at your institution.
From AI Answers to Enrollment: Getting Found, Measuring Impact, and Driving Results
From Confusion to Connection: Rebuilding Trust in Credentials
Credentials are multiplying, but trust in them isn’t keeping pace. This session unpacks why today’s credential ecosystem confuses learners and employers alike, and how a connected learning experience design, skills-based credentialing, and employer-validated work experience built into the curriculum as one system will create better outcomes for students. Bringing together various perspectives from the same interconnected system, panelists will offer practical, cross-institutional examples and a working framework attendees can apply to their organizations, serving the modern, adult learner.
Moderator: Shauna Cox, The EvoLLLution
From Credentials to Architecture: Building a Coherent Portfolio of Learning Pathways
From Credentials to Currency: Making Learning Portable, Trusted, and Valuable at Work
From Design to Review: Embedding RSI into the Course QA Process
Regular and Substantive Interaction compliance is often treated as a check performed after a course is built, creating rework and inconsistent documentation. This session shares how the Teaching and Learning Innovation team at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, built a course development framework that connects instructional design and QA throughout the design process. Presenters will walk through their five-stage QA review process, the rubric used to document RSI, and how design and review teams closed the feedback loop between them. Attendees will leave with a practical framework they can adapt at their own institution.
From Experiment to Practice: Scaling Responsible AI Across Instructional Design Teams
From Foresight to Workforce: Designing Programs of the University of the Future
From Ideas to Impact: Building an Operating System for Innovation
From Infrastructure to Impact: Building AI Microcredentials That Scale
From Market Opportunity to Financial Reality: Making Smarter Program Launch Decisions
From Programs to Partnerships: Building a B2B Growth Strategy for Continuing Education
From Silos to Ecosystems: Connecting Learners, Institutions, and Employers
From Strategy to Execution: Building Capacity for Academic Innovation
Higher education does not lack innovative ideas; institutions often struggle to execute and scale them. Senior leaders from Boston University, the University of Central Florida, and City University of New York (CUNY) introduce a five-part framework for building institutional capacity for academic innovation: Connect, Prepare, Trust, Distribute, and Learn.
Drawing on three distinct institutional contexts, the presenters will share their approaches to building relationships, creating dialogue across organizational boundaries, and developing structures that help emerging ideas and successful practices translate into sustainable institutional change. Attendees will apply the framework to their own institutional priorities and identify opportunities to strengthen their capacity for innovation.
From Student Conversations to Strategy: Leveraging Student Intelligence
Institutions invest heavily in market research and enrollment analytics, while student-facing professionals gather valuable insights through conversations with prospective students every day. This interactive session introduces a practical framework developed by Purdue University Online for transforming those conversations into strategic institutional intelligence. Through guided reflection, discussion, and real-world case studies, participants will identify where student intelligence originates within their organizations, assess how it flows to decision-makers, uncover where valuable insights may be strengthened, and leave with practical strategies for enhancing portfolio strategy, academic innovation, and institutional decision-making.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Using AI to Find Microcredential Demand in Courses
Most microcredential development relies on guesswork or hours of manual review, when the demand data and the content may sit right in your catalog. This session shares an AI-assisted workflow developed at ASU's Learning Enterprise, where instructional design teams feed key course details into Claude alongside workforce competency frameworks such as O*NET, NACE, and Lightcast to identify microcredential potential in existing courses. Attendees leave with a repeatable method for finding demand-aligned microcredential opportunities in the content they have, ready to apply to their own catalog.
High Tech, High Touch: Reimagining Student Support for the AI Era
Higher Ed’s Hidden Growth Engine: Convert and Retain the Students You Already Have
Enrollment growth is still possible, but not by pouring more money into the top of the funnel. This session shows how institutions can create growth by converting existing demand and retaining students through better-designed, data-enabled experiences. Dominican University used Collegis' connected-data approach to drive a 31% increase in first-year enrollment, while College of Western Idaho is approaching its 12th consecutive term of enrollment growth alongside stronger persistence. Attendees will see how journey mapping, analytics, personalized engagement, and proactive intervention can reduce leakage, remove barriers, and turn the student journey into a sustainable growth engine.
Moderator: Wes Catlett-Miller, Collegis Education
Leading Through Disruption: Building Resilient Online Teams When the Rules of Work Change
Lessons from a Decade of At-Scale Learning and the Future of Online Learning in the Age of AI
A decade ago, at-scale online learning was an experiment; today, universities have modeled it in many different ways, sometimes reaching millions of learners. This session brings together executives from Coursera, edX, and two universities who helped build that decade's strategy from scratch, often without a playbook. Together they'll trace what worked, what failed, and how stackable credentials evolved from buzzword into experimental pathways connecting certificates, degrees, and employers. The conversation then turns forward: what at-scale learning means in the age of AI, and how leaders should plan for it.
Making AI Practice Visible: Building an Institutional Showcase
Faculty considering how generative AI fits into teaching benefit from seeing how colleagues across disciplines are using it. Auburn University’s AI in Teaching and Learning Showcase is an accessible collection of faculty-developed examples built within the LMS. In this interactive session, presenters will share how the Showcase was developed and organized. Participants will explore examples and learn how an LMS can support a resource without requiring a new platform.
Participants will leave with a framework for developing an AI showcase within their own institutional context, including strategies for inviting faculty participation, selecting and organizing examples, and maintaining the collection over time.
Measuring Cognitive Engagement with Socratic AI in Online Graduate CS Courses
In this session, we discuss how institutions determine whether learners are thinking deeply with a conversational AI agent. Based on the analysis of 205 Socratic AI dialogue sessions in an online graduate reinforcement learning course, the session demonstrates how the ICAP framework and AI uptake can reveal cognitive engagement within reciprocal student-AI exchanges. Attendees will practice coding authentic dialogue excerpts, identify patterns of surface and deeper engagement, and apply an adaptable assessment framework to their own context. The session will offer practical strategies for designing Socratic prompts, selecting meaningful engagement measures, and using dialogue evidence to improve online graduate courses.
Meeting the Moment: How Higher Ed Can Realize the Lifelong Learning Opportunity
AI is reshaping workforce skills, creation of learning offerings and content is becoming easier for experts and non-experts alike, and how learners discover programs is changing, making this a pivotal moment for university lifelong learning strategy. Leaders from the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech share how their institutions are differentiating in three ways: building flexible, stackable portfolios spanning credit and non-credit, degree and non-degree pathways; centering the learner experience on faculty connection and community; and designing platforms that carry learner context across their journey. Attendees leave with a framework for assessing their own institution's readiness.
Navigating AI Policies and Guidelines in Higher Education
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, higher education leaders must provide clear institutional direction while maintaining the flexibility to respond to change. This session examines how higher education institutions are developing and implementing AI policies and guidelines within centralized and decentralized governance structures. Drawing on current research and examples from different institutional contexts, the panelists will discuss organizational readiness, policy development, institutional adoption, and the appropriate roles of formal policies and flexible guidelines. Participants will leave with practical frameworks and tools for examining their institutions’ readiness and developing responsible AI strategies.
Moderator: Jordan DiMaggio, UPCEA
One Enrollment Ecosystem: Shared Infrastructure for Credit and Noncredit Growth
In 2022, Bryant University brought Graduate Programs and Professional Education together within one integrated portfolio spanning degrees, stackable credentials, open-enrollment programs, and employer-based learning. Dedicated enrollment marketing and analytics, online learning development, technology, and program-development capabilities work across both credit and noncredit education. Presenters will share how this model has supported portfolio growth and learner pathways, as well as lessons about competing demands, role clarity, and limited capacity. Attendees will compare Bryant’s experience with their own structures and consider where a more integrated approach could add value at their institutions.
