Noodle

Noodle will be at UPCEA's SOLAR Conference in Boston, July 29-31, talking with online learning leaders about where GenAI is actually landing inside programs and operations. One example: structured practice for high-stakes conversations in human services education. Nursing, social work, criminal justice, and education programs all teach de-escalation, mandated reporting, and crisis response. What's harder to teach is fluency under pressure, the difference between knowing a protocol and executing it when a real person is in front of you. Noodle's latest practice guide looks at how AI-enabled simulation gives students repeated, feedback-rich reps before they reach a clinical placement or field deployment, and includes a case study on how one CSWE-accredited program built this into firearm safety training. 📥 Download the guide (.pdf) If you're at SOLAR, let's chat. If not, the guide is worth a read either way and we'd still love to connect and learn more about how you're navigating this.

Noodle is headed to Boston next week for UPCEA SOLAR (July 29-31, 2026) SOLAR brings together senior leaders and practitioners in postsecondary online learning to focus on where the field is heading: access, quality, completion, and impact for students. One theme we're watching closely is how the online learning leader's role keeps expanding. What started as a specialist function managing a single modality is increasingly an enterprise-wide mandate, especially as GenAI reshapes programs and operations across the institution. If you'll be at SOLAR, we'd love to connect.

A shift is underway in college admissions: price-first estimates instead of sticker shock. Brandeis University is out with one and we're proud to have been a partner in building. Faye, a new online tool developed with Noodle, lets prospective students upload their financial and academic information for a personalized price quote before they apply. Full rollout is planned for the Fall 2027 admissions cycle. Cornell College in Iowa now sends early, non-binding financial aid estimates to prospective students through its Save Your Seat program, reaching them right when they're starting applications or narrowing their list. It's a different experience than the typical net price calculator, which asks students to submit detailed financial information before they see any numbers. In summer 2025, Cornell sent estimates to about 20,000 students. Nearly 20% of the incoming Fall 2026 class committed to Cornell after receiving one. Whitman College took a different approach: an income-based tuition cap. Its 10% Promise limits out-of-pocket tuition to 10% of parental adjusted gross income, verified annually through the FAFSA. The cap covers tuition only (federal aid and work-study go toward room, board, and other costs), and the program is designed to reach families who earn too much for need-based aid but still can't cover Whitman's full cost of attendance. Three different mechanisms, one shared bet: give families real numbers earlier, and more of them will see themselves as able to afford you. Georgetown University's The Feed rounded up all three in a recent piece on cost transparency. Link in comments.

Phil Hill & Associates' On EdTech had a good breakdown this week of the new Department of Education earnings accountability rules (and a follow-up, "Updates on Accountability Rule" that Premium subscribers can access). The bottom line is that the framework hasn't changed, but the timeline has, with earnings measured four years after a student completes a program and reported through a data pipeline that runs years behind real time. That lag raises a question worth sitting with: if the metric that decides a program's fate is always looking several years into the past, how much can short-term signals like early placement rates really tell you? Noodle's Stephen Green explored a related idea last week, that a longer measurement horizon gets closer to whether a program actually worked. Full piece linked below.

Higher ed has been arguing about what to call noncredit and nondegree programs for years now, and Inside Higher Ed's readers picked the debate back up this week. "Alternative." "Extended." "Credential." Nobody agrees, and the terminology keeps shifting as the market does. Noodle's John Katzman and Regina Law weighed in on one piece of that debate: universities don't need to go it alone to compete in this space. The real opportunity is in collaboration, sharing content and infrastructure across institutions rather than each one trying to build a full catalog from scratch or ceding control to a handful of platforms that take most of the revenue. Links in comments.

Noodle Founder & CEO John Katzman sat down with the The EdUp Experience podcast to talk about AI in higher ed, mapping two separate but parallel paths for where it fits. In the classroom, use AI to make learning better. In student services and academic support, use AI to make things cheaper and faster. Different goals, different standards for success. He used Noodle's own product, Dialogue, as an example. A student turns in a paper, then gets invited into a quick Zoom with an AI agent that actually grills them on it, asking why they made certain choices or how something ties back to what the class covered. The point is finding out fast whether the student actually understood the material. On academic integrity, John pointed to a simple idea from criminology: certainty of getting caught deters more than harsh punishment does. Build that consistency into how assignments work, and the incentive to cheat mostly disappears. Good listen if you're thinking about where AI actually belongs in your institution right now. Link in comments.

