The Growing Influence of Online Learning in Higher Ed

Sophie White: We have a really great episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk for you. In this one, Kristen Gay, EDUCAUSE Researcher, and I talk with Bethany Simunich and Melissa Vito about the CHLOE Conversations Reports. This means the changing landscape of online education. This year, this report looks at a more qualitative view of online education in higher education. I was really inspired and empowered by this conversation. I don't think I had a great sense before of the strategic role of online education and how we function as colleges and universities. That really came across loud and clear to me in the discussion, as well as everything from how AI fits into the conversation in terms of personalizing learning, supporting quality and engagement and impact reporting. And then also how online learning has evolved as a field to play a more strategic role in how our colleges and universities function. I hope you enjoy it.

***

Sophie White: Hello everyone, and welcome to the EDUCAUSE Shop Talk podcast. I'm Sophie White. I'm a senior manager for program and content marketing at EDUCAUSE, and I am one of the hosts for today's discussion.

Kristen Gay: Hi everyone. I am Kristen Gay and I am a researcher here at EDUCAUSE and an author of the 2026 CHLOE Conversations Report series along with Bethany who is also here.

Sophie White: Great. Thanks for the beautiful segue. Today we're talking about the CHLOE Conversations Report, which is the changing landscape of online education. I'll let Bethany talk about it in a minute, but we'll be discussing the reports and also just what online learning in higher education looks like generally and where it might be going. We have two wonderful guests with us today. So first up, we have Bethany Simonich. Bethany is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Quality Matters and co-director of the CHLOE Project. Her work focuses on online learning quality strategy and innovation, including how institutions are responding to emerging technologies such as AI. She has more than twenty years of experience in higher education with a particular focus on online learning, instructional design, faculty support, and research to practice. Thanks for being with us, Bethany.

Bethany Simunich: Thanks so much for having me. Glad to join the conversation.

Sophie White: And next up we have Melissa Vito. Melissa has worked in higher education for over thirty-five years with most of her work in the areas of student affairs, retention, student-facing auxiliaries, including residence life and student union, enrollment in her later years at the University of Arizona where she was asked to envision and fully build their online programs along with distance education and a branch campus. So everything she had learned, transitioning a bit to online education, everything she'd learned informed the vision and the building of the UTSA program that she currently supports. They were immediately successful and through that opportunity she knew that the future would focus on online learning and other related areas. Melissa consulted after retiring from the University of Arizona in 2018, and in March of 2020, she took a new position at the University of Texas at San Antonio as vice provost for academic innovation, which included online faculty development and other related areas.

Driven by an academic innovation mindset, online programs have grown. Their work and faculty development has been recognized nationally and internationally as they conceived and built an academic innovation center in the heart of UT San Antonio. Really impressive, Melissa, and thanks for being with us.

Melissa Vito: Thanks. Thank you.

Sophie White: I'm inspired how you retired and then you came back full force--

Melissa Vito: It wasn't-

Sophie White: --to support online programs.

Melissa Vito: It was like a pause of about a month. I left in July and then I started consulting in August. And so it gave me a little bit of time, cleaned out a few closets, got a little bit organized.

Bethany Simunich: That's not

Melissa Vito: Retirement. No, no. Retirement is not my style. And so anybody who knows me well would say that. It was a redirection.

Kristen Gay: Exactly. A sabbatical.

Melissa Vito: Yeah, exactly.

Sophie White: For our sake, I'm glad that we have you back post sabbatical retirement.

Kristen Gay: Agreed.

Bethany Simunich: Thanks.

Sophie White: Great. So jumping into it, Bethany, can you tell us a little bit about the CHLOE project and what your goals are for it?

Bethany Simunich: Yes. So CHLOE as the CHLOE Report, so many of you are probably familiar with the Changing Landscape of Online Education report, and that's been around for about a decade. So it really came about at that time where it was filling that gap where the Babson report was leaving and there really wasn't this voice about online learning strategy and leadership that really was connected to what was going on at institutions. So it originated as a partnership between Quality Matters and Eduventures, and we have produced a quantitative report for about ten years now. After the issuance of CHLOE 10 last year, we started talking with the team and of course EDUCAUSE joined the CHLOE project. Was it two years ago, Kristen? I believe so. Yeah. Yeah, this will be twenty-three. So we are on our third report with EDUCAUSE and we were just having a conversation about what can we do different now that we've been around for a decade, what can we do differently?