Prioritizing Academic Innovation at CSU Channel Islands
In a resource-constrained environment, a little creativity and the right tools can go a long way. Learn how CSU Channel Islands' Extended University built an orchestration model where one designer "conducts" a suite of agents and tools to develop courses, freeing time for relational work: partnering with faculty on heutagogy and quality design. With recent use cases and early impact insights, we’ll review how these integrated tools demonstrate elevated equity-minded support for students, faculty, and institutional processes. See the prompts, tools, and ecosystem (including an AI career coach and chatbot) that institutions can adapt and use.
Rethinking PLA: Scaling Prior Learning Through AI, Partnerships, and Collaboration
Scaling Up: Lessons on Growing an Internal Marketing Agency
As competition for online students intensifies, institutions must make strategic decisions about how to invest in, structure, and sustain marketing capabilities to drive enrollment. Learn how a small marketing team evolved over a decade into an internal service unit supporting programs across a large public research institution. Presenters will share candid lessons on funding, pricing, staffing, internal client relationships, and demonstrating value alongside OPM and agency alternatives. Building on the institution's journey, this session explores what happens after a centralized model is established. Attendees will consider approaches they can apply to evaluate marketing and recruitment support at their institutions.
Moderator: Nico Rose, University of Florida
Seeing What AI Sees: Explainable Skill Evidence in Holistic Admissions
What if admissions professionals could see exactly what evidence AI is using to interpret an applicant’s skills? Drawing on the LORI (LOR Insights) project, this session examines how explainable AI can surface and contextualize evidence of durable skills in recommendation letters while preserving transparency for human reviewers. Through comparative examples and visual explanations, participants will consider how different AI approaches shape what admissions professionals can see, verify, and ultimately trust. The session highlights practical considerations for transparency, human oversight, and responsible use of AI in holistic admissions.
Starting Small, Scaling Smart: Launching a Pre-College Vertical Through Strategic Partnerships
Facing shifting enrollments and tight budgets? Learn how the University of Delaware Professional and Continuing Studies (UD PCS) entered the pre-college market to build a net-new revenue source without a massive upfront investment. In this dynamic session, the presenters will outline the operational strategy of starting with a single trial partner to validate demand, manage resources efficiently, and mitigate financial risk. Attendees will gain a clear roadmap for taking a low-investment pilot from initial launch to a permanent, profitable pre-college vertical.
Storytelling as Strategy: Building Trust, Visibility, and Growth Across Channels
The AI-Enabled Enrollment Journey: From Discovery to Proactive Engagement
The Future Is a Choice: A Strategic Leadership Workshop for Higher Education’s Next Five Years
What choices will distinguish institutions that thrive over the next five years from those that simply survive? In this interactive strategic leadership workshop, participants will envision what institutional success could look like, challenge assumptions standing in the way, identify barriers and opportunities, and make the difficult strategic choices required to move forward. Through cross-institutional dialogue and guided activities, participants will move from imagining the future to identifying actionable priorities they can take back to their institutions. The premise is simple: The future is not primarily a prediction problem; it is a choice problem.
The Graduate Enrollment Balancing Act: Prioritizing People, Programs, and Resources
Graduate enrollment teams balance a lot—multiple programs, prospective students, events, travel, communications, partnerships, and new opportunities. With limited time and resources, deciding where to focus can be challenging. This interactive session will explore how we can make more intentional decisions about our people, programs, and resources without simply adding more to an already full plate. Attendees will leave with a practical Prioritize, Adjust, or Let Go approach they can use to evaluate competing priorities and focus their efforts where they can have the greatest impact.
The Hidden Project Manager in Every Job – Everyone is a Project Manager
This session reframes project management as a core professional skill across higher education, not a job title. Using LSU’s real-world workflow and PMI’s five process groups, presenters will show attendees how to move work from informal idea to intentional execution with greater clarity, transparency, and consistency. Participants will leave with practical templates, role-based guidance, and a framework they can immediately apply to projects across their own institutions.
Moderator: Radhika Krishnadas, Louisiana State University
The New Currency of Talent: Connecting Degrees, Certifications, Apprenticeships, and Skills into a Unified Workforce Ecosystem
Higher education continues to organize learning through silos. Employers do not experience talent this way. Employers are trying to answer one question: Can this person do the work? As a result, employers increasingly combine degrees, certifications, apprenticeships, internships, work experience, and demonstrated competencies when making talent decisions. Yet colleges continue to build and manage these systems separately. The institutions that thrive in the future will become ecosystem orchestrators, connecting all forms of learning into coherent talent pathways.
The Power of Experience: Perspectives and Evidence on High-Impact Practices Driving Student Retention and Engagement
This session will examine how high-impact practices (HIPs)--including career exploration, real-world projects, and applied learning–can strengthen student persistence and outcomes at scale. Participants will get an exclusive look at new research which identified meaningful impact of a career-connected HIP on student retention at a significantly online institution. Academic leaders will examine the implications for student success and share strategies for translating these findings into scalable approaches aligned with institutional priorities.
The Registrar Is Your Online Growth Strategy: Redesigning Institutional Infrastructure Around Adult Learners
Online enrollment growth does not end when a student decides to enroll. Academic calendars, registration processes, re-entry policies, transfer credit, and other administrative practices can create barriers that disproportionately affect adult and online learners. This session brings together online learning and registrar leadership to examine how institutions can identify and remove these points of friction. Using lessons from the University of Cincinnati, presenters will explore how cross-functional partnership can transform policies and processes designed for traditional students into institutional infrastructure that better supports the learners universities are working so hard to recruit, enroll, and retain.
The Retention ROI of Social Capital: Lessons from Two Online Colleges
As budgets tighten, institutions need retention strategies that are both effective and measurable. This session features leaders from Alamo Colleges District and Rio Salado College, two large public institutions serving thousands of fully online learners, sharing how they are building social capital at scale to improve persistence. Panelists will discuss real implementation models, including Certified Peer Advisor programs, AI-assisted community moderation, and a relationship-mapping tool called InCircle, along with the metrics used to demonstrate ROI. Attendees will leave with practical, adaptable strategies for turning connection into a fundable retention outcome.
These Online Leaders Trained Their Own Digital Twins… Here’s What They Found
Higher education online leaders are operating in an environment marked by relentless uncertainty, shifting market demands, and skyrocketing workloads. To navigate these pressures without sacrificing strategic impact, leaders must find new ways to maximize personal and operational efficiency. In response, four senior higher ed leaders turned to a cutting-edge solution: building personalized AI-powered "digital twins" trained on their own professional knowledge, decision-making frameworks, communication styles, and daily workflows.
Transitioning From Service to Strategy: How Instructional Design Leaders Shape the Future of Higher Ed
Instructional design leaders are becoming strategic partners shaping higher education’s future. Two disruptions reshaped what instructional design leaders contribute to higher education. During the pandemic, they diagnosed problems and executed practical solutions when traditional processes stalled. When generative AI arrived, many asked how to use it to improve teaching and learning rather than simply restrict it. Both moments showed instructional design and online-learning leaders as strategic guides, not just service providers. Panelists from different institutions unpack how that shift happened in practice, to include the decisions, relationships, and credibility-building actions that moved them from service unit to strategic partner, and what it actually took: trust, data, timing, and political capital.
Unlocking Online Pathways: Scalable Mentorship for First-Gen Transfer Success
First-generation online transfer students face distinct transition challenges that demand intentional, flexible support. Discover how Florida Atlantic University utilized grant funding to build a scalable mentorship framework tailored for online learners in partnership with Mentor Collective. Presenters will share strategies for securing grant funding, configuring peer mentorship models for non-traditional schedules, and using early-warning survey data to drive retention. Attendees will leave with practical frameworks to design, fund, and launch mentorship initiatives that elevate sense of belonging and success for online transfer pathways at their home institutions.
