Professional, Continuing, and Online Education Update by UPCEA

Americans looking for proof of the value of higher ed - Matt Zalaznick, University Business

2026-06-19T06:10:00.000-04:00

Americans need some convincing about the true value of higher ed. They “haven’t given up on college,” but institutions need to prove that what students learn will lead to civic and economic opportunities, says a new analysis. And the most important place to provide that evidence is in the communities surrounding campus, says the report, “Trust in Higher Education Starts Local,” from C&S (Campus and Community Solutions), a civic education nonprofit.“Higher ed doesn’t have a PR problem. It has a proof problem,” says the organization that surveyed more than 2,400 adults in the U.S. to examine attitudes toward colleges and universities—and to chart a path forward.

https://universitybusiness.com/americans-looking-for-proof-in-the-value-of-higher-ed/

A framework for ensuring student AI proficiency - Margaret Ellis, Times Higher Education

2026-06-19T06:00:00.000-04:00

Over the past few semesters, I have structured my teaching around a framework that helps students build that capability: demystify, use and reflect. Many students arrive with strong opinions about AI but only a partial understanding of how these systems work. Some see them as nearly magical tools that can produce answers instantly. Others dismiss them as unreliable or assume they are only useful for technical specialists. Demystifying AI begins with explaining the basic ideas behind large language models (LLMs) and related systems. We show students how these models are trained, what kinds of data they rely on and why their outputs can sometimes appear confident even when they are incorrect.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/framework-ensuring-student-ai-proficiency

The state of international enrollment in 6 charts - Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive

2026-06-19T06:00:00.000-04:00

Last summer, financial analysts predicted that the Trump administration’s restrictions on international enrollment and increased scrutiny of foreign students would create financial risk for colleges. They argued that those policies tarnish the reputational shine of U.S. higher education and could have an outsized impact on tuition revenue, as international students often pay full price. nrollment data has done little to assuage those concerns. Even before President Donald Trump retook office lastE year, growth in international enrollment in the U.S. had slowed after rebounding following the pandemic.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/the-state-of-international-enrollment-in-6-charts/821753/

Transforming Enrollment Management in the Field of Online Learning - Vickie S. Cook, OLC Online Learning Journal

2026-06-18T06:10:00.000-04:00

The landscape of enrollment management in higher education related to all modalities of learning is undergoing a significant transformation driven by evolving student expectations, shifting demographics, and the necessity for institutions to optimize operational efficiency. Traditionally centered on human-driven processes and relational strategies, enrollment management for online learning enterprises must now integrate advanced technologies such as Business Process Automation (BPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to remain effective and competitive. This manuscript for online learning administrators and enrollment management leaders will explore the systems-level continuum from Business Process Mapping (BPM) to AI-driven functionality, highlighting the strategic evolution of enrollment operations within the field of online learning.

https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/article/view/5482/1584

UPCEA Releases Guidebook on Employer Engagement and Credential Innovation

2026-06-18T06:05:00.000-04:00

UPCEA, the online and professional education association, today released a new guidebook designed to help colleges and universities strengthen employer partnerships and build institutional capacity for workforce-aligned credential innovation. Developed through a multi-year grant-funded initiative, Expanding Institutional Capacity for Employer Engagement in Credential Innovation provides higher education leaders with practical frameworks, implementation tools, and practitioner-informed strategies for advancing University-to-Business (U2B) engagement. The guidebook builds on UPCEA’s ongoing multi-year credential innovation initiative focused on accelerating the development and delivery of workforce-responsive, noncredit credentials and skills-based learning pathways.

https://www.highereddive.com/press-release/20260609-upcea-releases-guidebook-on-employer-engagement-and-credential-innovation-1/

Remote work — not AI — has sidelined recent college graduates, research finds - Andrea Hsu, NPR

2026-06-18T06:00:00.000-04:00

The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates. But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work. An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive into the flexible work arrangements at one unnamed Fortune 500 tech company, reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely. Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put such workers in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/01/nx-s1-5843076/remote-work-college-graduates-unemployment-ai

Coursera Launches Its Short-Form Content With AI Curation - Edited by Adam Harrie, this article was written with the assistance of AI; Trend-Hunter

2026-06-17T06:10:00.000-04:00

Coursera introduced a scrollable short-form content feed that delivers bite-sized educational videos and explainers, featuring AI-driven personalization tailored to users’ interests, learning habits, career goals and previous course activity. The company positioned the feature as an entry point to deeper learning experiences rather than a replacement for full-length courses and certification programs.The feed surfaces content across subjects such as coding, data science, business, productivity and personal development, while continuously adapting recommendations based on user engagement and learning behavior. The design mirrors recommendation-driven content platforms, emphasizing discoverability and short-form learning experiences.

https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/shortform-feed-content

What is CourseAI? - Moodle

2026-06-17T06:05:00.000-04:00

CourseAI is a Moodle solutions plugin that turns a topic description or a set of uploaded materials into a fully structured course in under three minutes. Feed it a PDF, a video, an audio file or a simple prompt — and it generates sections, activities, assessments, completion tracking and even illustrations. Educators then review, adjust and make it their own.

