Reasons to participate in the SUNY Learning Network:

1) A community of SUNY professionals dedicated to improving learning with new technologies.

The SUNY Learning Network is supported by a community of instructional designers, technology support specialists, academic coordinators, faculty, and others working on the program. They collaborate to share information, best practices, and lessons learned that benefit everyone and embody academic values. Your campus’ direct participation in SLN provides access to this community ensuring that you do not re-invent the wheel in your online learning efforts, and that your courses are designed, delivered, and supported with best practices. The SUNY Learning Network has been recognized by EDUCAUSE with its national award for Systemic Progress in Teaching and Learning for its efforts to aid the SUNY System in this regard.

Benefit: SLN aims at academic excellence, provides an immediate and robust support community, avoid tangible and intangible costs for developing this support community.

2) Student Support

Online learning is about learning first and foremost. Online instructors do not expect to have to play the role of help desk, and best practices in this area suggest that burdening faculty with this responsibility is inappropriate. When students experience technical difficulties they need immediate assistance. The SLN Helpdesk offers this support via online and telephone based options. The SLN Helpdesk is highly regarded by online students and regularly receives ratings of 97+% customer satisfaction year after year.

Benefit: Campuses can avoid costs associated with adding 24/7 student services such as those provided by the SLN Helpdesk.

3) Faculty Support

As institutions use increasingly sophisticated options to facilitate online learning, technical support for faculty becomes crucial. The SLN Faculty Helpdesk can answer technical questions that typically arise in this fast changing arena.

Benefit: Participating campuses can avoid costs associated with building their own 24/7 faculty support services.

4) Technology Infrastructure

As campuses develop more complete courses leading to degree programs online, providing a reliable, stable, robust technology infrastructure becomes mission critical. The SUNY Learning Network is built upon a redundant, clustered, robust infrastructure with high availability, load balancing, off-site disaster failover, archiving, and the capacity to handle the rapidly growing enrollments SLN participating campuses are seeing.

Benefit: Campuses avoid costs associated with building an equivalent technology infrastructure or relying on third-party providers.

5) Faculty Satisfaction & Development

The SUNY Learning Network provides a comprehensive program of faculty development for online learning, starting with online forums for learning about online teaching, through a series of workshops delivered at eight locations across New York State. Faculty participating in the SLN program join a growing community of practitioners striving to ensure that online courses are of equal or superior quality to their classroom counterparts. Additionally, a core group of instructional designers, equipped with well-developed online and print resources, provides dedicated support and guidance. This core group works with a team of more than 40 campus-based instructional design support staff assisting more than 1000 instructors who, this year will offer over 3000 online courses. More than 98% of faculty report satisfaction with the SLN Faculty Development Program.

Benefit: Campuses avoid costs associated with building a comparable faculty development program.

6) Programmatic Marketing

The SUNY Learning Network provides participating SUNY campuses with a consolidated gateway to SUNY's online programs. This online presence and associated marketing efforts (national and local newspapers, magazines, direct mailings, conferences, and web-based) have proven very successful, with online enrollments growing at 25%-40% per year.

Benefit: Campuses gain from cooperative marketing efforts between the institution and the SLN program, and avoid costs associated with unilateral marketing.

7) National recognition & prestige

Through a series of case studies published and supported by the Sloan Foundation, SLN's best practices have been recognized by three prestigious national awards - for online programming [Sloan], systematic progress [Educause], and faculty development [Sloan]. This year, SLN's lead trainer, WIlliam Pelz received a national award for excellence in online teaching.

Benefit: Participating in SUNY’s recognized leadership in online learning benefits the reputation and direct quality of individual courses and programs.


8) Administrative & Program Development Services

The SUNY Learning Network assists and supports a team infrastructure on campus that makes online learning work on an institutional and university-wide level. Working with a core group of administrators for SLN, (Academic Coordinators), campuses have the opportunity to network with other campuses. This community benefits from access to model campuses that can assist in their development of online learning policies, processes, and procedures. This approach also provides a mechanism for communication between the campus and the SLN Program Office. SLN also provides additional opportunities for campuses to grow online offerings, extend SUNY's unique programs, and meet identified market demands.

Benefit: Development of online learning technology and programs informed by University-wide communities, coordination and opportunities, giving participating campuses access to best practices and synergies.

9) Rapid development of the Online Learning Platform to serve blended and hybrid learning

There is a dynamic and quickly growing need for an online learning platform that will support all the breeds of online learning, currently satisfied by an array of commercial providers SUNY-wide. CourseSpace is a CMS technology and program developed collaboratively by individual SUNY campuses to serve blended and hybrid learning, designed on the model of SLN. This year, SUNY’s Office of Learning Environments has taken responsibility for rapidly developing CourseSpace, integrating it with SLN, and making it available to campuses under a rational and simple fee structure, with all the benefits of system-wide coordination and support.

Benefit: SUNY will now develop and serve the entire spectrum of online learning needs on SUNY campuses from simple web-listing and enhancement of courses through robust hybrid and blended learning, through totally asynchronous learning. A full-spectrum platform within one development effort will benefit from all the advantages of “system-ness.”

10) A Solid Future: U-wide commitment to growing online learning “Developed by SUNY for SUNY”

The Chancellor and Provost of SUNY have committed significant additional financial resources to rapidly develop the SUNY-sponsored and developed online learning programs. We are in the process of adding talent and resources over the next two years to make SUNY-sponsored online learning even more responsive to faculty and students and to serve anticipated growth. Along with the integration and development of CourseSpace, we plan to quickly enhance the utility, attractiveness, flexibility and ease of use of SLN, adding many more web-enabled features and eliminating the need for a client. We also plan to evolve a robust outreach program to campuses to help bring new courses, programs, and degrees online, as well-as inter-campus collaborations to do so and marketing of programs to wider audiences in-state, nationally and internationally. Our plan also calls for no increase in fees to campuses.

Benefit: System-wide vision and support ensures continuity, protection of academic values, and containement of campus costs associated with the licensing and increasingly costly support for commercial alternatives.


Conclusion

SUNY’s online learning initiatives collaborate to fulfill the academic mission and achieve efficiencies. The key to our success so far has been our commitment to follow campus control over academic issues, campus input on program direction and technology development, and campus choices for participation and deployment. Our commitment to campuses is that we will continue to be responsive to and guided by our shared priorities as we grow rapidly in the coming years.

Each campus considering participation in the SUNY Learning Network should evaluate the total comparative costs involved in creating, managing, and delivering high quality online learning beyond licensing fees. Forty SUNY campuses currently use SLN and many have committed to SLN as the best choice among all other alternatives. By any measure, SLN continues to be the premiere choice for delivering asynchronous learning across SUNY, and we hope that success will be joined in our support for an integrated blended and hybrid learning platform.

Finally, SUNY administration has committed to a quick and coordinated development of programs, outreach and technology, based directly on intelligence we get from SUNY campuses and our communities, ensuring continued responsiveness and growth as campuses increasingly explore and embrace the benefits of online learning and collaboration.