Moderator: Jennifer Kious, Mentor Collective
We Have Receipts: Putting Higher Ed's AI Predictions on Trial
In 2026, a group of higher education leaders put their AI predictions in writing — about recruitment, student success, online learning, and institutional operations. A year later, we're bringing the receipts. This highly interactive session puts specific 2026 claims on trial. Did AI deliver the hyper-personalized enrollment experience we anticipated? Can predictive analytics actually close the gap between flagging a student and helping one? Have AI agents moved from speculative future to operational present? And — the most uncomfortable question of all — has AI actually freed people to do more human work, or mostly added another layer of it?Attendees serve as the jury, voting on each prediction before the panelists respond. Drawing on current institutional experience and evidence emerging through UPCEA's AI Hub, panelists will defend, revise, or abandon their thinking. The session closes by turning the tables: the audience makes its own predictions about AI one year from now — creating a new set of receipts to be examined at the 2028 Annual Conference.This isn't a technology update. The predictions simply make accountability visible.
Moderator: Phil Ice, CampusWorks
What Would I Tell Myself When I Took the Leadership Job: Tips and Lessons Learned for First-Time Leaders
Congrats! You received your first leadership opportunity. But now what? This interactive panel will explore the difficulties and lessons learned in those first years, discuss values and beliefs that have carried all of us, and leave attendees with both a collective acknowledgment of the difficulty and shared advice for action. We hope people feel seen as they embark in their introductory leadership, as well as bring back a connection or excitement about their new job!
When Every Course Can't Be a Priority: Making Strategic Course Renewal Decisions
When course renewal needs exceed available resources, how do institutions decide what to address first, and how extensively? Leaders from UAGC and OES explore how academic priorities, faculty and governance input, learner signals, curricular relevance, and operational considerations can drive different pathways for course renewal. Through a facilitated portfolio scenario, participants will consider how institutions can prioritize investments and determine when maintenance, targeted enhancement, substantial revision, or redevelopment is the appropriate response.
Moderator: Daniel Khalef, OES
When the Org Chart Changes: Navigating Reorganization from Institution to Individual
Who Owns Workforce Development? Building an Institution-Wide Ecosystem
Workforce development increasingly depends on an institution’s ability to connect expertise, employer relationships, labour-market intelligence, program development, learner support, and external partnerships. But who owns that work? Leaders from a university continuing education unit, a specialized nonprofit college, and a community college will compare how different institutional models build workforce-development capacity without eliminating the benefits of decentralization. Using tangible examples, the panel will explore who leads, who contributes, how external partnerships fit, and what makes the model sustainable. Participants will leave with practical questions and ideas they can use to examine and strengthen their own institutional ecosystems.
You Don’t Have to Build It Alone: Deciding When to Partner, Share, or Bring in Outside Expertise
A Dean Who Hired a Company Because They Gave Her an Answer She Didn’t Like
Facing a shifting adult learner market and a team ready for something different, the dean of UVA's School of Continuing and Professional Studies invited an outside partner into a full diagnostic before accepting any recommendation. Twenty-four listening sessions with more than forty participants across every function, completed in a few weeks, reframed the question leadership had been asking and produced a short list of priorities that began quick implementation. Presenters share their stories, including the initial ask that was declined, and share a discovery method attendees can adapt to modernize growth.
Accommodating Students’ World Englishes for Academic Inclusion: A Focus on China English in Academic Writing
As English in indeed an international language, our international students might use such Englishes (e.g., Indian English) within their essay writing, which is in opposition to the expected use of standard American English. The challenge, then, is to respect linguistic difference, a reflection often of cultural difference, while guiding students toward the requisite academic standard. This presentation focuses on the use of China English amongst Chinese students in their essays, in order to illustrate this issue. This allows for us as educators to also learn about our students’ cultural expression, as we attempt to guide them toward academic writing standards.
Addressing the E in ADDIE: Circling Back on Instructional Design
Although the ADDIE framework is an instructional design cornerstone, its final phase - Evaluation - is frequently overlooked. This session explores how online learning units and faculty can collaboratively evaluate online courses following design and implementation. Discover how leadership leverages end-of-project evaluation surveys, and how instructional designers use structured Post-First-Taught Consultations with faculty to analyze course implementation, evaluate student learning experiences, and refine online courses for subsequent terms.
Architects of Achievement: Supporting the People Who Power Online Student Success
This roundtable explores the role of online course coaches who work alongside faculty to strengthen student engagement, provide meaningful feedback, and increase student-faculty interaction. Drawing on interviews with online coaches, the discussion examines how coaches support grading, communicate with students, monitor progress, and extend faculty capacity. Participants will consider the opportunities and challenges of coaching models and discuss how intentional collaboration among faculty and coaches can create more connected, responsive, and supportive online learning experiences. This unique model of support has broad implications for applications to university who offer extensive online learning.
Authentic Skills, Real Careers: Rethinking Learning Assurance
Learning assurance doesn’t end at graduation - it continues throughout a lifetime of learning and work. This panel explores the assurance continuum, bringing together the perspectives of learners, educators, employers, and employees to examine how authentic skills mastery can be developed, assessed, and demonstrated at every stage. Discover how evidence-based learning, authentic assessment, and validated skills can improve graduate readiness, strengthen employer confidence, and support career mobility. Join us to explore practical strategies for connecting education and employment through a shared commitment to ensuring learners graduate with trusted evidence of the capabilities needed to succeed.
Moderator: Tom Mendham, Echo360
Automating the Routine: AI Workflows That Give Instructional Designers Time Back
When course development demand rises, instructional designers can lose valuable design time to repetitive file remediation. This session presents Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering’s process for testing Codex through ChatGPT EDU and building a reusable library of AI-assisted workflows for file conversion, formatting, template correction, and accessibility-related tasks. Presenters will share the testing criteria, library structure, lessons learned, and examples of workflows that reduce manual effort. Attendees will gain a practical approach for identifying automation opportunities, validating generative AI outputs, and redirecting instructional design capacity toward higher-value, learner-centered design work.
Balancing Rigor and Human Connection in an Accelerated Online MBA
As graduate business education shifts toward accelerated delivery, maintaining student engagement and critical thinking in shortened terms is a critical challenge. Accelerated graduate programs are increasingly attractive to adult learners, but shortening the academic calendar creates a pedagogical problem: how do we preserve higher-order thinking and meaningful interaction without simply increasing workload?
Better Questions, Better Design: Moving from Assumption to Inquiry
What if the most powerful instructional design tool isn't a new technology, template, or AI tool, but a better question? This interactive workshop explores how instructional designers can move from assumption to inquiry before designing a course. Grounded in Humble Inquiry and Powerful Questions, participants will work through realistic faculty scenarios, uncover assumptions, examine how questions are constructed, and practice asking questions that reveal what course design actually needs. Participants will leave with a practical questioning framework and a reusable worksheet for faculty consultations, helping reduce rework, improve communication, and create clearer learning experiences for students.
Better Together: A Blueprint for Building a Community of Practice
Two years ago, PaCE units across the UT System solved shared problems—employer partnerships, microcredentials, budget defense, impact measurement—in isolation, unaware peers nearby had already cracked them. Today, a peer-led Community of Practice (CoP) connects those units regionally and statewide, turning duplicated effort into shared advantage. This session shares that story as a working case study, then delivers the blueprint: a step-by-step process for launching a CoP with thirteen sister institutions or none at all. While systems like UT make a CoP easier to imagine, the real mechanics are universally replicable, so every attendee leaves with a plan, not just a case study.
Beyond Access: Building a College-Wide Student Success Ecosystem with STAR Bundle
Many students begin the semester without immediate access to required course materials due to cost, availability, or the complexity of purchasing from multiple sources. These barriers can hinder engagement and academic success from the very first day of class.
Large multi-campus community colleges like Lone Star College addressed this challenge by implementing the STAR Bundle, an institution-wide course materials program that provides students with their required digital and physical course materials by the first day of class through a seamless, affordable model.
