As technological tools and academic program delivery formats have evolved over the past few decades, opportunities to pursue graduate degrees online have grown substantially. By fall 2018, more than one-third of all postbaccalaureate students (approximately 1.2 million) participated in online distance education, with about 31 percent pursuing their graduate degrees exclusively online (National Center of Education Statistics, 2020). As more students have completed online graduate programs, there correspondingly has been a growing population of graduate-level “online alumni.”
Connections Are Everything: Putting Relationships at the Heart of Higher Ed
As academic leaders, we are under so much pressure to deliver—enrollment targets, strategic plans, graduation rates, AI policies, and on and on—that we can lose sight of what our students