SUNY Effective Online Practices Program
The SUNY Effective Online Practices Program aims to collect, share and showcase the online best practices, strategies, and innovative online teaching and learning activities or programs of exemplary SUNY online practitioners from across the SUNY system. All effective online practice submissions will be included in the SUNY Effective Online Practices Repository.
Program tracks include:
- Online Teaching & Learning Practices: Online best practices, strategies, and innovative online teaching and learning activities.
- Online Course Quality Practices: Exemplary processes or practices to ensure quality in online course design, online course accessibility, and student online learning environment.
- Online Student Support Practices: Best practices, programs or initiatives that support the success of online students.
- Online Enrollment/Recruitment Practices: Exemplary models of online student recruitment practices.
- Online Program Partnership Practices: Exemplary models of multi-campus or global partnerships and/or intra-campus collaborations that benefit/support online courses or online student programs.
- Online Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Practices: Best practices, tools, and/or strategies that build DEI awareness and support DEI efforts in online teaching and learning activities, online courses, and professional development for online practitioners.
The SUNY Community will have the opportunity to review and rate entries and the effective online practices that earn the highest ratings overall will be recognized as part of the program awards conferred annually in the spring. Program participants are invited to present their effective online practice as part of ongoing SUNY Online webinar offerings.
TOPR Partnership
SUNY Online Teaching, in collaboration with the University of Central Florida (UCF), sponsors an initiative to recognize excellence in online teaching practices across SUNY via the award-winning Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR). TOPR is an open public resource hosted by UCF that reviews, selects, and organizes effective online practices for online faculty, instructional designers and other online teaching and learning practitioners. Submissions from SUNY in the Online Teaching & Learning track are invited to be submitted for consideration for inclusion in TOPR.
Congratulations to the 2025 SUNY Effective Online Practices Award recipients!
1st Place: The Brightspace Organization Page: A Hub for Graduate Student Engagement and Success – Submitted by Angela Thering and Andrea Nikischer, Buffalo State University
2nd Place: AI-Powered Study Tutoring Application: Enhancing Student Learning in Online Education – Submitted by Jie Zhang, Ning Yu, Sandeep Mitra, SUNY Brockport
3rd Place: Embedded RSS Newsfeeds in Course Discussion Boards – Submitted by Brandi So, Farmingdale State College