Arizona Online Continues to Shift the Paradigm on Higher Education

As one of the nation’s top online education providers, Arizona Online takes its role as a thought leader seriously. 

During the 2023-24 academic year, the team shared insights with colleagues and peers around the nation to help them understand and adopt best practices in online and digital education. 

In March 2024, Dr. Caleb Simmons, executive director of online education for Arizona Online, sat on a panel with Carmin Chan, Ph.D., former senior director of online student success initiatives at Arizona Online and now vice provost of NAU Online, at the UPCEA Annual Conference in Boston. 

They discussed the issue of revenue and retention, specifically why retention and persistence are not only measures of student success but also vital metrics of revenue generation. Dr. Simmons shared how student success is critical to the mission of online education while also serving as an investment that affects the bottom line. 

The team touched on this same topic earlier in the academic year, hosting a panel titled “Moving Beyond Traditional Metrics: A Discussion of Student Success Metrics For and By Online Educators” at the 2023 Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate conference. 

Arizona Online again partnered with the Online Learning Consortium for a blog published in September 2023. Dr. Simmons penned the post, “A Mission to Serve: An Idealist AND Realistic Approach to the Business of Online Education,” urging digital learning leaders to consider the benefits of prioritizing student success. 

Student success was also the topic of a September 2023 webinar co-hosted by Arizona Online, UPCEA and Mentor Collective. Dr. Simmons, Carmin Chan and Heidi Creel, senior student success coach at Arizona Online, shared their thoughts on how fostering connection helps ensure sustainable online student success, namely, through peer mentorship. 

In a UPCEA-hosted Coffee Chat shortly after the webinar, the team again shared these insights, along with strategies for building a strong online community and fostering a sense of belonging among students. 

At the 2023 UAGC Teaching and Learning Conference, “Working Toward Yes: Open Access as Innovation in Higher Education Culture,” Arizona Online offered its expertise to instructors teaching in the online modality. 

Dr. Simmons led a roundtable session about OpenAI as an effective resource for online educators, giving examples of AI-assisted content creation, assignment generation and grading. 

In another session at the event, Dr. Simmons and the Arizona Online team presented “Creativity Across the Curriculum,” during which they showcased how to use technologies, such as Adobe Creative Cloud, to deepen learning in the online space. 

Arizona Online’s leadership team discussed additional technologies and tools, such as video production and virtual study abroad, in a research presentation and a podcast appearance, respectively. 

Dr. Simmons shared his research on the role of video production and its value for student learning outcomes during a presentation funded by the U of A Center for University Education Scholarship. And he spoke about the possibilities of virtual reality for study abroad on an episode of the U of A podcast Futures in Digital Learning, hosted by Adam Davi.

The Arizona Online team also delved into other aspects of the teaching experience later in the academic year.

In an episode titled “The Emotional Labor of Teaching” on the podcast Teaching in the CTEI (hosted by Angela Solic), Dr. Simmons noted that there are unique challenges and experiences of teaching online — and how the emotional labor of the process is often under-recognized. 

He discussed ways in which instructors can manage the emotional demands of online education, as well as suggested strategies for maintaining personal well-being amidst these challenges. 

Dr. Simmons noted that there are unique challenges and experiences of teaching online — and how the emotional labor of the process is often under-recognized.

Dr. Simmons spoke about this topic again in October 2023 on the New Books Network’s Higher Education Channel. 

The episode, hosted by Dr. Raj Balkaran, was titled “Teaching (and Learning) at a University Online” and explored how Dr. Balkaran and Dr. Simmons both found online and digital learning to be a means of widening the possibilities of their teaching. 

Expanding on this idea, Dr. Simmons wrote an article titled “A Future for Everyone, Rethinking Higher Education for All Through Online Modalities” for the newspaper The EvoLLLution: A Modern Campus Illumination. 

In the piece, Dr. Simmons suggested that online education is the best path forward for making higher education more accessible and inclusive, truly allowing educators to fulfill the mission of serving all learners. 

Dr. Simmons expressed similar ideas during an interview for an article in Higher Education Digest in June 2024. 

He spoke about the transformation of traditional institutions through online and digital education, specifically how online education has revolutionized higher education, broadening access and providing flexibility for students and institutions.