Chief online learning officers (COLOs) are often the jack of all trades within our institutions. To effectively manage our online enterprise, we are at the intersection of many other parts of the college or university, from enrollment management to academic affairs to student affairs to operations. Our ability to see across our institutional silos and advocate for online learners’ unique needs also offers us an opportunity to help improve processes for all students at our institutions.
With that in mind, COLOs have a responsibility to serve as change agents within their institutions. We help our faculty colleagues and fellow administrators consider new ways of learning and teaching. We help our staff modernize processes and embrace technology tools that increase efficiency and accessibility for all stakeholders, including online learners. In short, we help make postsecondary education a possibility for learners who would not have been able to access our campuses in a traditional classroom setting.
COLOs’ ability to see across our organizations and foster innovation also primes us for future growth potential in our own professional roles. The ability to quickly adapt to changing markets, manage resources entrepreneurially and plan for external forces are standout qualities many COLOs possess. As we look to the future of postsecondary education, COLOs’ leadership and expertise will become increasingly central to the success of colleges and universities.
Aligning with Learner Demands in the Realm of Lifelong Learning
First, COLOs must intimately understand the unique differences of the online learners their units serve. Online education is about so much more than simply offering coursework through an online modality. Certainly, the remote learning pivot during the pandemic was a stark reminder of that. Online units often serve post-traditional students balancing life responsibilities alongside their academic pursuits. They include adult learners, working professionals, caregivers, military-connected students and students of all ages who prefer the autonomy and flexibility online education offers. Institutional efforts to improve how we serve online students have a mutual benefit of improving user experience and accessibility for many of our campus-based populations, too. In short, to be planning for online learners is to be planning for today’s learners.
That said, it is also important for COLOs to understand that many of their fellow administrators have limited experience teaching or learning through an online modality, or they may assume the pandemic pivot to remote learning is synonymous with all online education. They may presume that particular academic disciplines are impossible to do online. They may struggle to relate to the delicate balancing act that post-traditional students often managing their academic pursuits alongside other life responsibilities perform. They may make assumptions about students’ cultural capital and value the exclusivity of traditional college experiences, despite those traditions sometimes being rooted in inequity. COLOs must help dismantle these fallacies and help tell the story of the learners we serve. We must make the case that today’s learners deserve better, and the status quo won’t cut it when we’re competing for enrollments.
Finally, a COLO must align their unit’s efforts with institutional leadership’s goals and priorities. They must demonstrate how their unit contributes toward—or, even better, accelerates—progress toward these goals. This alignment must happen at various levels. From partnering with deans and unit leaders to leveraging online education as a tool to diversify an academic portfolio and enrollment pipelines. It also involves partnering with enrollment management and student affairs to help re-enroll, retain and graduate traditional students who need to step away from the campus environment and finish up through online coursework. COLOs play an important role in cultivating mutually beneficial partnerships between online divisions and other campus stakeholders. Reciprocal collaboration offers the opportunity to shape priorities and ensure efforts extend across modalities, thus benefiting the whole organization.
Key Strategies to Enhance Engagement and Retention
Online learning offers a wealth of data about the student experience if you know where to look and ask the right questions. This data becomes an incredible tool for student-facing teams who can use it to drive action and proactive outreach. Here are some of my favorite strategies.
The Crucial First Few Days: Monitoring Student Engagement
Pay close attention to student engagement in their online courses during the first few days of a term. Whether they start off on strong footing or struggle to get plugged in, students’ initial experiences can make or break their likelihood to persist. Targeted attention toward students who have not yet engaged can help get students on track or guide them to adjust before the stakes become more serious. This targeted outreach can come from faculty, success coaches or advisors, but the takeaway is the same: There are real people behind the screen, we notice and care about you, and we want you to succeed.
Autonomy with Connection: Creating Belonging in Online Learning
Just because online learners want autonomy does not mean they want to feel isolated. Developing students’ sense of belonging is a powerful tool in the retention playbook. The importance of integration has long been touted for traditional college students, and online learners crave it too. However, student engagement looks different in an online environment. Whereas campus populations might be involved with clubs or campus employment, online learners gravitate toward personalized mentorship (with mentor matching based on mutual criteria of interest) and career-focused opportunities. Reconsider campus traditions or rituals into virtual alternatives, so your online learners have opportunities to feel included in student life.
Retention as a Continuous Effort: Beyond Annual Data
Remember that retention is an ongoing, year-round project and not just an annual IPEDS census data snapshot. Effective enrollment management within an online enterprise requires both stewarding prospective student pipelines and retaining existing students until they achieve their education goal. If a current student disengages or drops coursework, that offers a clear opportunity for student-facing teams to engage and help develop a re-enrollment plan. Pay close attention to retention from session to session, term to term and year to year. Also, COLOs should work closely with your institutional research teams to adapt their reporting tools to help capture these more dynamic views of retention data, if they don’t already.
Trends in Online Learning
Inter-Institution Collaboration
Resource constraints coupled with an urgent need to diversify enrollments beyond traditional campus populations will drive institutions to increasingly look for inter-institution partnership opportunities where courses and specialty degree pathways can become a shared endeavor between partner schools. These collaborations would allow institutions to focus their limited resources and faculty and staff capacity on their unique programs and minimize time and effort on building prerequisite or foundational courses that are redundant across institutions.
Evolving Online Student Demographics
Online units will see increasing demand among a wider variety of student groups in addition to post-traditional populations. Enrollment will likely grow to include more significant numbers of traditional-aged or younger students, including those who arrive at college after significant prior experience with K-12 online coursework. Also, expanded internet access within emerging global economies will spur demand among internationally located adult learners. COLOs must think carefully about how to adapt their operations as their online student demographics evolve.
Adopting Year-Round, Dynamic Operations
The traditional academic calendar is a byproduct of the residential campus experience, but today’s learners (especially those online) demand more flexibility and continuous enrollment options that fit into their busy schedules. They want shorter course time, so they can focus their energy on multiple courses at once—and they want the ability to stop in and out as life demands it. These dynamic enrollment behaviors will prompt us to re-examine other policies and practices by asking ourselves where, when and how learning happens. Traditionally, faculty and student schedules have been rigid and may have served as barriers to innovative educational practices. Looking ahead, these practices will have to evolve to meet the expectations of tomorrow’s learners across all modalities.
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