This session will share Lone Star College's journey from vision to implementation, highlighting the cross-functional collaboration among Academic Affairs, Information Technology – Enterprise Applications, the bookstore, publishers, and faculty that made the initiative successful. Presenters will discuss the planning process, technology integrations with the learning management system, operational workflows, faculty communication, student support, and change management strategies that enabled a scalable and sustainable solution.
Attendees will gain practical insights into building institutional partnerships, overcoming implementation challenges, and creating an equitable day-one access experience that supports student success. Whether your institution is exploring inclusive access, expanding affordable learning initiatives, or modernizing course material delivery, participants will leave with actionable strategies and lessons learned that can be adapted to their own campus.
Beyond AI Detection: Designing Authentic Assessments for AI-Enabled Workplaces
As AI becomes increasingly integrated into workplace practice, assessment must evolve beyond AI detection toward authentic demonstrations of competency and learner AI agency. This session explores a competency-based assessment approach used in industry-aligned microcredentials at Toronto Metropolitan University. Drawing on the AI Powered Futures initiative, it highlights how industry-informed workplace scenarios enable candidates to demonstrate applied problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making in realistic AI-enabled contexts. Participants will gain practical insights and lessons learned for designing authentic assessments that reflect evolving workforce expectations and support meaningful competency demonstration in an AI-enabled world.
Beyond Internships: Creating a Scalable Model for Career-Connected Programs
Most work-based learning relies on internships and other experiences designed for traditional students, leaving adult and working learners with fewer opportunities to gain relevant experience. Leaders from National University, Calbright College, the University of Virginia, and Riipen will explore how continuing, professional, and online education units can embed authentic employer projects across courses, certificates, and degrees. Panelists will share strategies for integrating these experiences across an academic portfolio, sustaining employer participation, and building the institutional infrastructure required for scale. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for expanding access to career-connected learning while supporting program differentiation, workforce relevance, and enrollment.
Moderator: Dana Stephenson, Riipen
Beyond Launch: How UC Berkeley’s MAS-E Program Evolved in Practice
Launching an online degree is only the beginning. This session explores how UC Berkeley's MAS-E program evolved after launch through curriculum review, learner feedback, operational insights, and changing market needs. Presenters will share how a trusted partnership between UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering and OES enabled academic and operational stakeholders to make evidence-based decisions, refine the learner experience, and continuously improve the program. Attendees will gain practical frameworks for fostering collaborative partnerships, establishing effective governance, and balancing innovation, academic quality, and long-term program sustainability.
Beyond Programs: Building the Lifelong Learning University
Demographic change, longer working lives, changing workforce requirements, technological disruption, and the growing need for repeated reskilling are challenging institutions to serve learners across their lifetimes.
Meeting this challenge requires more than adding individual certificates, courses, or online programs. Institutions need an integrated strategy that connects their academic strengths, learner relationships, credentials, support systems, technologies, and external partnerships.
This session will help participants translate the broad aspiration of lifelong learning into an actionable institutional framework.
Beyond the Ladder: Building Agility for a Changing Workforce with Career Learning Lattice
As the half-life of professional skills shrinks to seven years, traditional career ladders no longer meet workforce needs. This session explores the Career Learning Lattice, an agile framework integrating strategic professional development with career lattices to pivot through disruption. Drawing on Delphi research and real-world insights, explore how higher education professional development units build impactful corporate partnerships. Strengthen your value proposition helping companies build resilient learning culture that maximizes training investments and minimizes workforce disruption.
Beyond the Micro-Credential Hype: Scaling Sustainable Programs and the Faculty AI Academy Model
Higher education institutions are rushing to launch micro-credentials, yet many face low enrollment and limited stakeholder buy-in. This interactive workshop provides higher education leaders with a framework for evaluating, launching, and scaling sustainable credential portfolios that deliver clear ROI.
Featuring the Faculty AI Academy, an internal badging model focused on AI literacy and pedagogical integration, as a core case study, this session explores how credentials drive internal transformation and workforce alignment. Working with a hands-on "Credential Sustainability Matrix," participants will gain ready-to-adapt templates to map skill demand, replicate successful badging initiatives, and streamline institutional offerings.
Bridging the AI Readiness Gap in Small Colleges: From fragmented use to systemic integration
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced a paradigm shift in higher education, creating opportunities and complex challenges. This study uses AI Readiness Framework to evaluate the readiness level of colleges and measures the magnitude of readiness gap.
The study uses sample of 139 colleges from Carnegie Database of Higher Education; performs ‘web-audit and content analysis’ using the AI Readiness Rubric inspired by Educause-AWS framework. The findings reveal the “AI-Divide” in higher-ed with only 2.4% of small colleges reaching integrated level of AI Readiness versus 65% of large colleges which are 25x more likely to reach “Integrated” status.
Building Accessible Learning at Scale: Integrating Title II Readiness into Course Development
In response to evolving federal accessibility requirements, UTEP's Center for Instructional Design transformed accessibility from an isolated compliance effort into a core component of course design and faculty development. Recognizing that accessibility could not be effectively achieved through periodic audits alone, the instructional design team embedded accessibility and universal design principles within every stage of course development. This session will demonstrate how an enhanced course development process help faculty identify and remediate barriers before courses reach students. Presenters will share lessons learned, implementation strategies, faculty engagement approaches, and methods for scaling accessibility support across an institution.
Building an On-Demand Video Library for Online Student Support
Discover how Purdue University Online developed a centralized library of short, accessible tutorial videos to enhance the asynchronous student experience. Learn how bite-sized, on-demand resources can replace lengthy workshops, webinars, and text-heavy communications while providing students with timely, relevant guidance throughout their academic journey. Attendees will explore practical strategies for creating scalable video resources, integrating them into student communications, reducing repetitive advising tasks, and equipping advisors and success coaches with sustainable tools to strengthen student engagement and support student success.
Building Pathways Through Innovation Infrastructure: Partnership to Impact
Employer partnerships, apprenticeships, internships, and microcredential pathways often operate as isolated initiatives, limiting their economic and community impact. This session explores how continuing and professional education leaders can build applied learning infrastructure that connects these efforts into coherent, scalable pathways. Drawing on Northeastern University's Center for Bioinnovation, which pairs AI-enabled analytical tools with employer partnerships spanning middle school through graduate study and extends to two-year institutions like Massasoit Community College, and on Alchemy's Internship Service Provider model for scaling paid internships, presenters will help attendees identify and strengthen partnership infrastructure in their own regional context.
Building Trust: The Four Corners of Online Governance
In many structures, multiple entities share a fraction of authority over the online enterprise. Often stakeholders needing insight and clarity regarding online priorities aren’t sure which of the four corners of their institution to look to: administration, an online unit or division, IT, or the academic school. When each entity holds a piece of authority over operations, resourcing, tech stack, portfolio, and quality reputation, lines blur and conflicting priorities can erode trust. This session brings together leaders who have been navigating the four corners. They will share stories about navigating conflicts over priorities and resourcing, and how they've built enough trust to disagree productively. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for mapping decision rights in their own four corners.
Moderator: Stacy Snow, Kennedy & Company
Building Workforce-Relevant Digital Accessibility Capacity Through an Online Microcredential: A Case Study
This interactive workshop explores how UNT Health Fort Worth developed and implemented "Creating and Remediating Digital Content for Accessibility," an online 8-week, non-credit microcredential designed to build digital accessibility skills among faculty, staff and students. Created in response to updated ADA Title II requirements and workforce demand, the program teaches WCAG, UDL, and accessibility remediation practices. Participants will examine the credential's design framework, competency mapping, assessment strategies, and implementation lessons learned. Attendees will evaluate adaptable tools, identify workforce skill gaps, and draft credential frameworks. The workshop provides practical resources to support scalable, learner-centered credential programs and institutional compliance efforts.
