The Online WNY Learning Alliance assists working adult students needing the flexibility of fully online degree options. OWL’s 6 member colleges provide holistic advisement to students from the outset of their college careers, which can include early exploration of post-degree options. This project will develop web-based orientation / training materials, and internal procedures, so that career and transfer exploration and assistance for online degree-seeking students occurs from day one of their college studies. This maximizes course alignment with goals, shortens time-to-completion, helps keep students in NY for career and/or baccalaureate degree opportunities, and contributes to regional workforce and economic development.

Throughout our educational system there is a growing need to understand, support and increase student success. Research has gone into defining characteristics that lead to student success. The authors assert that continued assessment of students and use of assessment data to create interventions and redesign curriculum lead to a state of continued improvement for the institution, its faculty and students while maintaining a strong relationship to the current tools used in any of the disciplines. Our goals for Phase One of this project are to develop, and validate an instrument designed to predict student success based on individual learner characteristics and the learner’s level of engagement with information and communication technology (ICT). The outcome of Phase One is a validated instrument and scoring rubric to assess learner readiness (SUNY Prep, Learner Preparedness Survey).