SLN Receives Grant to Improve College Readiness & Completion

Official SUNY Press Release

SUNY institutions will use technology-enhanced blended learning to increase student success, reduce costs, and advance Chancellor’s strategic plan.

SUNY announces $250,000 national grant to the SUNY Learning Network for a blended learning initiative

The SUNY Learning Network (SLN) will receive a $250,000 education from Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), a new initiative focused on identifying and scaling technology-enabled approaches to dramatically improve college readiness and completion, especially for low-income young adults, in the United States.

The Next Generation Learning Challenges funds will be used to enhance a developmental math course and develop a blended online degree program using technology to improve student success and promote unprecedented collaboration among the 4 SUNY community college partners. The SUNY Learning Network will work with the SUNY campuses to target young adult low wage earning single parents from under served populations with the SUNY SLN “Catch-up and Complete” Enhanced Blended Learning Initiative. This program will scaffold and support student success through the developmental education stage to prevent loss, create educational momentum for the student and the social connections necessary to succeed, support successful entry into a degree program, measure progress and scaffold support, and accelerate completion that ultimately results in a local labor-focused credential for the student.

“This funding will provide us with an opportunity to target the Bermuda Triangle of developmental education – where most go in and never come out – by helping students Catch-up, so that they can then Complete their education and earn a credential that gets them a job, resulting in improved chances for them and their children to escape poverty.” said Alexandra M. Pickett, the associate director of the SUNY Learning Network who is the author of, and principal investigator on the grant coordinating the initiative. The program seeks to provide these at risk students with an educational experience that targets their developmental needs, program completion and student success to begin to break the cycle of poverty in the state of New York. The ultimate goal is to reduce poverty and the trans-generational transmission of poverty in NYS by assisting young adult low-wage working single parents from underserved populations to complete a degree program that provides them with a credential that they can use to move into a higher paying career.

A blended learning initiative aligns very well with the SUNY Chancellor’s strategic plan that calls for action, credibility, and data-driven decision-making with core values of student-centeredness, community engagement, diversity, integrity, and collaboration. This grant gives us the opportunity to address the issues together and systematically, thereby improving the likelihood of positive sustainable impact and success.

In addition to benefiting at-risk students with enhanced blended learning options, the four partner SUNY campuses will collaborate by adopting the use of common standards, course objectives, and assessments in the program’s courses. The courses will share common content that is adapted, developed, and/or curated by the participating faculty and delivered in the common courses taught at all four SUNY institutions. Several innovations in technologies and approaches will be implemented to test their efficacy in the program. An online interactive social networking hub will be used by all four institutions to scaffold student resilience with peer-to-peer support and social networking, open and digital content will be used to reduce textbook costs and promote higher levels of engagement with rich media content, online learning concierges will be developed at the campus and system levels to personalize and support the student experience, and digital-age librarians will be developed at the campus level to promote the development of information fluency skills in project participants.

Standardization on tools, technologies, and approaches at the system-level afford numerous benefits to the university. A successful blended learning initiative can serve hundreds of thousands of SUNY students more efficiently and effectively, reduce costs, address persistence and completion, and inform and influence the quality of technology-enhanced instruction in SUNY.

In addition to funding, NGLC is gathering evidence about effective practices, and working to develop a community dedicated to these persistent challenges. The goal of this project is to identify faculty development and course/program design innovations, student support technologies, and inter-institutional standardizations and approaches that improve persistence and at-risk student. “Through this grant we hope to advance our knowledge of the kinds of supports that enable community college students to persist and succeed in online and blended programs. We have conducted research in this arena for over ten years but funding from this project will allow us to ask new kinds of questions about the challenges confronting community college online learners specifically.  We believe that this research will add to our understanding of new forms of learner self- and co-regulation that lead to success in technology-mediated learning environments.” said Dr. Peter Shea, associate professor in the department of educational theory and practice at UAlbany, and SLN’s senior researcher and co-principle investigator on the grant.

This grant recognizes that SUNY continues to lead the way in online teaching and learning innovation. The project will be guided by the principles and practices from the SUNY Learning Network, an award winning national and international leader in effective online teaching and learning faculty development, course design and practices. Project participants will share materials and lessons learned from the program so that others can benefit.

By promoting inter institutional collaboration, capitalizing on existing successful SUNY-wide mechanisms, and leveraging cutting-edge technologies and innovative approaches we can positively impact student outcomes, success, access, convenience, and persistence with a blended online degree program that leads to a credential that will position students well to enter the local workforce. The lessons learned from this project will be used to scale the initiative to other SUNY institutions and to inform and influence the quality of blended and technology enhanced instruction in SUNY.

With this project we have the opportunity to act as a system and leverage the “Power of SUNY.” A SUNY blended learning initiative is good for the university, good for the economy, good for the environment, and good for people of the state of New York.

In a nationwide, competitive grant process, the SUNY Learning Network’s  proposal was one of only 29 selected from a pool of 600.

Next Generation Learning Challenges is a collaborative, multi-year initiative created by the Gates and Hewlett foundations and others to address the barriers to educational innovation and tap the potential of technology to dramatically improve college readiness and completion in the United States.

The 4 public two-year institutions are: Herkimer County Community College, Finger Lakes Community College, Jamestown Community College, and Westchester Community College.

The State University of New York is a unified statewide system of 64 campuses, including community colleges, two-year colleges of technology, specialized and statutory colleges, traditional four-year colleges, research university campuses and academic health centers.  The nation’s largest and most comprehensive system of higher education, the University enrolls nearly 370,000 students and employs over 75,000 faculty, administrators and staff. http://suny.edu

The SUNY Learning Network (SLN) is the award-winning online learning network for the State University of New York under the Office of the Provost and is the lead organization in this proposed project. http://sln.suny.edu