Come for a Course, Stay for a Career
What if continuing education’s biggest growth opportunity isn’t finding the next learner, but giving current learners reasons to return? This session explores how institutions can move beyond one-time enrollments to build lifelong learner relationships. Discover how connected data, intentional experiences and smarter operations can reduce friction, strengthen re-engagement and create pathways back as learners’ careers evolve. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for turning continuing education into an engine for sustained enrollment, engagement and institutional growth.
Creating Operational Solutions with Curiosity, AI, and Grit
Operational challenges often persist because the people closest to the work lack the time, technical background, or confidence to build solutions themselves. This session shares how one educational technology consultant used curiosity, generative AI, and Microsoft Power Platform tools to turn recurring frustrations into scalable operational systems—without formal software development training. Through two real-world examples, attendees will learn how to identify high-impact problems, engage stakeholders, prototype and iterate, design for adoption, and use AI as a thought partner while keeping human judgment at the center.
Crucial Conversations: Disclosure of AI Use and Trust Among Students and Faculty
The proliferation of AI tools has complicated the relationship between online instructors and their students, particularly when it comes to AI use and disclosure. In online courses, research indicates that faculty policies for student disclosure do not align with their own disclosure practices, which can erode the relationships that are essential for high quality learning experiences. At this roundtable, attendees will contribute to a collaborative discussion about student and instructor concerns about disclosure, risks and benefits, disclosure policies and instructional design implications. Presenters will frame the discussion by sharing research findings on trust and disclosure in higher education contexts.
Designing Intentional Academic Technology Workshop: Pedagogy, Collaboration, and Role Clarity
Academic technology training often lacks pedagogical scaffolding, while unclear boundaries between instructional designers and technologists cause fragmented institutional support. This roundtable explores a tri-fold model that pairs instructional designers, faculty, and technologists to balance pedagogy, lived experience, and technical guidance. Through small-group discussion, participants will exchange strategies for structuring technology professional development, clarify support roles, and address real-world constraints such as limited staffing. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for pairing pedagogical purpose with technical training and adapting collaborative support models within their own institutional contexts.
Designing Online Curriculum with Labor Market Data: Connecting Learning and Work
Join us for this engaging and informative session to drive curricular development with data-driven strategies. Learn to create academic programs that not only meet the current demands of the workforce but are also adaptive to future trends, creating pathways for learner success in and beyond the classroom.
Early, Honest, In-Progress: A Real-Time Case Study in Scaling Growth
Most partnerships take years to show results, but a collaboration between EducationDynamics and University of Cincinnati Online is challenging traditional higher ed growth playbooks in real time. Pairing early data from the 2027 Modern Learner Report with mid-stream insights from their multi-college rollout, presenters reveal how to drive rapid, transformational growth across diverse academic divisions without eroding unique unit identities. Attendees will examine real numbers, operational friction points, and an adaptable governance model built to keep pace with today’s non-linear learner journey—offering a candid look at what is working, what has changed, and what’s next.
Moderator: Karina Kogan, EducationDynamics
Effectively Leveraging AI in Higher Education Environments
AI is ubiquitous, and it feels like higher education leaders are trying to use it to solve every problem. Although AI has tremendous value and creates opportunities for institutional improvement, it is not the panacea for solving every challenge. In this session we will cut through the AI hype to show real and practical ways AI should be leveraged effectively and ethically through human-centered means at higher education institutions.
From 40 to 140—and Beyond: Building the Systems to Scale Course Development
As demand for online course development grew at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering, project backlogs, competing priorities, faculty workload, and pressure on instructional design capacity grew with it. We realized that simply adding staff or making existing processes faster would not create a sustainable scale. We needed to redesign the system supporting the work.
We centralized project management, standardized intake and data collection, established systems of record, and automated routine workflows, communications, and reporting. These changes increased visibility into workloads, timelines, and capacity while reducing repetitive administrative work. With eight instructional designers, we supported approximately 40 development projects. Today, 14 instructional designers support approximately 140 projects—3.5 times the project capacity with a 75% increase in staffing.
No single technology produced these results. Scalability emerged from an interconnected ecosystem in which standardized processes created reliable data, reliable data enabled automation and reporting, and greater visibility supported better operational decisions.
But solving one set of constraints exposed another: course production itself. Instructional designers still manually translate objectives, assessments, activities, alignment decisions, and module structures into the LMS.
Our next evolution applies the same principles to course design. Attendees will see how a digital design tool captures course information as structured data and how those inputs can generate consistent course components in Canvas through an automated workflow.
The goal is not to automate instructional design. It is to automate repetitive work that does not require instructional design expertise, creating more capacity for faculty collaboration, active learning, accessibility, AI-resilient assessment, and course quality.
The session will share implementation lessons and a transferable framework for scaling course development: Standardize → Structure → Automate → Measure → Improve.
From Bottleneck to Blueprint: A Roundtable on Managing Large-Scale Course Conversion Under Pressure
A peer discussion on managing large-scale online course conversion under real time and volume pressure. Presenters briefly frame their experience redesigning the project management processes, including intake and onboarding, behind a conversion of nearly 2,000 online courses to an eight-week, asynchronous format on a one-year, first phase deadline, then open the table to participants to compare notes on what has and has not worked in their own institutions' project structures and cross-team coordination at scale.
From Chaos to Clarity: Using Smartsheet as a PM tool to Manage Operations Projects & Support
Learn how a growing adult and professional education operations division leveraged a project management tool, Smartsheet to create a framework for managing operational work and project requests. This session will highlight our approach to evaluating needs, designing workflows, implementing the tool, and developing dashboards and metrics that provide visibility into workload, capacity, progress, and impact. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for improving transparency, prioritization, and scalability within their own organizations.
From Convening to Capacity: A Design-and-Evaluation Toolkit for Faculty Communities of Practice
Most faculty communities of practice begin with enthusiasm and end as a calendar invitation nobody accepts. This hands-on workshop offers a design-and-evaluation framework built across five communities at an academic health sciences center. Participants work with three tools: a design canvas that forces early decisions about purpose, membership, and facilitation load; a tiered evaluation plan connecting faculty participation to course design and learner experience; and a sustainability checklist for the handoff points where communities quietly fail. Most of our time is spent applying these tools to your context. You leave with drafted materials and the openly licensed template set.
From Data to Decisions: AI-Powered Evaluation of Non-Credit Learning Opportunities
This session explores how higher education institutions can use Agile Innovation to move from AI experimentation to operational implementation. At the University of North Texas, Agile Innovation means taking established frameworks, processes, and institutional knowledge and applying them to emerging technologies rather than creating entirely new systems around the technology.
Using UNT Executive & Professional Learning’s D.I.A.N.E. as a case study, presenters will demonstrate how an existing process for evaluating non-credit learning opportunities was translated into repeatable AI-assisted decision support. Participants will examine the practical considerations of applying AI to established institutional processes, including workflow design, data inputs, governance, human oversight, change management, and iterative improvement.
The session provides a practical framework for identifying where emerging AI capabilities can strengthen existing institutional processes and how institutions can implement AI responsibly, consistently, and at scale.
From Overload to On-Time: Redesigning the Student Onboarding Journey
What if students were onboarded the way new employees are, gradually, and with the right information at the right moment, instead of handed everything at once in a single orientation? This session shares how UC Online applied that model to redesign student orientation: a Canvas 101 rebuilt from a multi-module course into a single-page resource hub with clear support pathways, a branded just-in-time onboarding communication campaign, and a centralized student resource hub, all built to improve first-to-second-term retention. Presenters will share their implementation approach, early data, and lessons learned.
