Wendy Colby

Wendy offers more than 25 years of leadership and expertise in online and hybrid program creation and development, working closely with major institutions across higher education to lead, design, implement, support, and scale high-quality degree and certificate offerings. Since February 2020, she has served as chief executive officer of UMGC Ventures/AccelerEd in College Park, MD, a portfolio of education technology and services businesses affiliated with the University of Maryland Global Campus (serving over 90,000 students) and the broader University System of Maryland’s 12 regional campuses, working collaboratively with university leaders to design new programs, adopt new modalities to reach more students, and take workforce programs online.

Prior to UMGC Ventures, Wendy was divisional vice president at Laureate Education in Baltimore, where she led the development, commercialization, and scale of digital learning solutions for over 80 universities around the world, and where she served in numerous executive positions, including leading the College of Nursing at Walden University, overseeing enrollment, marketing, portfolio management, online program development, and profit and loss operations. She has additionally held senior leadership roles with Carnegie Innovations (an affiliate of Carnegie Mellon University), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Thomson Reuters, and Silicon Valley-based startup DigitalThink, guiding digital transformation efforts and growing new business in the corporate online learning space.

As BU’s first vice president and associate provost for BU Virtual, Wendy will be responsible for leading a new unit that will support the development, production, recruitment for and delivery of online programs and will operate in collaboration with our schools and colleges. Among the top early priorities will be the ongoing evolution of the Questrom School of Business’s online MBA program and the launch of the School of Public Health’s online Master of Public Healthprogram in January 2023.