TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast

As US higher ed institutions experienced shifts to remote work and instruction in early 2025, it's an ideal time for us as digital learning professionals to reflect on key lessons learned in ensuring continuity of operations as we seek to support successful future transitions.

Guest Dr. Vickie Cook joins hosts Kelvin and Tom to discuss unexpected career trajectories for digital learning professionals, especially COLOs, related to sought-after, transferable skill sets.

In celebration of 30 years of OLC conferences and with input and reactions from our community of online/digital learning professionals, including a live audience(!), hosts Tom and Kelvin discuss the issues inherent in predicting and shaping a desirable future for online/digital education over the next 30 years.

Guest Dr. Matt Bergman joins Tom and Kelvin to discuss the current role credit for prior learning plays in American higher education and how we can all do a bit more to use this approach effectively in our digital learning work.

In this “call-in show” episode, hosts Tom and Kelvin are joined by some of the past year’s guests in sharing observations about 2024 as it ends and predictions and hopes about 2025 as it begins. Some of the themes emerging include balancing humanness and technology-assistance and staying focused on the aspirational goals of our collective work.

Guest Phil Hill joins hosts Kelvin and Tom to discuss substantive insights on the role of the LMS and trends in online higher ed enrollments. (Must see TV. Even if it is a podcast.)

Hosts Tom and Kelvin talk through themes from the CHLOE 9 report that stand out as broadly applicable to all online education professionals while we all seek to anticipate or shape the future.

Guest and former Hubert Humphrey Fellow Angelica Gabriela Rocha Guevara joins hosts Tom and Kelvin from Guatemala to discuss the similarities and differences of her country’s pursuit of online education compared to that of other countries around the globe.

Hosts Kelvin and Tom consider the centrality that online learners’ needs must have in shaping the work of online higher education. Particular attention is given to how responsibility for this common goal must be shared between individual faculty and institutional processes to assure quality at scale.

Return guest Nicolaas Matthijs joins hosts Tom and Kelvin to discuss some of the trends he’s seeing in the rapidly changing AI-assisted technology space with an eye toward how digital learning professionals can make wise use of the tools in our work.