From Pilot to 33K Credentials: How GW Scaled Across a Decentralized University
Learn how George Washington University turned a single-department credentialing pilot into a cross-college and -university strategy spanning international affairs, nursing, and public leadership programs, with more schools in the pipeline and a university-wide leadership rollout now underway. Leaders from GW and Accredible will share the governance playbook, the budget and political realities of scaling inside a decentralized university, and the credential engagement data used to build institutional buy-in. Attendees will gain practical ideas for governance, cross-campus adoption, and measurement they can apply to their own credentialing initiatives.
Moderator: Dan Theckston, Accredible
From Reactive to Proactive: Expanding Your Team's Circle of Influence
How do you build a team that brings you solutions instead of simply bringing you problems? Explore how Covey’s Circle of Influence, paired with practical project management strategies, can help leaders shift teams from reactive to proactive. Through interactive scenarios and discussion, you’ll practice coaching strategies that build ownership, expand influence, and empower team members to confidently navigate challenges—even when much of the project is outside their control.
From Student Voice to Student Success: Reimagining Online Discussions
Reimagine online discussions as dynamic, inclusive learning spaces with Harmonize. Discover how multimedia, polling, and AI-powered teaching support can amplify student voice, encourage meaningful participation, and create more connected learning experiences. Using Canvas as the demonstration environment, this session will showcase practical strategies that can inspire more engaging discussions across learning platforms.
Grading the Graders, Fairly: Pairing Student Perceptions with LMS Behavior to Support Online Faculty
Continuing and online units run on per-course facilitators, yet most are judged on one student-evaluation score that penalizes strong instructors stuck in weak course shells and hides specific gaps a healthy average masks. This session shares a complete, working system that pairs student perceptions with objective LMS behavior to tell a struggling facilitator from a struggling course, protects facilitators when the shell is the problem, and makes mentorship the default rather than a punishment. You'll leave with a transferable model, the safeguards that keep it fair on small samples, and a four-track mentorship structure to adapt for your online faculty.
GUIDE AI: Strategic Integration of AI across ID phases
How can instructional designers strategically incorporate AI into each phase of course design while maintaining human expertise, quality, and integrity? This panel brings together designers and leaders who have embedded AI across the full ID workflow—from initial consultation through course evaluation. Panelists present a strategic framework for AI integration across instructional design phases, ground it with real tools built and tested in practice, and address hard questions: Where should AI assist? Where shouldn't assist? How do we maintain quality and integrity? Attendees leave with a framework to apply, tools to learn from, and clarity on thoughtful AI integration
How Do You Plan for What You Can't Predict? Creating an Adaptive Enrollment Marketing Strategy
Prospective-student behavior and marketing technology are changing faster than annual media plans can anticipate. The University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business and Eduvantis share how they created an Innovation and Test Bucket within their media budget to fund experimentation throughout the year. Using real tests and results, presenters will show how they identify opportunities, determine what merits investment, measure performance, and decide whether an experiment should be scaled, refined, or left behind.
Incarceration to College: Pathways for Mothers with Justice-Involvement
Are colleges and universities equipped to serve students with incarceration experience? For those who have not experienced the criminal justice system, it is challenging to understand the burden, stigma and obstacles that come with reentry from prison to college. To help make progress at Marian University, The Committee on College Pathways for Mothers with Justice Involvement was formed and is rooted in the doctoral research of Dr. Lesley Neff, Lived Experiences of Formerly Incarcerated Mothers: Navigating Societal Stigmas and Barriers Impeding Their Pathways to Pursue Higher Education, to create a nationally recognized model of inclusion and support.
Moderator: Johnna Denning-Smith, Marian University
In-House Control Meets Third-Party Insights: A Collaborative Blueprint for Higher Ed Marketers
Explore the relationship model between the data & digital marketing consultant (CollegeAPP) and University execution teams. This session offers attendees a replicable framework for evaluating data ROI, maintaining creative control, and keeping leadership/stakeholders happy.
Learning on Their Terms: Flexible Delivery in Online Graduate Programs
Flexible course delivery, which allows extended completion windows, student-controlled pacing, and suggested rather than mandatory weekly deadlines, is gaining interest in online graduate education. But does it produce different outcomes than traditional delivery? This roundtable shares preliminary findings from a six-block pilot study comparing student experience in flexible and traditional format courses within an online health sciences graduate program. Early data suggest comparable outcomes across formats, raising new questions about what we should be measuring and how we design for flexibility well. Come ready to share your own experiences, questions, and approaches in a peer exchange focused on practical realities.
Leveraging Canvas for Accreditation Processes
Collecting accreditation data doesn't have to be a tedious headache. This session highlights how Kent State University’s College of Aeronautics and Engineering leveraged Canvas Outcomes and reporting mechanisms to streamline assessment, resulting in successful accreditation across all major programs.
Making Higher Ed Systems Work Better Together
As online learning ecosystems grow, institutions are managing more systems, more data, and more integrations. This session explores how open standards can help reduce that complexity. Using 1EdTech’s Edu-API standard as a framework, presenters will examine practical approaches to connecting systems, reducing manual work, improving data consistency, and making it easier to adopt new technologies. Participants will learn how to identify high-value integration opportunities, engage cross-functional stakeholders, and build a more flexible, scalable technology environment that better supports online learners and institutional decision-making.
Making Sense of the Data: Equipping Faculty for Continued Course Improvement
Course evaluations and learning analytics arrive without instructions, and faculty are asked to respond to data they were never taught to read. This roundtable presents a framework for a workshop instructional designers facilitate to build that skill: interpreting what the data does and does not show, sorting findings by user experience, belonging, and learning impact, and deciding whether each change happens now, later, or never. It also covers low-lift ways to gather informal feedback mid-term. Facilitators share the full materials and lead an open conversation; participants are encouraged to bring their own approaches.
Managing the Work Behind Online Learning: Coordinating Teams, Timelines, and Quality at Scale
Online learning depends on more than course design. This session shares practical approaches for coordinating people, projects, timelines, quality expectations, faculty needs, accessibility work, DLE support, multimedia production, and evolving priorities across a large online education support unit, with a focus on making complex work visible and manageable.
Meeting Demand, Managing Costs: Building a Scalable Short-Course Catalog
As institutions face increasing pressure to meet workforce demands with limited resources, strategic partnerships can provide a cost-effective path to growth. This session explores how TTU Flexible Learning leveraged a workforce development partnership with a large Texas municipality to build a scalable catalog of industry-relevant, non-credit short courses. Presenters will share lessons learned, a co-funded curriculum development model, and strategies for aligning academic expertise with employer needs. Attendees will leave with practical tools, templates, and a replicable framework for developing workforce-focused learning opportunities through sustainable partnerships and innovative collaboration.
Mission: Possible - Declassifying the Secrets of an Integrated Faculty Support System
Guiding faculty through institutional change might feel like a "Mission: Impossible," but this session proves otherwise. Discover how Purdue University’s virtual drop-in support model evolved into a secret weapon for navigating LMS migrations, ADA Title II initiatives, and multi-campus integrations. We will explore how recurring drop-in sessions provide essential just-in-time assistance while acting as critical listening posts to gather feedback, uncover needs, and improve communication. Attendees will leave with proven tactics to execute this "Mission: Possible" and successfully adapt this proactive faculty support model at their own institutions.
Nothing About Us Without Us: Co-Creation with Community
The University of Michigan's Center for Innovation in Detroit (UMCI) is a fast-growing unit advancing technological innovation and talent development across Detroit and surrounding areas. Through career and professional development, industry and corporate training, K–12 programs, and master's degrees, UMCI builds the skills learners need for current and future careers while stimulating regional economic development. This session shows how UMCI co-designs programs with Detroit communities, using focus groups and informational interviews early in the design process to create learning experiences that meet participant needs and foster lifelong learners. Participants will reflect on incorporating learner voice into their own work.
