26 State University of New York
Alexis Clifton; Tony DeFranco; and Michael Daly
New York
Type of Institution: Public state system with 64 institutions, including research universities, academic medical centers, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, colleges of technology, and an online learning network.
Impetus: Early open educational resources (OER) initiative at Tompkins Cortland Community College; Achieving the Dream grant; state funding.
Student Information System: Varies by school. Banner (Ellucian) is the most popular, followed by other Ellucian registration products, such as PowerCampus. Other systems in place include PeopleSoft and individualized tools.
Markings Used: Varies by school (e.g., Attribute Type: [OER] Open Resource Textbook)
Unique Features: Office dedicated to assisting campuses adopt OER; system-wide implementation of marking OER sections in a comprehensive back-end reporting tool.
Background
The State University of New York (SUNY) is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States. Our 64 institutions include research universities, academic medical centers, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, colleges of technology, and an online learning network. SUNY serves nearly 1.3 million students in credit-bearing courses, continuing education courses, and community outreach programs. SUNY was created out of a commitment to providing opportunity and access to New York residents and is designed to meet diverse needs across the state.
The following case study first provides an overview of SUNY’s system-wide open and affordable course marking initiative and then zooms in on two key case studies from institutions within the system, Tompkins Cortland and Fulton-Montgomery community colleges. The activities reported in these institutional case studies preceded the state-wide initiative, informing how SUNY operationalized the call to designate courses that use open educational resources (OER) with a marker. This case study will be most useful to readers interested in how consortial or state-wide calls for course marking can balance group needs with the cultures and mission-driven needs of individual campuses.
SUNY OER Initiative
Trends in OER adoption, implementation, and creation across SUNY gained national visibility in 2015 when the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative (Achieving the Dream 2020) awarded grants to five SUNY community colleges. Two years later, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced $8 million in state budget funding dedicated to OER in higher education, to be split evenly between the SUNY and City University of New York systems.
The 64 SUNY institutions primarily function as independent units within a federated system, with shared direction and services stemming from the system offices. SUNY distributed the four million 2017/18 state fiscal-year dollars to individual campuses, allowing them to determine the most fitting way to use these funds in alignment with local initiatives and priorities. B