How it works - CourseAI follows three simple steps:

Prompt. Choose your subject or upload existing materials — a PDF, audio or video file — to use as the foundation for your course.

Generate. Select your scripting options and let CourseAI do the work. Results arrive in under three minutes, built on the ABC Learning Design method.

Create. Review the generated structure, adjust anything that needs it, and publish. Then CourseAI’s job is done — the course is all yours.

https://moodle.com/news/moodle-plugin-courseai/

Explaining reported generative AI engagement in higher education: an extended TAM with ethical compatibility and reliance-based trust - Zhenyu Liu, et al: Nature

2026-06-17T06:00:00.000-04:00

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools into higher education has intensified conversations regarding usefulness, ethical alignment, and responsible engagement. Unlike traditional technology acceptance studies that focus on initial use, this study examines AI use intensity among active university users. Building on an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the model incorporates AI-Alignment Construct, reliance-based trust in AI outputs, and normative alignment within academic contexts. Data were collected from 637 university students and analyzed using variance-based structural equation modeling. The results indicate that perceived usefulness remains the strongest predictor of AI use. Furthermore, reliance-based trust and AI-Alignment Construct demonstrate statistically significant correlations with engagement, whereas moderation hypotheses were not supported.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-56912-9

Where today's job seekers have the best chance of getting hired - Mark Huffman, Consumer Affairs

2026-06-16T06:10:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for the fastest path to employment, restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues, and tourism-related businesses are leading the way. Leisure and hospitality added roughly 70,000 jobs in May, making it the strongest-performing sector by a wide margin. Employers appear to be ramping up staffing ahead of the summer travel season. Healthcare continues to be one of the most reliable sources of job growth in the U.S. economy. The sector added between 35,000 and 47,000 jobs in May, depending on the data series cited, continuing a multiyear hiring trend fueled by an aging population and persistent demand for medical services. Local government hiring surged in May, adding approximately 55,000 jobs. Schools, public services, and municipal agencies accounted for much of the increase.

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/where-todays-job-seekers-have-the-best-chance-of-getting-hired-060526.html

Online Is a "Safe Space" in War - Robert Ubell, AI Learning Insights Substack

2026-06-16T06:05:00.000-04:00

When remote classes were first tested so many years ago, who would have dreamed they would become a refuge for students and faculty cut off from campus by traumatic conflict? When the U.S. and Israel unexpectedly launched a war with Iran in late February, American colleges with branches in the Middle East took cues from the global Covid epidemic, closing campuses, moving everything online.1 Qatar ordered all schools and universities to switch to distance learning on the first day of the conflict. By late March, after Iran threatened that U.S. campuses were legitimate targets, American campuses in the country—including those run by Georgetown, Virginia Commonwealth, and Texas A&M—had moved online-only, where they remain.2 Universities in Ukraine and Gaza also found a haven in remote education, moving to digital learning to maintain classes. Online education has assumed a grim challenge for which it was never intended, securing higher education for students as campuses crumble under attack. In Gaza, for example, despite the destruction of nearly all universities in the zone, learning and academic life continues remarkably online.

https://ailearninsights.substack.com/p/online-is-a-safe-space-in-war

92% of US employers willing to offer higher starting salaries to graduates with micro-credentials - Business Wire

2026-06-16T06:00:00.000-04:00

New Coursera report highlights growing ROI on industry micro-credentials for learners, employees, and employers

79% of US employers say micro-credential holders demonstrate improved productivity in their first year

85% of US graduates with micro-credentials report securing a role aligned to their field within 12 months

“Over the next decade, over 1.2 billion people are due to enter the global workforce, while 60% of the world’s existing workforce will also require reskilling,” said Marni Baker Stein, Chief Content Officer, Coursera. “This report provides clear evidence that job-relevant industry micro-credentials are helping to meet an unprecedented demand for skills, and providing tangible ROI for students, employers, and universities that offer them.”