Bethany Simunich: And so we decided to do a qualitative approach this year and to really do something that would allow us to dive a little bit more deeper into these trends and these issues, some of the key findings even from the CHLOE Report. So this year is the first year that we are releasing CHLOE Conversations and it is a qualitative research report. We were able to have focus groups with thirty online learning leaders, doing deep dives into topics around quality assurance, institutional support for online, program strategy, AI, and then we also did sector focus groups. So CHLOE has highlighted community colleges and public and private four years. We wanted to see if some of these trends and even some of the forecasting, if it was playing out differently for different sectors. So we had these focus groups, they went really well. We had some great conversations and we are going to be releasing those research reports.

Bethany Simunich: I think by the time the podcast is out, they will be up on the EDUCAUSE website. Yay.

Sophie White: Absolutely. We'll put a link to the conversations reports in the show notes for this podcast. So I'm curious, Bethany, thinking about how the report has transitioned, how did transitioning to this more qualitative approach help you understand what the national survey, the more quantitative approach couldn't?

Bethany Simunich: Yeah, good question. I think what it did is provide some stories and some examples. It shed light on really what's going on at the institution in a much deeper way than a data point can do. I think especially, and Kristen, you probably have a response to this as well, but for me, it reinforced what we're seeing in those quantitative data points. So I think a lot of the conversations that we had in the focus groups, they really gave some life to some of the data points of CHLOE 10. We've also been collaborating more deeply with our friends at UPSIA around the Bones Report, and I was surprised, but pleasantly so to see how many of the points in our focus groups really reinforced the Bones report this year as well. So I think it's a matter of taking those data points and giving them some life, giving them some examples.

Bethany Simunich: There were a lot of good stories and quotes and whatnot that the participants shared, and I think it just makes everything a lot richer. It gives you a richer data set to look at.

Kristen Gay: For sure. And I'll just add to that, that I completely agree, and I think it was also helpful for framing some of the findings that we had from CHLOE 10, for example. One of the findings was that a lot of institutions have a really decentralized AI strategy, which I saw as a concern as a researcher, but a lot of our focus group participants said, no, this is a time for ground up experimentation. We need to be comfortable with this productive struggle right now and not jump into strategy prematurely. And I think there was some positivity there that ground up experimentation should be driving strategy. We should be keeping students at the center of this rather than letting technology drive the strategy. So that was kind of cool actually to see that they were thinking of this finding differently than I would have. And I'm curious for you, Melissa, from your perspective, what are you seeing that's not captured in these sort of national surveys about online learning or these big picture studies?

Melissa Vito: Thank you. So can I add a comment to what you were talking about to Sophie's question about quantitative versus qualitative? Actually, someone gave me this book because I always talk about trying to see around the corner, and there's a woman who actually wrote a book that was called that, Rick McGregor. I think it's probably 10 years old now, so it's ancient history. But she made a comment about how we find information and how we inform ourselves to think about what might be next before it's obvious, before it is in front of us. And she made a comment about data and said, "The awesome thing about quantitative data is that it does tell you what is." So it is a moment in time, and you can look at it over years and see trends, but it is what is. Qualitative data is where you actually can see what might be around the corner.

Melissa Vito: And I always have remembered that because I think it's true. I really do. And I think it brings to life in a different way, like Kristen, your comment about it seems like it's a problem, that it's not centralized, but actually it's an opportunity because you can do more things if it's decentralized and you're able to move more quickly. And so I just wanted to add that as kind of a footnote to your question because I always have that in the back of my mind when I'm thinking about data or listening to people, because one of my team members said for you, every conversation's a focus group, but it kind of is because you learn from it.

Kristen Gay: No, I love that. As usual,

Melissa Vito: You are just - Anything surprising. No. You

Kristen Gay: Are so inspiring. But yeah, I was just curious from your point of view, what are you not seeing represented in these larger scale national surveys that are so useful, like you said, for capturing trends and change over time, but what is missing from those?

