The “Digital Critique Platform” (DCrit) innovates traditional critique processes and facilitates program-level review and assessment. DCrit accepts submitted projects for critique; assigns participating faculty, professionals and peers to conduct rubric-based critiques of specific student projects; and distributes critiques to participating students. The platform will support a program-wide portfolio of student projects to serve assessment purposes. DCrit supports synchronous and asynchronous, and online and in-person critiques, expanding critique possibilities beyond the traditional synchronous, face-to-face model. DCrit will capture and archive both student work and critical assessments in a single database, facilitating the review and assessment of both individual-level and aggregate-level progress towards specific educational objectives.

A one-day conference, Friday, October 26, 2012, at The College at Brockport will help faculty and researchers understand and safeguard intellectual property rights in producing and consuming information. The May 2012 federal court decision in the closely-watched Georgia State case makes the conversation especially timely. The program will include discussion of the copyright and licensing environments in general, and alternatives to current models including the open access movement.

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).