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260604586976/en/92-of-US-employers-willing-to-offer-higher-starting-salaries-to-graduates-with-micro-credentials

New Federal Guidelines Threaten Almost Half of Graduate Arts Programs - Zachary Small, NY Times

2026-06-15T06:10:00.000-04:00

The Education Department is finalizing guidelines for an earnings test that would punish nearly half of all graduate programs in visual arts, music and performance based on the low income of recent alumni, according to the government’s calculations. The proposed guidelines apply to all university programs, and institutions whose alumni fail to meet them twice in three years could lose their ability to enroll students using federal loans. Those students would most likely need to transfer to other programs or quit their education. According to experts, that would lead to a sharp decrease in enrollment and the likelihood of school closures. For master’s degree programs, the agency would calculate the earnings of alumni four years after graduation to see whether they earn more than the median salary for working adults aged 25 to 34 who have a bachelor’s degree. Previous tests measured all programs against the salary of working adults with high school diplomas — a lower threshold for universities to pass.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/arts/design/education-department-earnings-salary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nlA.JoK8.8GEnrT4TYdqw&smid=url-share

Higher ed’s next crisis won’t start in the classroom. It will start in the cloud - James L. Norrie, University Business

2026-06-15T06:05:00.000-04:00

Higher education has spent years worrying about enrollment cliffs, declining public trust, political polarization, and, as we enter the AI era, the commoditization of knowledge and the future value of degrees. Those concerns are real and deserve attention. But another crisis is quietly forming beneath the surface of nearly every college and university, and unlike many institutional challenges, this one may arrive globally and all at once, in a wave of distrust and disruption. This month’s breach involving the Canvas learning management platform was a stark warning. The immediate discussion focused on familiar questions: Who was responsible? Was the institution or the software vendor liable? Could FERPA violations emerge if protected student information had been exposed? Even institutions not directly impacted by the incident should pay attention because the uncomfortable answer to many of those questions is some version of “yes.”

https://universitybusiness.com/higher-eds-next-crisis-wont-start-in-the-classroom-it-will-start-in-the-cloud/

The board’s role in managing emerging AI risks - McKinsey

2026-06-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

During a recent panel discussion, McKinsey and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) gathered top chief information security officers (CISOs) and board directors, highlighting four priorities for effective oversight: strengthening governance and accountability, balancing innovation with risk, building real-time risk-management capabilities, and improving AI fluency in the boardroom. Together, these shifts signal that AI is no longer just a technology topic; it is now a core enterprise risk and strategic differentiator (see sidebar, “On the street: Sights and sounds from the world’s largest cybersecurity conference”).

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-technology/overview/cybersecurity/the-boards-role-in-managing-emerging-ai-risks

Reimagining What Higher Education Can Be - Kristen Turner, Drew University

2026-06-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

Students increasingly need skills that extend beyond traditional academic disciplines. They need to learn how to collaborate, solve complex problems, and adapt to new challenges. Drew’s new college is designed to address those realities. Rather than focusing solely on course credits and exams, students develop personalized learning pathways built around inquiry, mentorship, and real-world problem solving. They work on projects connected to community partners, explore interdisciplinary questions, and build portfolios that demonstrate their abilities. The goal is not simply to complete assignments. It is to develop the habits of mind that allow students to navigate an uncertain and evolving world. “We want students to prototype their lives,” Turner says. “To try things, explore their interests, and discover what they want to pursue.”

https://drew.edu/2026/06/11/reimagining-what-higher-education-can-be/

A framework for ensuring student AI proficiency - Margaret Ellis, Times Higher Education

2026-06-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/framework-ensuring-student-ai-proficiency

‘If we make AI the enemy then surely it must become one’ - Stuart Christie, Times Higher Education

2026-06-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

Chatbots sit on our students’ shoulders, gathering information meticulously, whispering advice in their ears – and yet, it often comes up short. Still, GenAI’s hallucinations allow learners and educators to re-centre their thinking, recasting themselves as optimisers of fallible outputs. GenAI can also be used to challenge the untested assumptions of our own stances and approaches. Referencing my own attempts to come to grips with AI “plus/minus” for one class, I’ll show one way forward for instructors interested in short-course design using AI-assisted pedagogy. GenAI can neither judge nor evaluate. Its algorithms simply isolate and aggregate character strings iteratively, based on prior patterns. It also lacks responsiveness to surrounding context. By contrast, teachers and learners debating value propositions via GenAI are best placed to arrive at discoveries in real time in an ongoing process of collective ethical contestation.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/if-we-make-ai-enemy-then-surely-it-must-become-one