Melissa Vito: Yeah, I actually think the conversation started to get at some of the pieces that I felt weren't there. And I've talked to actually Richard about this at Ankura, but I think people who are chosen to lead online, you come in and think, okay, this is what I'm going to do. And I may have come up through the work I did in instructional design. I believe in this as an important modality, support for students, faculty development, but I just can't quite break through. So what am I doing wrong? Is it strategy? Is it institutional? And I think what this gets at is in some cases we need to go a little bit bigger. We need to zoom out further. And what I saw in the qualitative was actually some reference to what some states are doing, whether it's Georgia deciding to invest or how policies are written.

Melissa Vito: Those things aren't visible to most people and not always known, but if you have a policy that says online needs to be more expensive, then that's going to change the way that you think about what you're doing. And I think some of the work that was done across legislatures, and it's not a criticism, it's just how things have grown, may have been done five or ten or fifteen years ago when online was in a different place than it is now. And so I think in some states there was a concern that it might take students. So we need to make sure that online's not doing the same thing that residential is or online's more expensive or there are some things out there that I think the conversations piece opens the door to more of those types of conversations because they're important for those of us who help lead online and who are boots on the ground and also to help educate up and sideways about the things that aren't necessarily visible, but that can either encourage or constrain the work we're doing.

Melissa Vito: So very long answer, sorry about that, but really excited to see some of that come out of the conversations. So that was one thing.

Sophie White: Yeah. I know I'll add, not being immersed in this world day to day, I thought it was really interesting that the conversations I think that you authored, Bethany, how online learning is really central to a lot of pieces of the institution. I think I was still looking at it as a bit reactive, as you say in this report of it's good for. Obviously it was so important during the pandemic, but also for adult learners, people who have challenging schedules, things like that. But I saw this transition to no, it's actually a strategic fabric of what we're doing at institutional level, and that was a really helpful transition for me to make. So I don't know, Bethany, if you want to talk about that a bit, why this is an important aspect of how the institution as a whole focuses.

Bethany Simunich: Yeah, so there's a couple data points, and not just in CHLOE conversations, but in CHLOE 10 and the Bones report as well, we're hearing this as a theme that online learning is central to most institution strategy, and yet the ecosystem around it really hasn't caught up. So in a lot of ways you may have a lack of leadership, you may have a lack of support, you may have a lot of things that leave institutional teams especially in a reactive mode. So instead of being able to be strategic and being able to prioritize, you're caught in this reactive cycle. There was a quote from one of the participants, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but what they said was, "We keep trying to fix what's broken. What we need to do is just build a better house." And I think that that sums it up so well.

Bethany Simunich: I mean, the reason that that quote stuck with me, I've been saying it over and over in conversations is I think it really gives a good description to what a lot of people who are in online learning are dealing with at institutions. So there is a difference between strategic recognition, meaning the institution said, "This is important to us, this is part of our enrollment strategy, this is part of our access strategy, this is part of our revenue strategy, equally important, and strategic capacity." And that's more related to we've decided who has authority over this, how priorities get set across colleges. And so this idea of having this ecosystem that works well where online learning is no longer othered, it's no longer this endless cycle of reactivity, but focusing on the fact that it is important to institutional strategy, that goes hand in hand with not only having the right leadership, but having that leadership at the right level.

Bethany Simunich: So this year in CHLOE conversations, one of the things that we did was we included online leaders that weren't COLOs, but they may be the senior most online learning leader at their institution. Part of that reasoning is we wanted to see what is that experience like when you have the leadership but you do not have the authority. So it's one thing for institutions to say to COLOs or whomever is leading this effort that online is part of our strategic priority, it's a top priority, but at the same time, leaving these folks then to negotiate with five colleges and IT and marketing and finance, and you might have a template or quality assurance procedures over in one college or department or for one program, but you can't even talk about them because it's not throughout the whole institution. So you're limiting your own conversation even.

Sophie White: And I'll just define for anyone who doesn't know, COLO, chief online learning officer. Melissa, I'm sure you have a lot to say about this, so dive in. How do you feel about the strategic role of chief online learning officers or the senior most?

