Chief Academic Officer & VP Global Academic Learning Enterprise

Job :

Location:

ICC - Adelphi, MD Category:
Advising and Enrollment Type:
Full time

Chief Academic Officer & Vice President, Global Academic Learning Enterprise

Office of the Chief Learner Experience & Success Officer

Exempt, Regular, Full-Time

University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) seeks an innovative, results-oriented servant leader as Chief Academic Officer and Vice President of Global Academic Learning Enterprise. Our Global Academic Learning Enterprise (GALE) includes many of the functions that traditional models refer to as Academic Affairs. UMGC is intentionally building an academic enterprise defined by impact rather than tradition. The Chief Academic Officer (CAO) will play a defining role in shaping the next generation of online and global public higher education.

Reporting to the Chief Learner Experience & Success Officer (CLESO), the CAO will lead UMGC's academic enterprise as a globally scaled, learner-centric, data-driven, skills-based, and AI-powered organization. The CAO is responsible for ensuring academic quality and public trust while deliberately moving the institution beyond legacy academic structures, titles, and workflows that no longer serve modern learners ensuring that UMGC's degrees, credentials, and learning pathways are coherent, credible, relevant, and outcomes-driven across a global, adult-serving learner population.

The CAO is responsible for academic product strategy, portfolio stewardship, faculty excellence, and academic legitimacy. This leader will collaborate with others to reimagine academic models adapting to the continuously changing landscape in post-secondary education with the ability to see experiences through the eyes of the learner.

UMGC operates through a purpose-built, matrixed operating model that aligns academic authority, learner experience strategy and learning product execution around a shared commitment to student success. In this model, the CAO provides leadership for the academic compass - articulating what learning must mean, what outcomes credentials represent, and what standards define quality - while Learning Product Development translates that intent into cohesive, learner-centered experiences and scalable learning products.

The CAO must exhibit a commitment to academic rigor and learner success. This model allows UMGC to pair the credibility of a mature academic institution with the agility, speed, and continuous improvement of a modern, student-centered, product-led organization. The CAO will be a collaborative, high-EQ leader who is comfortable leading through complexity and change with a bias toward execution and measurable impact.

This leader will view academic work through a "Jobs-to-Be-Done" lens-organizing roles, responsibilities, and workflows around what must be accomplished to enable learner success, rather than around traditional academic or faculty titles. The CAO will work collaboratively and as an equal partner with other student-facing leaders across the university, sharing accountability for learner access, engagement, persistence, completion, and post-completion success.

The CAO leads the three Schools (Cybersecurity & Information Technology; Business; and Integrative & Professional Studies) and academic leadership not as independent academic silos, but as distinct academic product portfolios aligned to UMGC's learner segments, workforce needs, and strategic priorities. Each School, led by a Portfolio Vice President/Dean is accountable for the academic health, relevance, and performance of its portfolio. The CAO will govern enterprise academic performance indicators used consistently across portfolios to inform investment, evolution, and sun setting decisions considering the product holistically using clear indicators of quality, outcomes, relevance, sustainability, and learner value.

Faculty excellence is central to this role. The CAO will serve as the University's chief steward of faculty quality, engagement, and academic leadership embracing changes to serve learners best and thus will lead the evolution of faculty roles, workload models, and expectations to align with centrally designed, technology-enabled learning systems while preserving academic judgment, rigor, and disciplinary integrity. Faculty are positioned as essential academic partners bringing disciplinary expertise, teaching excellence, and academic judgment within an operating model that shares matrixed accountability for the learning experience, leveraging the expertise of closer partners to improve learner outcomes.

The CAO will lead an academic organization that sees itself as the next generation of online and global education serving learners through various modalities to meet the individual needs of a diverse student population-one that continuously adapts to learner needs, workforce demands, technological change, and societal expectations. The CAO will ensure academic rigor and integrity remain non-negotiable, and lead academics as an integrated, outcomes-driven…