A few months ago, I sat down with a provost at a small regional institution. They were frustrated. Enrollment and budget concerns hovered over every meeting and conversation, but their online programs felt like a genuine source of hope. There were signs of life, but something was still off. Everyone I spoke with at the institution kept coming back to the same theme: there was a lack of traction, and nobody could explain why.
They asked me what I thought, and I told them what I’ve told a dozen institutions: nobody owned it.
Not admissions. Not the instructional design team. Not the academic affairs office. Each of them owned a piece of online learning. None of them owned the whole thing. To borrow from Milton Friedman: “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition.”
That’s the gap I see over and over. And it’s the gap the Chief Online Learning Officer role exists to close.
The Ownership Problem
Online program development isn’t a single function. It’s a coordination problem. You’re managing curriculum design, technology infrastructure, faculty development, student support, market positioning, financial modeling, and enrollment strategy. All of it happening at once, and all of it connected.
In large university systems, this work gets distributed across several senior leaders with defined lanes. In small institutions, it falls to mid-level professionals with competing priorities. There is no point guard orchestrating this elaborate coordination.
So decisions get made in silos. The instructional design team builds a beautiful course only to be told the curriculum committee revised the objectives. The enrollment team starts marketing before the student support model is ready. IT selects a tool that doesn’t integrate with the LMS. The provost wonders why the program underperformed.
This isn’t a talent problem. These are capable people doing their best. It’s a structural problem.
What the COLO Role Actually Does
The Chief Online Learning Officer sits at the intersection of all these functions. Not to do all of them, but to make sure they’re talking to each other.
In practice, that means owning the online learning strategy, aligning multiple functional teams toward shared outcomes, and serving as the accountable leader when something doesn’t go right.
It also means translating. I’ve always thought of the role as a chameleon: COLOs need to adapt depending on the environment. The COLO translates enrollment data into curriculum decisions. Translates faculty concerns into technology choices. Translates budget realities into program sequencing. That translation work is invisible until it’s missing, but when it’s missing, it’s expensive.
The role tends to be one of the most relationship-intensive positions in higher ed. You’re not issuing directives. You’re building alignment across people who report to different bosses and carry different institutional loyalties. It requires a specific kind of patience and an ability to play the long game.
Why Institutions Can't Wait
The Chief Online Learning Officer is still a relatively new title in higher ed. The latest reports estimate only 6% of institutions have their senior online administrator reporting directly to the President (Fredericksen et al., 2025). Many small colleges haven’t heard of the role. Most small colleges assume a Director who oversees the LMS and instructional design is sufficient. That role matters, but they are not one and the same.
In the meantime, programs keep launching. Coordination problems keep compounding, and the costs, visible and otherwise, keep accumulating.
Not all institutions that struggle with online programs have a resource problem. Some have sufficient resources, what they have is a clarity problem. Who’s accountable for the ROI of those resources? Who makes the decision when two functions disagree? Who’s watching the whole board?
The good news is that solving the ownership problem doesn’t require a new full-time hire immediately. Some institutions have designated an existing senior leader to carry this function formally, even part-time, as a first step. Others have experimented with interim or fractional arrangements to bring in outside strategic ownership while they build internal capacity. The specific model matters less than the commitment: someone needs to own the whole board, and that needs to be explicit in their role.
What Good Looks Like
When the ownership problem gets solved, things start to click. It does not happen overnight, and certainly not without effort. Online program development takes time and investment, and there are no shortcuts worth taking.
The initial wins show up behind the scenes. Decision-making gets faster because there’s a clear place for decisions to land. Cross-functional work gets cleaner because someone is managing the handoffs. Programs get built with a coherent design rather than patched together after the fact.
Faculty who were skeptical start to see a structure they can trust. Enrollment teams get the information they need early enough to actually use it. Administrators spend less time being surprised by outcomes that, in hindsight, were entirely predictable.
The shift doesn’t require a particular title or a particular org chart structure. It requires someone with the authority, the relationships, and the mandate to own the whole operation.
A Parting Question
If you work in online education leadership at a small or mid-size institution, here’s my question to you: who at your institution could tell me who’s accountable for your online program strategy?
Not the departments who are involved. Not the staff who contributes. Who’s accountable?
If the answer is unclear, or it takes more than a few moments to answer, it’s worth having a conversation. The title you use for the role is secondary. The ownership is what matters.
References
Fredericksen, E. E., Simunich, B., & Uranis, J. (2025). COLO profiles & competencies 2024: A national research project about chief online learning officers. Online Learning, 29(3), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v29i3.5017
Jeremiah Grabowski is the founder of Fractional COLO, where he provides Chief Online Learning Officer-level leadership to institutions building and scaling online programs. He writes regularly on online learning strategy at fractionalcolo.com and on Substack at coloinsights.substack.com.