Melissa Vito: I mean, Bethany, that was a great. Agree with most of the points that you shared, and I think that online is becoming more central if you think about things. So I'm working in Texas. One of the governor's key points that has just been in the news is that he wants a 90 degree bachelor's, and there's a real concern that students are taking too long. And through that process, not only do you possibly incur debt, but you also are not making money. And so there's both of those things happening when you take longer to graduate. And so he's asked the Texas Coordinating Board to look at some ways that that might be done quickly over the next few months. And for me, online, thinking about modalities, how we create pathways for our students that aren't all the same and that blend at times or mix and match.

Melissa Vito: And that's not like one online class, but it's like maybe your pathway is easier for you to do 60 units online in a program where you could do that and you can do the other 30 in person or hybrid or in some other way. And so I think that for online learning leaders, it's always important to scan the environment and then think about maybe either a very rational way that we can intersect or help solve a problem or maybe an out of the box way to think about what the opportunity presents to online. And so I think you're right, Bethany. I think the early online role in institutions was to expand a resource base truthfully, and to do that by meeting a need of adult learners that was being met by University of Phoenix or a few other areas, but that generally higher education as a whole area hadn't gotten into.

Melissa Vito: I think as it's normalized and I think as quality has improved and people are more accepting of it, I think the strategy of it becomes how we hold onto what's best with online. We require all of our fully online courses and fully online programs to be quality matters and we also use OLC scorecards. So we actually have kind of a higher standard that has to be met because our students aren't here. So it has to be as good as possible. But I think it's incumbent on us to look for things that aren't obvious, but that can help create opportunities for the institution as a whole that go beyond what people are thinking. And I'm thinking the workforce conversation that is pervasive in higher ed right now, where is online in terms of how we create extra opportunities, recognize workforce that students bring in? What is our conversation around that?

Melissa Vito: Because that's a national conversation and it's becoming part of what parents are thinking about when students are coming. I think parents still think of a residential experience, but also see online as a pretty normal way. So I think that our strategy needs to be just not helping people understand online, but how we connect to the bigger ultimate goals of the institution and create opportunities to move an entire institution forward and to solve some issues or create new things. So that's my answer.

Kristen Gay: I love that, Melissa, and I love that the way that you're talking about strategy makes me think a lot about story and online learning programs telling their story at the institution. And this gets back to me, Bethany, to a finding from your report, which was that a lot of online learning leaders are practicing quality. Their programs are practicing quality, but that's not really translating to students. It's not becoming part of the story. And so what do you think it would take to move from doing the work of quality to demonstrating its impact to prospective students?

Bethany Simunich: That's a really good question. So this quality question is something that CHLOE's been looking at for a couple years now. It's first started surfacing in CHLOE eight and we dubbed it quiet quality. And it's exactly as you were describing, Kristen, that institutions are practicing various types of quality assurance efforts around online learning, but they're not talking about them. And it's hard to understand why. It's easy to understand maybe why not all institutions are able to talk about the quality of design, because as we've already mentioned during our conversation, sometimes you have uneven application within institutions. And so I keep hearing again and again, well, we have this really high quality program over here and they have quality assurance standards and we even see it in enrollment, but these other programs, and it's typically a story where they won't play ball, so to speak, and you have those little silos within the institution.

Bethany Simunich: But that being said, quality assurance is actually a very robust way to think about online learning, and it's not just course design, just like in a good online ecosystem is not just about course design. So institutions are practicing various things around, for example, effective teaching for online courses and faculty support around that, unique supports for online learners. And we've seen an uptick in that in CHLOE data in terms of making sure that those who are studying fully online, they have access to advising services and library services. There are some parts of that that are still lagging, like tutoring services. We found only about half of institutions reported having that. So in some cases, they're not telling their story around quality assurance and making these promises to potential students and current students because they don't have a full story. And that goes back to some of those issues that can surface from decentralization, from being siloed.

Bethany Simunich: But it also, I think, stems from an issue of that lack of clear leadership in some places. If this is a strategic priority and you know that we are competing in a much more competitive online marketplace, that's a data point from CHLOE 10, then these are some of the hard discussions that we're going to have to have. In focus groups, there were some participants who said, "We are doing this at our institution and we are using it in our marketing, and it has become a competitive advantage." We've seen over the years that relying on simply your institutional name as a quality signal, that has been declining. Students want to be assured in some way that if I come to your institution, even that big name institution, am I going to have the same quality learning experience as I would if I were taking this program, for example, on campus?

