Serendipity35

If you read about the Open SUNY announcement recently, you probably thought of it as another MOOC story. But it's more than that. You have one of the largest statewide systems in the U.S. trying to shorten up their time-to-graduation rate and also lower student costs.

The way they are planning to do that is in part by using Open SUNY to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level.

It has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts.

It build upon on SUNY’s current open and online initiatives. They claim that Open SUNY has "the potential to be America’s most extensive distance learning environment." That's strong language, but they are big enough to make the claim as a system.

The hope is to provide students with affordable, innovative, and flexible education in a full range of instructional formats, both online and on site.

It will network students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world using social technologies and linking to open educational resources.

I knew about Open SUNY mainly because of their connection with the College Open Textbook group which I have participated in for several years. Open SUNY has their own Open Textbooks initiative and when they offered a course through Blackboard’s CourseSites, I registered for their "Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs" to see the content and how they were using CourseSites.

One of the stated goals of Open SUNY is to expand access to public higher education:

Launch of Open SUNY in 2014, including 10 online bachelor’s degree programs that meet high-need workforce demands, three
of which will be piloted in the fall. Open SUNY will leverage online degree offerings at every SUNY campus, making them available to students system-wide using a common set of online tools, including a financial aid consortium so that credits and aid can be received by students across campuses. Chancellor Zimpher said Open SUNY enrollment will reach 100,000 students within three years, making it the largest online education presence of any public institution in the nation.

1. reducing the time to degree;


2. reducing the overall cost of obtaining a SUNY degree;


3. meeting workforce and societal needs;


4. improved graduate outcomes;


5. increasing the SUNY completion rates;


6. increasing the number of online learners;


7. enhancing the profile of SUNY as an innovative leader in teaching and learning