Inside BUV: Rethinking What Online Learning Makes Possible

Inside BU Virtual offers a behind-the-scenes look at the people, ideas, and innovations that make Boston University’s online programs flexible, accessible, and impactful. Through candid Q&A conversations with staff, students, and faculty, this series highlights award-winning faculty who bring academic rigor and creative approaches to online learning, students’ experiences in virtual programs, and the ways these programs prepare learners to succeed in a rapidly evolving workforce. By reaching learners wherever they are and opening doors to new opportunities, BU Virtual, in collaboration with BU’s schools and colleges, helps expand access to transformative learning and drive meaningful impact in careers and communities.

Q: You’ve been involved in online and continuing education long enough to see the field evolve from something universities were experimenting with at the margins to something increasingly central to institutional strategy. What do you think we understand differently today?

Jay Halfond: Twenty-five years ago, those of us building online programs were still trying to prove that universities could create high-quality learning experiences at a distance. I spent considerable time reassuring faculty, fellow deans, and senior leaders that we could create online programs worthy of Boston University. I kept a mental response to the frequently asked questions I knew the skeptics would ask.

Today, these are no longer the questions.

Online learning has matured into a sophisticated enterprise. I chaired the group that developed UPCEA’s original Hallmarks of Excellence in Online Leadership, at a time when institutions were still developing the structures and capabilities needed to support online education. The recently updated Hallmarks of Excellence in Digital Learning Enterprises reflect just how much has changed. Online learning is no longer viewed simply as an alternative modality; it is increasingly part of the core infrastructure and strategy of the university, at least those that strive to be current and competitive.

That evolution has also changed how we create great learning experiences. Faculty remain at the academic center, but exceptional online learning is inherently collaborative. Faculty bring disciplinary and pedagogical expertise, teaching experience, and knowledge of their students. Learning designers, technologists, media professionals, and online learning designers bring expertise in learning design, engagement, accessibility, technology, and an expanding set of possibilities for how students can interact with faculty, content, and one another.

The strongest experiences emerge when those perspectives come together. We are no longer simply asking whether an online course can replicate what happens in a physical classroom. We can ask a much more interesting question: What kind of learning experience can we create when no longer constrained by the classroom at all?

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Q: If online education has matured, has our definition of “quality” changed as well? What distinguishes an exceptional digital learning experience today?

Jay Halfond: Technology matters, but technology itself does not create quality. The question is what the technology allows faculty and students to do.

For me, a great learning experience creates intellectual engagement, connection, curiosity, and community. That might include lively synchronous conversations, provocative asynchronous exchanges, substantive projects that allow students to pursue their interests, interaction with leaders and experts who might never otherwise enter the classroom, and opportunities for students to learn deeply from one another.

I have sometimes described the distinction this way: an adequate online operation behaves like a factory; a great one behaves like a laboratory.

The point is not that standards or consistency are unimportant. Quite the opposite. We now have considerable shared expertise about learning design and what it takes to support students well. That foundation allows us to do more—not less. A mature online learning enterprise should provide the infrastructure and expertise that enable faculty to experiment, create, and continually improve the learning experience. Most faculty are inherently inquisitive and inventive – and given the opportunity and support can take learning to a much higher level.

The goal isn’t simply to reproduce a successful model at scale. It is to build the capacity to keep making the model better.

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Q: Large research universities once tended to think about online education as a separate activity. Is that distinction still useful?

Jay Halfond: Increasingly, I don’t think it is.

The early history of online education was necessarily about creating something separate and risked remaining marginalized. Universities needed new technologies, new expertise, new policies, new forms of student support, and often new organizational structures. We were building capabilities that did not previously exist, often facing more skepticism than enthusiasm.

But many of those capabilities are now relevant well beyond students enrolled in fully online programs. Students move among physical and digital environments. Working professionals expect to return to learning throughout their careers. Residential students take online courses. Faculty teach across modalities. Technology connects classrooms to people and resources around the world.