Bethany Simunich: So I think institutions are kind of waking up to the fact that they're going to have to tell their story, and there's different ways that you could focus on that student support angle. Like I said, it doesn't have to just be about design, but at some point we have to have some of those hard conversations about even minimal quality assurance because you need that to remain competitive. And I think Richard even goes into this in his article that in this next era and in this competitive marketplace, it's no longer good enough to simply have an online program. You need some way to be competitive with that. And one of those ways really to compete is to use quality as a differentiating factor.

Sophie White: Yeah, I love that take on that you can't just use your institutional name to - I do too. Infer quality is really a good point. I've been thinking about this a bit this week. We'll see what happens, but this was the week that Harvard announced the AI clone professor. I saw. So I feel like I've been thinking about this issue of if you're an institution like Harvard who has an international renown across the world and then you're doing something experimental like an AI clone professor, does that add to or take away from your institutional reputation?

Melissa Vito: In every word. One of the things that we did that I started thinking about during the pandemic is how are we measuring the impact of all the work we're doing around faculty development because we're doing tons of it and we still do. And we brought digital learning in with our teaching and learning center. So it's teaching, learning, and digital transformation now, which makes it easier for us to think about quality. You know what I mean? To think about things more broadly. And we always say we're not just driven by modality. It's these things that drive us across the board. But early on, I remember talking to the provost and I said, "Are you okay if I go talk to institutional research and see if maybe we could fund a position that would be dedicated to our area?" So not only were we able to do it, but we found someone who is actually just rock star.

Melissa Vito: And so we do look at the actual impact of both faculty development programs. We do stuff with AQ. They do some research every five or six years, but we're doing stuff looking at our programs and our locally developed ones. But we also look at our courses and the courses that we're transforming or doing some different work and we're finding lowered rates and we're focusing on online, big courses that some of our residential students take, but all of our online students take. And so some of the core that are required almost no matter where you enter UT San Antonio, some of those speed bump courses. And we're finding lower rates of DFW, higher rates of As and Bs on the quantitative end, along with qualitative, what we might expect, which is more engagement from students, and actually more positive feelings from faculty. Their course evaluations go up.

Melissa Vito: So I mean, I was just going to throw out as a strategy for people who are trying to think about, God, how do I actually describe impact through storytelling is so important, but if you can just load a data point into that story, then you've got the whole package and it does matter. I mean, it really does

Sophie White: Matter. I'm curious, Kristen, I think AI has also been such a disruptive technology in the past few years for higher education and technology in general. I know your report conversation focused on AI and online learning. Do you want to spend some time talking about that, what you learned from it and what the impacts are?

Kristen Gay: Yeah. I was going to say, I can't believe we've made it this far without talking about AI much. I know we talked about it a little bit, but.

Melissa Vito: We've got a solid twenty minutes.

Kristen Gay: I know. The alarms are going off. We haven't talked about it yet. Bring us on. That's right. Yeah, it was fascinating really. I think online learning leaders, the focus group participants we talked to are not just participating in institutional strategy around AI. In a lot of cases, they're driving those collaborations and those conversations. And I think their background with innovation, technology, flexible course design, I think that has been such an asset in working on AI strategy. I think AI is, as we talked about, it's a real opportunity to rethink or it's giving us a real opportunity to rethink some of the elements of course design, and that's online and face-to-face and everything in between that we take for granted, like assessment, instructor presence. That was something that was really coming through in our conversations. And I think instructor presence is one that I'm especially puzzling over because that's important across modalities, but how do we really figure out what it is that means to students?

Kristen Gay: That can mean a lot of different things. I know in other EDUCAUSE research, what we've seen is that students describe it as something as simple as my instructor knowing my name or feeling like there's a level of accountability in that relationship with the instructor and with their peers. So I think that's something for us to keep digging into in particular along with assessment. And I think the other key thing that stood out to me from the AI report is that although experimentation and innovation has been great and we have largely been full steam ahead on that, data that supports the impact of that experimentation is lagging. And so we have maybe data about usage and about general perceptions from students and faculty about AI, but a lot of times we're lacking the ROI data, the impact data. And some of the participants shared that the reason for that is because there's a real lack of baseline data.