The ROI conversation in continuing education runs on what's easy to count quickly: enrollment, completion, first placement, early wages. Those numbers are useful, and they are also incomplete in ways that shape what gets built. Accreditation systems, employer scorecards, and state accountability structures reward short-term outcomes. Over time, what gets reported becomes what gets valued, and what gets valued determines what gets designed. The question worth asking is not where a learner lands on day one, but where are they three to five years out. ❓ Did the credential help them advance internally or change fields? ❓ Did income stabilize or rise across a longer window? ❓ Did the program make them more adaptable as the labor market shifted? Those are different questions, and they produce different programs. The institutions getting this right tend to share one thing: they define the outcome first and build the curriculum backward from it. Noodle's Chief Partnerships Officer, Stephen Green, looks at what that shift requires in "The Longer View of ROI in Continuing Education", and it includes a case study worth reading. 🔗 Link in comments.

AI is already part of how students prepare work, how faculty shape courses, and how programs stay connected to practice. The more pressing question is what institutions do with that reality. Last week, Noodle's Elissa Lappenga, M.Ed., SHRM-CP sat down with S. Sriram, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing and Lindsey Gallo, Coopers and Lybrand, Norman E. Auerbach Assistant Professor of Accounting, from University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business to work through exactly that. The conversation covered curriculum, assessment, faculty workflows, and student experience, with the kinds of questions that tend to surface when a team is making real decisions in real time rather than theorizing about change. 🎥 The webinar recording is now available (LINK IN COMMENTS), and you can download a post-webinar takeaway here that captures the question sets from the session. ---> Both are worth keeping close if you are working through any of these issues on your campus.

Most universities treat graduation as a conclusion. The degree is conferred, and institutional attention shifts to the next incoming class. 🛑 The professionals graduating today will work longer and face more significant skill disruptions than previous generations. The institution that helped them enter the workforce is often the one best positioned to help them navigate it. The World Economic Forum projects that 59 out of every 100 workers will need training or reskilling by 2030. Professionals now expect to retool more than once over a career, and the pace of change driven by AI and other technologies is accelerating that expectation. The four-year degree can be the start of a relationship that lasts forty years. Graduates move through distinct career stages, each with new learning needs: upskilling early on, stackable credentials mid-career, transition support later. The institutions building durable lifelong learning strategies are starting with a harder question: what role does this institution want to play across a graduate's career, and what would it take to play it well? The structural barriers tend to surface after institutions have already made program decisions: 📌 Alumni relations, continuing education, and career services typically operate on separate tracks 📌 Most student information systems were built to track enrollment and completion, not longitudinal engagement 📌 Incentive structures still center on new student enrollment, leaving alumni learning without a clear owner These are solvable problems, and the institutions that solve them tend to identify them before the program decisions are made. Stephen Green, Noodle's Chief Partnerships Officer, looks at what a genuine lifelong learning strategy requires in his latest article, "From Enrollment to Lifelong Engagement" 🔗 Link in comments.

Inquiry volume is holding. Applications are flat. Yield is soft. That pattern is rarely a demand problem. It's a response problem, and it tends to show up in three specific places: how fast institutions respond to inquiries, how clearly they communicate actual cost, and whether enrollment teams have the capacity to do the outreach that actually converts. A typical admissions office has five to ten counselors managing 40,000 or more leads. Most of the top-of-funnel work falls to automation. Students who inquire on a Friday afternoon may not hear back until Monday. In a market where most prospects are comparing multiple institutions simultaneously, that lag is an active assist to a competitor. The article, "Three Ways Institutions Are Blocking Their Own Pipeline" covers where the friction concentrates and what to do about it. Link to article in comments. BONUS! 📢 🎉 American Marketing Association (AMA) is hosting a webinar with Noodle authors Meredith Purvis and Ryan L. Villwok July 28, 2026 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CDT. Register via the link in the article.