SUNY Online Student Skills Inventory
(SOSSI) v2.0

Welcome and Overview

You’ve likely seen it happen. Students enroll with enthusiasm and hope, then nothing. No work in the course; no response to emails; no login activity. By the time you’ve reached out, the student has already disappeared. The SUNY Online Student Success Inventory (SOSSI) v2.0 exists to change that pattern, identifying at-risk students during their critical first encounter and preparing your campus to intervene with proactive support at the right time.

Who This Guide Is For

This guide is written for the people responsible for supporting online students: academic advisors, student success coaches, and student support professionals in tutoring, access and accommodations, financial aid, technology, and related roles. Administrators overseeing online learning will also find it useful, particularly the Implementation Process and Data and Reporting sections.

What You’ll Find Here

This guide walks you through everything you need to know to implement SOSSI effectively, from understanding the tool and its foundations, to making decisions that determine how well it works at your institution, to configuring your instance and interpreting results.

What is SOSSI?

SOSSI is a SUNY-developed, developmental readiness tool that helps campuses identify online students’ strengths and potential support needs early. Rather than diagnosing or gatekeeping students, SOSSI focuses on growth. After completing a five-module survey, results highlight where students are already strong and where timely support can improve persistence and success. The tool is provided to campuses at no cost.

What makes SOSSI different from other readiness tools isn’t just what it measures. It’s that the measure was built around what SUNY students said they needed, deployed early enough to act on the responses.

SOSSI v2.0 was shaped by two original research studies conducted across the SUNY system. A stakeholder survey established, in September 2025, what campus professionals believed online students needed most. Two months later, interviews with online students across SUNY campuses told a different story. The gaps between those two data sets were significant enough to change four of the tool’s core modules and introduce an entirely new one. What institutions assumed students needed and what students actually needed turned out to be meaningfully different. SOSSI v2.0 is built around what students need.

That research foundation matters because online students are often invisible to the systems designed to support them. They don’t stop by an office. They don’t linger after class. The signals that would prompt an advisor to action often do not exist in an online environment. By the time a grade or an absence flags a problem, the student may already be in trouble.

SOSSI v2.0 is designed to reveal what would otherwise go unseen: the technology barriers, the help-seeking habits, the mismatched expectations, the self-regulation challenges that predict early attrition but rarely appear in the data systems institutions rely on. Implementing SOSSI v2.0 does this at a specific point in time: before the semester begins, when there is still room to act.

Several principles follow from that:

Triage. SOSSI v2.0 is designed to help campuses distinguish between students who need light-touch support, those who need moderate intervention, and those who need immediate, direct attention. The goal is to create a signal that translates into the right level of response at the right time.
Integration. SOSSI v2.0 works best when it lives inside an existing process: orientation, intake, an advising workflow, rather than alongside one. The evidence from campuses using SOSSI consistently points to the same finding: when student completion of the SOSSI is integrated into a structured sequence, participation is higher and results are more likely to reach the people who can act on them.
Ownership. Data without a designated recipient doesn’t become support. SOSSI v2.0 is designed to connect students directly to advising and intervention services. It works best when that connection runs through the early alert systems, advising models, and communication workflows your campus is already using.

SOSSI v2.0 aligns with Title IV expectations for persistence and academic progress while supporting SUNY goals around retention, completion, and equity. It provides a shared system-wide framework that maintains consistency while allowing campus flexibility by helping campuses move from guessing who needs support to making informed, timely, and coordinated decisions.