Kristen Gay: We have data. How about what efficiencies look like, what outcomes look like, but we didn't have time maybe to gather that baseline data because we were moving so quickly into AI integration. And so I think that was an interesting challenge that emerged as well.

Sophie White: Melissa, how do you address this instructor presence question? That really resonated for me just thinking about sense of belonging.

Melissa Vito: I know how students connect to the community. I actually wrote that down because to be honest with you, because I thought about that and I though, I think I want to spark some more conversations about it. I mean, part of it is I thought Kristen, it was interesting to your point, how do students define that? And I mean, knowing my name, that's amazing. I think our work using AI has been more around how faculty can use it to develop their courses. And then also knowing that really it's part of a workforce expectation and that's been made very clear and we all feel it, that the way that it can be integrated in an assignment or an entire course or not at all is up to the faculty member. So we haven't tried to mandate anything excepting that you have a policy and then we have a lot of work that we're doing.

Melissa Vito: But the instructor presence thing, I think it's when we think about what makes why students do better in courses where we use a quality matters rubric or where we've done a full transformation, we talk about things like an instructor presence as closely linked to a sense of engagement in the individual course because that does generally come from a specific person. And I think for me, I want to dig into that a little bit more and see what it really does look like for students beyond knowing my name or making me feel a sense of connection to the community. Are there some other things that we do that motivate that to happen and maybe we need to name it because I don't think we always do, at least in our team.

Bethany Simunich: Could I add on one thing, Kristen? Please. Only because you mentioned baseline data and anytime a lack of baseline data is mentioned, I need to hop in and say this. This lack of baseline data, it is an issue. It is a pervasive issue in online learning. It is something that those of us who work in quality assurance deal with daily because lots of institutions will implement even minimum quality standards and they'll collect the data after, but they do not have the baseline data. And therefore again and again and again, they are hard pressed to show ROI beyond anecdotal stories or other type of qualitative data because they didn't collect the baseline data. So higher education is learning by doing with AI right now. That makes sense. I think that's what has to happen, but we're implementing faster than we're building these evidence systems. So the takeaway, I don't want the takeaway to be that experimenting first is somehow negative or wrong or bad, especially in the case of emerging technologies like AI.

Bethany Simunich: But the problem is when you experiment but you never evaluate and then subsequently you scale anyway, that is the problem. So just to message out to all of the listeners, it is not too late to collect baseline data. Even if you've already started deep into that exploration with AI, think about really what your goals are. And I think this is part of the conversation around AI as well. And Kristen, I'm sure you have a lot to add to this, but why are you using AI? For what purpose? And it could be administrative, it could be helping students learn how to use it better and become just better digital citizens. It could be for faculty, for assistance in course design, but why are you using AI? Are you using it to try to solve a problem? That is a key to you that you should be collecting some baseline data around that.

Bethany Simunich: If you're just experimenting, you still really are trying to determine if it makes something better. Does this give a more richer experience? Does this introduce efficiencies? So even things around collecting efficiency data, but don't lose that opportunity to collect that baseline data. Otherwise, you're going to have the same problem that we see in quality assurance. It is hard to get others on board when you can't demonstrate that ROI and that data is there, but it really needs to be a purposeful effort.

Melissa Vito: I agree with you. One thing I will say, when we look at things like course transformations or some of the work we do, we do look pre-post, we look at the same faculty members. So Kristen has taught this class for six years. We can go back, we look at where you were, we do propensity score matching to try to make sure that we're not seeing a completely different, you're suddenly teaching in the honors section and we did a course transformation. And so that has been an advantage of having an institutional research partnership because the baseline piece is so important and that can simply mean you're starting now to collect and you'll do this over time, but you can go backwards. It limits sometimes what you can do, but it doesn't negate the fact that you can do some pretty solid research if you're looking for some things that we need to look at as having been consistent, which really our course, faculty member, what the course, how it was taught, and then do some propensity score matching to make sure that the course, the student attributes are relatively similar across multiple years.

Melissa Vito: So anyways, you're right Bethany. Everybody be like Melissa. That's what we do. No, no, no.

