Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making

e-Literate 2013-04-16

I have been surprised at how little interest the OpenSUNY announcement last week generated in educational media and blog discussions. Perhaps the MOOC portion of the story, which was prominent in several headlines, caused people to assume this was just another school trying to jump on the bandwagon. What is significant, however, is that one of the largest statewide systems in the country is making a multi-pronged approach to reduce time-to-graduation and therefore lower student costs.

In brief, Open SUNY is part of the system’s agenda to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level, and it has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts. The concept for the strategic plan originated in 2009, eventually leading to the Open SUNY Final Proposal.

From 2009:

Building on SUNY’s current open and online initiatives, Open SUNY has the potential to be America’s most extensive distance learning environment. It will provide students with affordable, innovative, and flexible education in a full range of instructional formats, both online and on site. Open SUNY will network students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world through social and emerging technologies and link them to the best in open educational resources. Open SUNY will provide an online portal for thousands of people worldwide.

What is Open SUNY?

Open SUNY is a set of 5 interdependent components, as described by the final proposal.

Open SUNY Online – “Open SUNY Online would build on the achievements of the SUNY Learning Network (SLN), which, in this proposal, would form the core of Open SUNY Online, and expand to include all of SUNY’s online offerings, and be enhanced by the other dimensions of Open SUNY”.
Open SUNY Resources – This will be a coordinated repository and set of services sharing OER and open courseware throughout the system.
SUNY REAL (Recognition of Experiential and Academic Learning) – This is an expansion of the Empire State College program of Prior Learning Assessments (PLA), as described in my previous post.
Complete SUNY – “SUNY-wide project to support degree completion for students who have stopped out of college. The Complete SUNY program will identify and support former students who wish to return to SUNY to earn a degree.”
SUNY TILT (Transformation and Innovation in Learning and Teaching) – This faculty development and innovations program will be “a state-wide network to connect innovations in teaching and learning”. One of the innovations in question, of course, are MOOCs.

The whole suite of components will be supported by the Open SUNY Commons, which will also act as a portal to state-wide and national online initiatives in open education.

Open SUNY funding comes from a $18.6m funding from NY2020 legislation, and will eventually cost (according to estimates) $3.35m per year in operations.

Announcements

The plan was announced during the SUNY Chancellor’s State of the University address on January 15, 2013. One of the goals of Open SUNY, according to the Chancellor 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.

On March 19, 2013, the Board of Trustees endorsed the plan. One of the motivations for this move was to coordinate campus efforts and gain system-wide synergies, as described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed. One of the key targets for the online expansion will be non-traditional adult learners.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher wants to consolidate online course offerings after nearly 20 years of institutional independence.

“I think the problems the country is trying to solve simply cannot be solved one institution at a time,” Zimpher said in a recent interview. [snip]

SUNY began its online efforts in 1994 at Empire State College. Now, there are 150 online degree programs scattered across all its campuses. SUNY’s extensive offerings are, as it has said in documents related to its new effort, “fragmented” – the source of “countless unexplored opportunities for collaboration, economies of scale and innovation.”

Zimpher ultimately wants to enroll 100,000 new online students in the next several years while also adding new degree programs to train New Yorkers for industries with job openings. To reduce costs to students, she is also trying to speed degree completion times in online degrees to three years.

The chancellor said the whole online effort will target adults.

“We have all these adults who have some education but not enough,” she said. “We’re really trying to grow a major enrollment in an underserved population.”

Ry Rivard’s article also highlights potential pushback from the faculty unions.

A spokesman for the union that represents SUNY academics and instructors said the union had not been consulted about the push.

“SUNY hasn’t brought us into the conversation, hasn’t consulted us,” said Don Feldstein, spokesman for United University Professions, which represents about 32,000 SUNY employees.

SUNY spokesman David Doyle said the system had consulted with faculty by appointing some of them to a task force and by talking to faculty through the “appropriate governance channels,” such as the faculty senate.

How Will We Know?

The part of innovation that I don’t see mentioned enough, at least in the proposal and press releases, is a structured method of determining what works and what doesn’t work. The proposal does mention the metrics that should improve if Open SUNY is successful, but these are all at the initiative level, and not at the individual innovation level.

The impact of Open SUNY will be measured by its contributions to:

reducing the time to degree;

reducing the overall cost of obtaining a SUNY degree;

meeting workforce and societal needs;

improved graduate outcomes;

increasing the SUNY completion rates;

increasing the number of online learners;

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

Some of these are laudable goals (reducing time to degree and overall cost, increase completion rate), but some are ill-defined (improved outcomes) and some are questionable (increased number of online learners as a goal rather than means to a goal, and enhancing the profile).

But a deeper problem is lack of discussion on determining which innovations to diffuse and which innovations to keep from diffusing. Perhaps there are plans for evaluating courses and programs, but there are no details available that I can find.

Focus on Spreading Innovations, not Creating Innovations

SUNY, of course, is not the first place to develop MOOCs, online courses, OER, open courseware or PLAs, so what is important about this announcement? I think the significance lies in SUNY’s scale and SUNY’s approach. SUNY appears to view the Open SUNY program as a method to spread educational innovations throughout one of the largest systems in the country rather than creating a new pilot program or experiment. SUNY has 468,000 students and plans to add 100,000 more. Rather than trying to create a new innovation, the role of the system is to foster innovation and then take the best ideas and make them available to all.

Although it’s not getting enough attention, Open SUNY will have an outsized impact on the future of online education in the US. State-wide initiatives, whether driven by the systems or the state government, are becoming one of the biggest factors in how higher education is changing in the US. I suspect that other states will be watching SUNY and adopting this model in part or in whole.

Pay attention to Open SUNY – it will matter.

Further Reading