This year, I had the opportunity to get involved with the amazing Online Learning Consortium (OLC) team and play a humble role in organizing the OLC Innovate 2022 conference. I had the honor of serving as chair of the leadership and advocacy track and I was so impressed with the high caliber of presentation proposals we received this year! I also had the opportunity to present my research, as outlined in the extended abstract below.
Recent Research Implications on (Re)Calibrating Your Higher-Education Institution’s Chief Online Education Officer Role
Calibraing Handout (PDF)
During the last decade, we witnessed the rise of the chief online education officer (COEO) role in American higher-education institutions. A recently published empirical study puts an end to the dearth of research pertaining to guidelines for conceptualizing the COEO role.
Using bureaucracy and contingency as theoretical framework, this quantitative, correlative, non-experimental study invited COEOs from all over the U.S. to share their perceptions of the quality of their institution’s online program, along with their ability to influence quality based on their legitimate power and environmental factors that could potentially impact their legitimate power. More specifically, the research questions looked for the presence of a statistically significant correlation between COEOs’ overall legitimate power and overall online program quality (as self-assessed by COEOs using the OLC Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Programs), as well as between COEOs’ perceived overall legitimate power and COEO-reported environmental factors. Absent a list of all COEO-type professionals in American higher education, this study used non-probability sampling combined with convenience and snowball sampling. The results pointed to a strong, positive correlation between overall legitimate power and overall quality, as well as between overall legitimate power and the hierarchy of COEO job titles. Additional environmental factors significantly correlated with legitimate power categories included the number of units making a full report to the COEO and the breadth of COEO’s current portfolio of responsibilities, among others, while the hardest quality category to influence was technical support.
Knowing overall power has a strong positive effect on overall quality, it would be advisable for senior leaders to consider crafting their COEO’s job description such that power levels are commensurate with the desired quality levels for which the hired COEO will be responsible. In other words, for one thing, the more critical the online program is to the institution, the higher the COEO would need to be placed within the organizational chart. Although gaps in the literature still remain—particularly regarding what enables a COEO to successfully drive quality in online education—there are promising activities both in practice and inquiry that can maximize the impact of COEOs in American online higher education. Join this session to learn more!
Format wise, this session will alternate presentation and discussion segments. The interactive Q&A and partner exercises aim to personalize the implications of this study on your institution’s existing or future COEO role. During this session you’ll also obtain a copy of the publication, along to a handout guiding you and your team through the process of (re)calibrating your institution’s COEO role.
This session is primarily intended for senior higher-education leaders/administrators as well as researchers focused on further investigating the chief online education officer role in the United States and what enables COEOs to successfully drive quality in online education.