Kristen Gay: Good life advice in general,

Melissa Vito: Honestly. Yeah. I'm passionate about this.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. Well, and I'm curious too, based on what you're saying, Melissa and Bethany as well, are there other areas where you see as AI is becoming more integrated into teaching and learning, are there other ways that this might productively disrupt some of the things that we think about online learning or some of our practices?

Melissa Vito: I mean, outside of teaching and learning, it definitely has impact on marketing. We're already seeing that in terms of students just doing more of their own AI-driven search. So we're focusing on different aspects of the funnel. And we know that the thing that's changed is AI because we all think about it. That's a top of mind online learning adjacent kind of way that I know AI is changing how we're thinking about our strategies in marketing to potential students.

Sophie White: And that makes me think of, I know Melissa, you were talking earlier about Texas initiatives of shortening your time to degree. At a larger scale, how do you think that this online learning conversation about strategically positioning online learning, attracting new students speaks to this larger conversation about the value of higher ed? I think about how we are offering these really thoughtful online learning programs at our institutions, and then there is more competition in that marketplace too of non-institutions offering online bootcamp certifications training programs. So where does this whole conversation fit into the larger discussion on higher ed?

Melissa Vito: I think that is what you need to do your next showcase on, or whether it is describing what our students are doing or workforce. How are we telling those stories in a way that people hear them? My probably best degree was journalism as an undergrad because it taught me to always think about audience and how you find a point to intersect with something that has meaning for both of us. So I think you're right. I've seen different responses to the same question of what do employers value most? Did they value something that came from a company or a corporation or do they value something from higher ed? And I have seen answers yes to both of those. So I think we don't yet know, but I think we need to think about also the fact that a student, our relationship with students we should think of as lifetime.

Melissa Vito: Because if you think about students who graduated just a few years ago, I mean, Kristen, even think about your life experience. AI was nowhere on our radar. And I think about our graduates that have only been out a few years that need opportunities to learn things. So I think some of it is those create opportunities for us to think about how we intersect with what are definite needs. And it creates opportunities for us to be a little braver about working with corporations and offering what we can do and a partner. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. I mean, I really do. And I think whether we are looking at faster time to degree, I think we think about online, which I just came from a retreat that the provost had, and I mentioned this and people talked about this, but we think about ourselves as another important pathway and an on-ramp to education that isn't always siloed as fully online only for four full years and only residential or only your master's degree that has to be done in a certain way, but that we engage in those conversations and keep a little flexibility on our part, but that we do a lot of things really well that can, I think, help move some of these conversations into the market and use our alumni who have done online work with us who love what they did.

Melissa Vito: So to tell stories on our behalf.

Bethany Simunich: Melissa, that makes you think of two things from CHLOE conversations. One is there was a really good quote from one of the focus group participants describing online as the connective tissue at an institution. I

Melissa Vito: Saw that.

Bethany Simunich: Lovely. Yes. Yes. Because it spans technology and pedagogy and workforce development and non-credential options and other different pathways. So I thought that was not just lovely and optimistic, but I think it really showcased the potentiality of online moving forward that we no longer need to feel as though we are relegated simply to being a modality for learning. But this also made me think of a good provocative question that Richard addressed in his report, which is what value could online learning offer beyond convenience and beyond enrollment growth? So what are we looking at moving ahead?

Bethany Simunich: Part of it is to stop thinking about this as simply this separate modality that we need to support unique ways and whatnot. Phil Hill, for example, he had a really good post back in June about, especially when you're looking at quality and you're attributing that maybe erroneously to the modality rather than looking at quality as something that holistically should be throughout the institution. So stop looking at it as simply this different modality that we offer these learning experiences and switch your thinking to what can we do maybe online or with digital education that we can't do as easily or can't do as well with campus-based education. So rather than replicating the things at a distance, look at those possibilities maybe. One of those is deeper personalization with AI, which I think is much easier to do with online. It's much easier to scale that with online.