Pathways Behind the Walls: A Comprehensive 2+2 Model for Prison-Based Higher Education
This session outlines a comprehensive roadmap for designing and implementing a 2+2 Prison Education Program (PEP) that supports incarcerated students in earning both associate and bachelor’s degrees. It covers key planning stages, including partnership development, needs assessment, and alignment with reentry and workforce goals. Participants will gain insight into navigating the PEP approval process, ensuring compliance with federal regulations, and meeting accreditation standards for academic quality and transfer pathways. The presentation also examines fiscal considerations such as funding models, budgeting, and long-term sustainability. Finally, it highlights strategies for program evaluation, including tracking student outcomes, completion rates, and continuous improvement.
Repackage, Redirect, Re-engage: Converting Low-Attendance Faculty Workshops into High-Impact Micro-Learning
High-effort faculty development workshops often suffer from low live attendance, and busy instructors rarely have time to watch hour-long recordings. This session presents an AI-driven workflow using Google Drive, Gemini, and NotebookLM to refactor long-form webinar transcripts into quick-reference micro-learning assets. Attendees will discover how to match workshop content to the right format, including audio podcasts, visual one-pagers, interactive flashcards, and chair-level executive briefs, to boost faculty engagement and extend content lifespan without multiplying design hours.
Scaling Digital Credentials Through External Collaborations
Scaling digital credentials requires strong partnerships. This session explores how internal collaboration and external partnerships with employers, industry, education providers, and technology stakeholders can expand access to digital credentials, strengthen their relevance and recognition, and create scalable pathways from learning to employment. Attendees will leave with practical partnership strategies and an adaptable framework for building sustainable digital credential ecosystems.
Moderator: Jason Marcuson, HyperionDev
Self-Assessing Your CPL Program: A Hands-On Maturity Model Workshop
Most institutions evaluate their credit for prior learning (CPL) program without a shared standard for what mature practice looks like. This workshop puts one in attendees' hands. Working from a maturity model developed by CAEL with Sophia Learning, grounded in a literature review, benchmarking across 25+ institutions, and stakeholder interviews, participants rate their own program against seven components: policy structure, assessment standards, credit management, student supports, institutional infrastructure, data practices, and stakeholder engagement. Attendees compare scores in small groups, identify where their institution has the most to gain, and leave with a concrete next step.
Spicy Conversations: Transform Institutional Practice for Online Student Success
The success of online programs depends on more than academic partnerships among faculty, academic departments, and instructional design teams. Equally critical are collaborations with offices such as admissions, financial aid, registrar, and student services, as well as groups such as institutional advancement and athletics. This panel brings together leaders from three institutions and an educational technology provider to explore strategies for building the relationships, trust, and shared vision required to advance institutional change. Panelists will discuss how they have worked across organizational boundaries to address barriers, gain support for new approaches, and align resources with strategic priorities for online learning.
STREAMing Ahead: Interactive Reading Assignments for a Changing World
This session introduces STREAM as a solution to increase learner engagement with course materials, a proactive and innovative approach that transforms traditional course readings into continuously refreshed, interactive learning experiences and assessments.
The STREAM model helps faculty design AI-resistant assessments built around authentic, application-oriented questions that require students to connect course concepts to real-world contexts. Participants will leave with practical strategies, adaptable resources, and a clear process for integrating STREAM into their courses to enhance learning outcomes, support academic integrity, and develop more engaging and sustainable teaching practices in the age of AI.
Tag, You're It: Navigating the Title II Self-Evaluation
Tag! You've been tasked with originating a full Title II self-audit and transition plan to ensure your institution is in compliance with current accessibility standards. But where do you start? And do you have to do it alone? In this interactive workshop, we'll walk through our process in executing this federally-mandated evaluation for UCLA Extension, present scenarios for how to approach partnership and resourcing in accordance with Title II standards, and discuss the shared responsibility of creating and maintaining an institution that is accessible for all. You’ve been tagged in – come find out what happens next.
The Adult Online Program's Recipe for Growth and Retention
This session presents ten strategies from cases of adult online programs at higher education institutions that managed to be established and produce growth and retention. In this session, participants will explore the steps that are necessary to design a successful adult online program, the strategies to make them grow, and the initiatives that need to be carried out to promote student success and retention. By the end of the session, participants will be able to also evaluate the status of their programs, identify gaps, and develop strategies to improve them. Participants will also work on an action plan with strategies that they can implement at their institutions for continuous improvement.
The Course Is on Fire: What Do You Fix First?
Your course launches soon, the objectives are vague, accessibility problems remain, faculty are overwhelmed, AI-generated content has appeared, and you cannot fix everything. What comes first? In this interactive instructional design simulation, participants receive limited time and resources to triage realistic course-development problems. New complications arrive throughout the session, forcing teams to reconsider their decisions. Participants will compare approaches and leave with a reusable Course Design Triage Matrix for prioritizing design work, communicating tradeoffs, and protecting course quality when ideal timelines and resources simply do not exist.
The Faculty Incentive and Workload Marketplace: A System to Promote and Reward Innovation
A frequent challenge to implement innovative programs at universities is the lack of effective systems to reward faculty. The Faculty Incentives and Workload Marketplace is a system to assign points value to all the contributions that faculty can make, that can lead to productive and swift organizational change to achieve strategic goals, for example new programs, new teaching modalities, inter-disciplinary content or programs, microcredentials, improved online teaching, and other faculty work better attune to agile innovation and entrepreneurship. We will start with a Reality Check about obstacles to innovation due to traditional faculty evaluation. We will continue with the architecture of the Faculty Incentives and Workload Marketplace system. The third part is model to implement the Marketplace in three phases: Exploration & Preparation (analyzing organizational readiness, identifying barriers/enablers, engaging key stakeholders); Adoption and Adaptation (tailoring the innovative metrics, designing a pilot with feedback loops); Operation and Sustainability (measuring fidelity & normalization and determining pathways for continuous improvement).
The Future-Ready University: Leading Through AI-Driven Change
As artificial intelligence transforms higher education, academic leaders are required to balance innovation with institutional mission, culture, and academic excellence. This session analyzes leadership strategies for navigating AI-driven disruption while enhancing student success, faculty engagement, and institutional resilience. Attendees will examine practical frameworks for AI governance, organizational change, and workforce readiness, and will gain actionable strategies to guide human-centered transformation and develop future-ready universities.
The Sovereign Algorithm: Deciding the Fate of the Human-Led University
This high-stakes interactive debate challenges participants to define the ethical and strategic boundaries between human intuition and algorithmic autonomy in academic governance. Attendees will confront five provocative scenarios—ranging from AI-driven tenure to synthetic curricula—to determine if "Human in the Loop" is a permanent necessity or a temporary transition.
Unlocking PCO Possibilities: Scaling Your Expertise for Success
Have you ever wondered how your unit can take its unique expertise and create a sustainable, revenue-generating PCO portfolio? If so, this session is for you! This session introduces an award-winning, replicable model we used as a small team at a public university to transform our own PCO portfolio offerings. We will introduce the TIID Framework and share lessons learned along the way. Whether you want to generate new revenue streams for your unit or expand your reach, join us for a practical roadmap to turning your subject-matter expertise into a robust PCO portfolio.
What If Paid Media Came Last? Building an Organic-First Enrollment Strategy
The programs with the best paid-media performance aren't necessarily the programs that need the most paid media. UofL Online choses to ask, where is there an unmet demand gap, and can paid media strategically help close it? This session introduces UofL Online's new "Organic First" strategy, which positions paid media as a supplement to organic recruitment efforts. Learn how we translated this theory into a practical methodology for prioritizing programs, identifying organic inquiry gaps, setting paid inquiry targets, and allocating limited advertising dollars. The session will explore both the strategic rationale and the real-world planning process behind a model that higher education marketing teams can adapt to their own enrollment goals.
When GenAI Can Do the Work: Rethinking Online Course Design and Delivery
GenAI is challenging how online courses use written work, discussions, projects, and assessments as evidence of learning. Drawing on the Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum participation and collaborative faculty projects, this session maps unresolved design and delivery questions and invites attendees to compare what they are seeing in online learning.
