Do You Need a Chief Online Learning Officer? Here's How to Tell
Most institutions have someone managing online learning. Fewer have anyone steering it.
After almost a year in my Fractional COLO role, I speak to a lot of institutions, and the conversation often goes something like this. An institution has eight to a dozen online programs, a capable instructional design team, and a director of online education who has been holding things together for years.
I’ll ask how things are going, and the response is usually “Things are running.”
I’ll then ask who owns the strategy for which programs to grow, which to sunset, and how to position them against competing institutions.
Then comes the long pause. The looks around the table mirror the “not it” face you see on kids.
“Well...it’s the provost, or the VP of enrollment. It’s collaborative, but honestly, nobody owns it.”
On some level that answer is acceptable. There’s no chaos. Nothing is failing. But when everyone “owns” it, no one owns it. You get a slow drift. Kind of like a ghost ship. Things are running, but nobody is steering.
The difference between managing and leading
Online learning operations need both. Management keeps the machine running — course builds, LMS administration, faculty support, enrollment logistics. Most institutions have that covered to some degree.
Leadership is something different. It asks harder and more strategic questions: Are we building the right programs? Are our students graduating? How are our acquisition costs trending? Where will online enrollment come from in five years?
A Chief Online Learning Officer sits at that level. Not in the weeds of daily operations, though a good COLO knows that world well. They are working with other senior leaders to set the direction, monitoring trends, and connecting online strategy to your institution’s larger mission and financial health.
If no one at your institution is doing that work, it’s not getting done. The provost has 40 other things on their plate. The director of online education is managing the machine. The gap between those two roles is exactly where institutions get stuck. A year from now, nothing will have changed.
Five signs you need a COLO
Not every institution needs a full-time COLO. But with online enrollments being one of the only growth sectors in higher ed, someone needs to be playing that role. Here are the clearest signals:
1. Nobody can tell you, in one clear sentence, what your online strategy is. If you ask five senior leaders and get five different answers, you don’t have a strategy. You have five opinions, a lot of activity, and no direction.
2. Online enrollment is flat or declining, and you’re not sure why. This is often the first visible symptom. The underlying cause could be program mix, pricing, marketing, student experience, or all of the above. Diagnosing that requires someone whose full-time job is to understand your online portfolio.
3. You’re launching new programs reactively, not proactively. A faculty member gets excited about a new subject area. A board member suggested it. A competitor launches something similar. You build it. Two years later, enrollment is thin and you’re not sure why you built it. A COLO creates a filter for those decisions before resources are committed.
4. Your online programs feel like a separate universe from the rest of the institution. This is the sign I see the most. Faculty don’t trust the value of online programs. Students in online programs feel like second-class citizens. The instructional design team is buried under work and under-resourced. These are cultural and structural problems, not just operational ones.
5. A big decision is coming that nobody has the bandwidth to make well. A potential OPM contract. A major curriculum overhaul. A new platform migration. Decisions like these require someone with the time, the expertise, and the authority to lead them. Assigning them to an already-stretched director usually means the decision gets made poorly or not at all.
What a fractional model makes possible
For most schools, the honest answer to “do you need a COLO?” is: probably yes. The honest answer to “can you afford one?” is: maybe not full-time.
A full-time Chief Online Learning Officer salary ranges from $130,000 to $180,000 or more in annual compensation. That’s before benefits, which typically add another 30%, onboarding time, and the 12-18 month ramp before they’re fully effective.
A fractional arrangement gives you the same level of strategic expertise at a fraction of the cost, without the long-term commitment of a hire. It’s not a consultant who writes a report and disappears. It’s someone embedded in your work, attending your leadership meetings, rolling up their sleeves, and making decisions alongside your team.
What it is not: a substitute for operational staff. A fractional COLO is a strategic and executive resource. They can pinch hit for a time, but if your online operation is severely understaffed, that problem needs to be solved separately. The good news is that a COLO can help you develop the budget model to support needed staff.
How to know if your institution is ready
The best-fit institutions for a fractional COLO arrangement tend to share a few traits. Leadership is bought in on online education as a serious revenue and mission priority, not just a checkbox. There’s an operational team in place that just needs better direction and support. And there’s a real problem to solve, whether that’s enrollment, program quality, a major upcoming decision, or a strategy that doesn’t exist yet.
If your president or provost is still unconvinced that online education is worth serious investment, no COLO is going to fix that. That’s a leadership alignment problem, and it needs to be addressed before anything else.
But if alignment exists and the gap is expertise, bandwidth, or strategic direction, that’s exactly the problem a fractional COLO is built to solve.
The question worth asking
I’ll end with the question I ask at the start of almost every exploratory conversation: If you had a magic wand, what would be your wish?
Most people don’t say ‘more courses’ or ‘a new LMS.’ They say they want a clear strategy, and a clear direction. They want to stop feeling like they’re spinning their wheels. They want the right hand to know what the left hand is doing. Honestly, they want to win.
That’s the job. If nobody at your institution is doing it, it’s worth asking why.
Questions? Feel free to reach out, I promise I’ll get back to you. jeremiah@fractionalcolo.com