Five words and a GenAI prompt to spark deeper online learning - María Robertha Leal Isida and Dania Arriola Arteaga, Times Higher Ed

2026-06-12T06:10:00.000-04:00

We developed the “5E” framework (engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate) to structure our online sessions around five learning stages. We then used GenAI to speed up lesson design and respond to our students’ needs in real time. Not only did this approach increase participation and deepen understanding of complex topics but it also allowed us to cater to students’ varying levels of existing knowledge and disciplinary backgrounds.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/five-words-and-genai-prompt-spark-deeper-online-learning

Will AI Help Revive the ‘Stale’ OPM Market? - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed

2026-06-12T06:05:00.000-04:00

Over the past few years, OPMs—including Coursera, iDesign and 2U—have adopted AI-powered features designed to enhance support for instructors and students through coaching, content creation, tutoring and curriculum mapping. According to an April analysis, 70 percent of OPMs are now deploying AI for such purposes. But experts are skeptical that the AI boom will have a big payoff for the beleaguered OPM market, which is attempting to rebound with the help of private equity after years of declining revenues, reputational damage and mounting government scrutiny.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2026/06/01/will-ai-help-revive-stale-opm-market

Are academics making an (em) dash for AI? - Times Higher Education

2026-06-12T06:00:00.000-04:00

In the four years since its commercial launch, generative artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on personal and professional life. But are academics enthusiasts or sceptics? Five scholars explain how the technology has affected their own practice – for good and bad. Artificial intelligence writing is instantly recognisable, we are told—soulless, dispassionate, and devoid of the spark that marks genuine thought. Historian Jonathan Rees, in Academe this spring, calls it “bland, unspecific, pedestrian prose”. Journalist and UCL academic Sarfraz Manzoor, in a recent piece for The Independent, concluded that an AI article his students read was “competent but forgettable”. Scroll through r/professors on any given day and you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of colleagues enthusiastically nodding along and complaining bitterly about students submitting work that any fool can see was written by a machine.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/are-academics-making-em-dash-ai

Bypassing the Bachelor’s Degree - Josh Moody, Inside Higher Ed

2026-06-11T06:10:00.000-04:00

Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School created a pathway for students to earn a master’s degree without a bachelor’s. Officials say the program helps passionate students find their footing and fills much-needed workforce roles in the counseling field. Kevin Doyle, president of Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School, said the institution was inspired to launch the program to open doors for passionate students whose academic and career journeys weren’t a straight path and to fill gaps in the counseling workforce. “We frequently got calls from people who badly wanted to come to our school, and in the initial screening, they would disclose that they didn’t have a bachelor’s degree,” Doyle said. “We often could feel the passion that they had and wanted to be helpful to these folks. But thinking narrowly—before we did more exploration of this concept, we just referred them to go back and finish their bachelor’s degree and call us, two years from now, four years from now, whatever.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-students-and-postdocs/2026/06/02/bypassing-bachelors-degree

Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers - Alejandro Salinas, et al; SSRN

2026-06-11T06:05:00.000-04:00

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53% vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreement an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6849678

How Personalized AI Tutors Can Help Students Learn - Emma Needleman, Knowledge at Wharton

2026-06-11T06:00:00.000-04:00

The researchers built an AI tutoring platform that gives all students access to the same gen AI chatbot and course materials, but varies the sequence in which practice problems are assigned. In a five-month Python course across 10 Taipei high schools, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: One received a standard sequence of problems progressing from easy to hard, while the other received a personalized sequence, in which an algorithm adjusted problem difficulty based on each student’s performance and interactions with the AI tutor. Because everything else was held constant, this design isolates the impact of personalized homework.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-personalized-ai-tutors-can-help-students-learn/

Tech Future Promotes Continuing Professional Education - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

2026-06-10T06:10:00.000-04:00

It wasn’t that long ago that professional education was the less-respected, fragile forum for night school, weekend programs, extension and applied study at many colleges and universities. More recently housing the nascent online programs of the 1990s, this school or college was last in recognition and stature among the more powerful renowned and acclaimed schools and colleges. The sooner we adapt to more efficient access to external databases and broad retrieval of digital information, the better we will be prepared to shift with the rapidly changing workplace in order to remain relevant and useful as employees. Of course, we will add our own personalities, perspectives, ethos, philosophies and histories to applying the data tapped through technology, thereby adding the value of our thoughts and experiences. Guiding us along the way will be continuing professional education. Professional education will enable us to apply our human understanding and values to empower us to advance even as previous jobs we had held disappear into history.

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/online-trending-now/2026/06/10/tech-future-promotes-continuing-professional