Who’s Flying This Thing?: Lessons from Piloting a New Instructional Mode
Launching a new instructional mode might sound straightforward, but aligning pedagogy, policy, and practice can be anything but simple. This roundtable shares candid lessons from our institution’s pilot of a new hybrid instructional mode, exploring both its successes and missteps, as well as challenges in recruiting and preparing faculty and establishing shared expectations. We will examine what the pilot revealed about faculty support, decision-making authority, and stakeholder assumptions. We will also consider how the pilot created opportunities to build relationships and foreground pedagogy. Participants will share their experiences and identify strategies for making future instructional-mode pilots more successful.
Who's Issuing What? A Data-Driven Look at the Micro-Credential Provider Landscape
Micro-credentials are proliferating rapidly, but institutions often lack a shared framework for classifying and governing them. This session presents a national analysis of registered micro-credentials by provider type alongside a real-world case study: Western Governors University has nearly 100 distinct digital badges and has issued over 200,000 badges, reaching over 100,000 unique recipients. Presenters will introduce a practical provider-type taxonomy and lead attendees through a hands-on exercise mapping their own institutional credentials against it. Attendees leave with a usable framework for evaluating credential classification, transcripting, and transfer implications at their own institutions.
You’ve Got a Friend in Me: Building a Culture Where Teams Go to Infinity and Beyond
This session would explore how intentional culture-building and cross-team collaboration can transform disconnected groups into a unified team working toward a common mission.
Be Your Own PM: 3 Course Development Rules Every Creator Needs
Online course development projects rarely fail due to poor pedagogy—they fail due to expanding scope, missed deadlines, and communication breakdowns. Faculty and course creators don't always have access to a Project Manager, but a lightweight project framework can help fill the gap. In this fast-paced, 10-minute presentation, a Senior Project Manager outlines three essential PM practices tailored specifically for the online learning lifecycle. Attendees will learn how to guard project scope from day one, establish structured SME review cycles, and use asynchronous communication cadences to eliminate project stalls—delivering high-quality courses on time and without the chaos.
Before You Build Another Credential, Make Learning Visible
Universities are rapidly building certificates, micro-credentials, and other workforce-responsive programs, but are we starting with the solution before fully understanding the problem? This UPCEA Talk introduces a framework for approaching workforce-aligned academic innovation differently, then pressure-tests those ideas using Oklahoma State University's Durable Skills micro-credential as a real-world case study. By examining where practice aligns with the framework and where it does not, the session challenges attendees to reconsider how their institutions decide what to build, for whom, and why.
From Administrative Friction to Scalable Operations: Redesigning the Professional Education Learner Journey
How can professional education units grow without multiplying manual work? This session shares practical lessons from UChicago Professional’s efforts to create a more connected administrative ecosystem using Eduframe, LearnWise AI, Canvas, and supporting technologies. Participants will explore how to identify operational friction, map and redesign workflows, align cross-functional stakeholders, and prioritize improvements based on learner impact, staff effort, risk, and scalability. Attendees will leave with practical frameworks they can apply to streamline operations, improve the learner experience, and support sustainable growth.
From Guidance to Growth: The Evolving Power of Mentorship
Exploring four essential mentorship models, traditional one-on-one, peer-to-peer, reverse, and group mentorship, and their impact on careers. Participants examine how mentorship drives development not only for mentees, but also for mentors, reframing mentorship as a dynamic, reciprocal process that fosters learning, adaptability, and leadership in a rapidly evolving professional landscape.
Stop Teaching AI. Start Redesigning for It.
AI literacy is necessary. AI integration is valuable. But neither, by itself, is transformation. This rapid-fire talk introduces a three-stage framework—AI Literacy → AI Integration → Educational Redesign—and challenges academic leaders to move beyond asking how AI fits into existing education. If AI can increasingly generate, summarize, analyze, and create, what should humans know and be able to do? Participants will leave with a practical framework for identifying where their institution is today and a new question for shaping curriculum, assessment, and learner experience in an AI-rich world.
Designed for Real Life: Removing Friction and Building Connection Across the Adult Learner Journey
Designed to Travel: Building Credentials That Hold Value Across a Career
From Industry Hallmarks to Institutional Traction: The Entrepreneurial Operating System in Online Education
As an online education leader, you probably feel like you have a million things to keep track of. But what if there were just six things you had to get right? UPCEA’s Hallmarks of Excellence call on online education leaders to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset, and the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) provides a practical way to put that mindset into action. Through the UF Online case study, explore how six EOS components (Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction) connect to UPCEA’s Hallmarks of Excellence and were evaluated and acted upon to gain institutional traction. Participants will complete an organizational checkup across all six components and leave with EOS tools and templates to create actionable opportunities for improvement.
Moderator: Julie Uranis, UPCEA
From Opportunity to Portfolio: Making Smarter Bets in Noncredit and Workforce Programming
Guiding AI Innovation with Intent: Creating a Community Engaged AI Philosophy
Your faculty are using AI. Your staff are guessing at the rules. And the policy you write will shape your organization for the next decade.
Harvard's Division of Continuing Education: 25,000 students, 350 staff, built a values-based answer instead of a tool list: an AI Philosophy as north star, an AI Literacy Framework as compass, co-created with leadership, faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
You'll leave with components of a playbook for implementation: the visioning session design, the synthesis method, the reflection questions that surfaced institutional risk, and more. Tested in Harvard’s PCO organization. Built to adapt anywhere.
Middle Matters: A Practical Playbook for Leading Change Without the Top Title
Middle managers and support professionals often stand closest to institutional challenges but farthest from final authority. This hands-on workshop shows how to turn that position into responsible influence. Using a 4P Influence-to-Impact Map focused on Purpose, Power, Practice, and Proof, participants will analyze a real change challenge, identify sponsors and key collaborators, choose an effective strategic role, and design a 90-day experiment. Attendees leave with practical tools to advance learner-centered change without confusing leadership with titles or ignoring structural limits.
Scaling Course Quality with an AI Agent-Driven Course Review Workflow
How can AI agents help instructional design teams scale quality assurance without replacing human expertise? This session showcases an agent-driven workflow that analyzes Canvas LMS course content for outcome alignment, assessment validity, scaffolding, and student workload distribution. Participants will explore examples of executive summaries, HTML dashboards, and redesign recommendations generated from AI agent course reviews and discuss how instructional designers use these insights to support faculty consultations and course improvement. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for implementing agent-assisted course review processes that enhance quality, consistency, and student success.
Moderator: Jamison Patrick, UW Stout Polytechnic
Strategic Advocacy: Advancing Continuing Education from Campus to Capitol
How can PCO leaders become more effective advocates in an era of rapid change? The PCO deans of UC Merced, UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Riverside share practical strategies for advancing the interests of learners, institutions, and workforce partners through campus, regional, statewide, and federal advocacy. Participants will learn how to build influence, leverage data and storytelling, engage policymakers, and position their PCO unit as a strategic driver of workforce development, lifelong learning, and institutional success.
Supporting Remote Graduate Learners in Engineering: Building an Ecosystem of Belonging, Well-Being, and Success: An Integrated Student–Academic Affairs Model for Professional Graduate Education
Graduate and professional learners balancing careers, family responsibilities, and part-time study require integrated support beyond the virtual classroom. At Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering, the Assistant Deans for Student Affairs and Academic Affairs collaborate to support more than 7,000 online and hybrid Engineering for Professionals students. This session highlights a scalable, data-informed model that combines academic support, wellness, belonging, faculty engagement, career development, and early intervention. Through case examples and discussion, participants will explore practical strategies for building cross-functional support ecosystems that strengthen engagement, persistence, career advancement, and student success across online professional graduate programs.