So the strategic question is no longer simply, “Should this program be online?”

A better question is: How should we design this learning experience for the students we hope to serve?

Once we ask the question that way, many of the traditional distinctions—online versus residential, synchronous versus asynchronous, local versus remote—become design choices rather than defining characteristics.

That is an important shift. Online learning is no longer simply a separate part of the university; it is an institutional capability increasingly central to fulfilling the university’s mission.

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Q: You’ve spent much of your career working with adult and professional learners. What have they taught us about designing education differently?

Jay Halfond: Online education created an extraordinary expansion of opportunity for working adults. In the past, professionals who wanted to continue their education were largely confined to whatever evening or weekend programs happened to be available nearby. Today, they can participate in national and international learning communities.

But access is only part of what has changed.

Experienced professionals bring tremendous assets into a classroom: judgment, context, questions rooted in practice, and perspectives shaped by very different careers and lives. That changes the learning environment itself.

A classroom might bring together an education leader in Boston, a professional elsewhere in the United States, and another working halfway around the world. They aren’t simply learning from the faculty member. They are testing ideas against their own experience and against one another’s.

That suggests something important for universities. We shouldn’t think about adult learners simply as another population to whom we deliver courses. Their experience can become an active co-owner of the intellectual architecture of the course.

The challenge is to design intentionally for that richness.

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Q: You recently helped develop the new online Executive EdD at BU Wheelock’s College of Education and Human Development. Did creating that program change your own thinking about what is possible?

Jay Halfond: Absolutely. It was a unique faculty experience to build a program and courses from scratch.

Our goal was not simply to put a doctoral program online. We wanted to create sustained professional development and camaraderie over three years for a cohort of experienced leaders.

Preparing to teach the opening course, I spent roughly 150 hours thinking through the cadence, readings, assignments, collaborative work, and opportunities for students to engage with one another. Once underway, I brought leaders from across the country into our conversations—including you—and we deliberately made room for current controversies and issues as they emerged.

I have taught almost 100 courses, and this was my best teaching experience by far.

What struck me was that we weren’t trying to create a virtual approximation of an in-person doctoral experience. We were able to do things precisely because the program was designed differently: assemble experienced professionals across geography, bring national leaders easily into the classroom, connect students’ professional lives directly to their academic work, and create a community among people who otherwise might never have met.

And I could not have created that experience alone. The partnership with BU Virtual gave me access to expertise, infrastructure, and possibilities that fundamentally expanded what I could do as a faculty member.

To me, that is what a mature online learning enterprise should make possible.

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Q: As higher education enters a period of rapid change—from AI to shifting expectations about how and when people learn—what will distinguish the universities that thrive in the decade ahead?

Jay Halfond: The institutions that thrive will be those able to experiment and adapt while remaining grounded in academic purpose. Students’ lives no longer fit neatly into traditional categories, and increasingly their learning won’t either. Universities need to think more expansively about whom they serve, when learning happens, and how different kinds of learning experiences fit together across a lifetime.

AI adds another dimension to that change. It is already challenging assumptions about what students need to know, how we assess learning, what expertise means, and what faculty uniquely contribute. Those aren’t simply technology questions. They are exciting questions about education. AI is potentially a great source for knowledge – but no substitute for wisdom and judgment.

Responding well will require bringing together faculty, learning design, technology, and institutional leadership rather than expecting any one group to have the answers.

We should certainly be asking what AI can do. But perhaps the more important question for universities is: What becomes more important for human beings to do?

About Jay Halfond

Jay Halfond is Professor of the Practice Emeritus at Boston University and teaches in the higher education leadership programs at BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. He previously served as dean of BU’s Metropolitan College, where he was an early leader in the University’s development of online and continuing education. Over his career, Halfond has written and spoken extensively about innovation, leadership, and the evolving role of online learning in higher education.