So this used to be a weekly newsletter! It's been a few weeks since I sent one of these out, but I have a good excuse. My August is always busy, but this August was especially busy since my wife and I moved into a new house and prepped our old house to sell. That made for a lot of work, and I'm glad that we're past the bulk of it. We have a lot of unpacking and settling in to do, but all our stuff is at the new house and the old house is on the market. If you're looking for a four-bedroom in the Nashville area, let me know!

This didn't leave a lot of time for newsletter writing, as you might imagine. Today, however, I have no moving-related tasks on my agenda, so I've made some time to write this and share a few items of potential interest. Hopefully, I'll be back on my Thursday-or-Friday weekly schedule later this week.

Benchmarking Online Education

The online education wings of most colleges and universities have changed a lot since 2020, with online units moving in from the periphery to the center of operations at most institutions. On last week's podcast, we took a look at the state of online education in the United States by exploring data from the 2025 Benchmarking Online Enterprise Survey conducted by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. UPCEA sponsors the Intentional Teaching podcast, and thanks to that relationship, I was able to hear a few of the results of this year’s survey shortly before it was released, and those data points were interesting enough that I wanted to learn more.

On the show, I talked with Bruce Etter, senior director of research and consulting at UPCEA, and Julie Uranis, senior vice president of online and strategic initiatives at UPCEA. Bruce led the data analysis for the Benchmarking Online Enterprise Survey, or BOnES as they called it UPCEA, and he shared some enlightening results from the survey. This was Julie's second appearance on the podcast, and she came back to help us situate the new survey results in the history and changing landscape of online education.

Although BOnES surveyed chief online learning officers, there’s a lot in the report of interest to faculty and instructional designers and educational developers, and Bruce and Julie did a great job walking us through some key takeaways. Here are some that stood out to me:

• In the past, it was typical for faculty to teach online courses as an "overload" of some kind, but BOnES data show that 92% of online programs feature courses taught as part of faculty member's standard teaching responsibilities. Online teaching has become one of multiple modalities in which faculty teach regularly.
• Three-quarters of chief online officers surveyed said they plan to have a great market share of online enrollments in the future, but only 23% said their current marketing is better than their competitors. The rising tide of online enrollments won't lift all boats--some institutions will fare better than others.
• Staffing at online education units is growing, with the median staff size increasing from 15 last year to 20 this year. Julie pointed out that successful online education requires investment of resources. You might need as many buildings as onsite education does, but you need people and you need technology.

​You can listen to my full conversation with Bruce Etter and Julie Uranis about the BOnES report here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. And you can read the full 2025 BOnES report through the UPCEA website.

And on Tuesday, September 16th, between 1pm and 2pm Central, Bruce and Julie and I will be live on CORe, UPCEA's online community platform, for an "Ask Me Anything" style event focused on the 2025 BOnES report. If you're an UPCEA member, join us during that our for some live text chat!

Learning Curve with Jeff Young

This summer when I attended HigherEd PodCon, I had the chance to meet higher ed journalist Jeffrey R. Young for the first time in person. Jeff and I go way back, probably to a phone interview nearly two decades ago when he was covering educational technology for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but I'm pretty sure we hadn't met in person since this summer. I was excited to learn that he was launching a new podcast focused on AI and education, and I'm happy to share that the first two episodes of his new show, Learning Curve, are now out!

Jeff's first episode, "What Kind of Intelligence Is AI?", features an interview with Mutlu Cukurova of University College London about the nature of human intelligence and how that can inform the ways we understand artificial intelligence. I really appreciated Cukurova's notion that AI is not so much an approximation of human intelligence but instead a kind of alternative to human intelligence. He also pointed out that it's still early days for AI, drawing a comparison to the early days of automobiles when the new "horseless carriages" still had to accommodate a horse in case the engine didn't work. We might be in the "still needs to work with a horse" phase of AI right now, implying that in a decade or two AI will look and function very differently than it does now.

Jeff has a great interview style, weaving together the guest conversation with his own observations and summaries. I'm looking forward to listening to his second episode, "What If College Teaching Was Redesigned with AI in Mind?", featuring interviews with Paul LeBlanc and Maha Bali.

You can listen to Learning Curve via the links above or wherever you get your podcasts.

This Week in Backyard Birding

As I mentioned, my family and I have moved into a new house which means a new yard which means new birdfeeders! It was my birthday this weekend, and Emily got me one of those fancy birdfeeders with a webcam inside. She also got me one a couple of years ago for Christmas, but I don't think the technology was ready for primetime back then. This new feeder, on other hand, was easy to set up and easy to use and I'm hoping it will be reliable over time, too!

We had our first visitor to the new feeder yesterday, a tufted titmouse, which is a very common backyard bird here in Middle Tennessee. Thanks to the birdfeeder's app, I now get notifications whenever our feeder gets a visitor, along with a short video of our new feathered friend! I'm really going to enjoy this.

I had 39 bird species on the "yard list" at my old house, which is to say that I saw or heard 39 different species of birds while in my yard over the time I lived there. Bird #39 was a great blue heron who flew overhead just last week as Emily and I were there cleaning a few last things out of the house! What a way to finish that yard list.

Thanks for reading!

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