Bethany Simunich: So I know that those personalized pathways, those are something we've talked about for years, but they're very difficult to implement and scale. Can AI make that more efficient? I think that's a great question to explore. Can AI make that more efficient even independent of modality? That's also a good question. Something else to explore is can online or how can it collapse that distance between education and work? I think online especially is well equipped for that because students can have learning experiences that are related to their current job or related to an industry that is geographically local to them while still taking an online program at a geographically distant institution. So we're seeing some of these sector differences as well. Community colleges, for example, for years now, they've been leaning a lot more into that workforce connection, non-degree options, micro-credentials, bootcamps. Four years are still leaning a little bit more deeply into those online graduate programs.

Bethany Simunich: But I think they're also seeing that there is a wide variety of learners out there that are looking for these opportunities. And especially when this is part of your strategy for growing enrollment, you can't put all of your eggs in that proverbial one basket. So I think looking at online a lot more broadly and a lot more robustly and changing the questions we ask is going to do us all a good favor.

Melissa Vito: I agree. Well said.

Sophie White: Yes, that was beautiful.

Kristen Gay: Agreed. I really appreciate this conversation and really the optimism as well. I know there are challenges ahead with differentiation and proving impact and emerging technologies that continue to be disruptive, but I think in both positive and negative ways, I think students have more choices than they maybe have ever had overall, and I think that's really exciting. And I think that this opportunity to really demonstrate impact and tell our stories better might even help boost perceptions of higher education and the value of a college degree. And so I think there's a lot of excitement there for me. And I'm curious for you all, as we close out today, what makes you excited when you look ahead at the future of online learning or maybe most excited?

Bethany Simunich: Well, I'm going to answer a little bit of a different way and I'm going to answer it into what gives me hope, only because I did talk about some things already that I'm excited about. I'm excited to see what benefits AI can bring while still keeping learning human-centered. I think that's going to be a challenge, but I think that's also a place for excitement. But what gets me excited and what gives me a little bit of a hope is I think online leaders are spending less time defending whether online learning could be legitimate and more time asking what it can become. And for those of us that have been in online learning for a long time, we have waited a long time to get to that point and that question. So I think now that it has become really central to most institutions' strategic goals, now that they get the feedback from students, we have data points from CHLOE to back this up, that we have not just sustained student interest in online options, but it is increasing.

Bethany Simunich: When you look at enrollment numbers, students may say in a survey that they prefer face-to-face, but in terms of actually enrolling in that section, they're still going for that convenience factor for a variety of reasons that I think just to increase, it's going to increase as we move forward. So I think that students have shown us that they want different opportunities, especially modality opportunities. It is now central to institutions. I think we are dealing head-on with that leadership question. In some cases, it is a lack of true leadership. You need to have somebody at the right table and at the right level to actually lead these things. But I'm excited that the conversation is finally turning. I'm excited that we're no longer, at least in most circles, answering the question, is online good? Is this modality good? Because like I said, those of us that have been in this for decades, we have been in those conversations and it's like an endless loop.

Bethany Simunich: So the question's now becoming, how can we do it better? How can we do it differently? How can we support online learners in unique ways? And how can we use all of these things to differentiate ourselves as an online learning leader in this highly competitive marketplace? To me, that's exciting because it opens that conversation, I think, in ways all of us have wanted it opened in years and we can stop battling the naysayers and say, look at all the things that you can do and maybe do better with online.

Melissa Vito: Awesome. Can I add one thought? Building on everything you said since you asked us, I think that taking everything you described, Bethany, which is really that online is becoming normalized and not in a bad way, it's just now part of what we do, which is awesome. The next piece that gives me hope is to realize that some of the COLOs now may become a provost in a few years. And actually student affairs is now shown to be a pipeline into presidencies, which nobody would've thought of 15 or 20 years ago. And I would love to see COLOs as being seen as a pipeline into broader institutional leadership, because honestly, that is where we will be able to make more systemic enduring and transformational changes that ensure that we continue to move forward and don't stay ossified in what we do in online, but that it continues to grow as everything else does around higher education.

Melissa Vito: So that's what gives me hope, and I think we're just so close.

Sophie White: So inspired by the way that we wrapped up this conversation and the way that we're looking at it from a collaborative standpoint as higher ed and where we can really advance and thrive into the future. So thank you so much, Kristen, Melissa, Bethany for being part of the discussion today. And thank you for all the fantastic work you're doing for higher ed.

Melissa Vito: Thank you.