Distance Education

SUNY Expands Open SUNY+ Online Programs

• By Leila Meyer
• 10/28/14

The State University of New York has expanded its enhanced online degree program, Open SUNY+, adding 56 degree and certificate programs from 17 campuses across the state.

Open SUNY is the university system's online education platform, which launched in 2013 and offers nearly 400 online-enabled degrees and 12,000 course sections. Select programs are available through Open SUNY+, which offers additional support services for students and faculty and is intended to provide online students and faculty with the same level of support available to their traditional, on-campus counterparts. With this announcement, Open SUNY now offers a total of 64 Open SUNY+ programs from 19 campuses. Eventually, SUNY plans to migrate all of its online courses to the Open SUNY+ platform.

Additional support services available for students in Open SUNY+ programs include:

• 24/7 help desk and tutoring services;
• Personal concierge, a single point of contact for student questions about their degree program; and
• Access to real-life work experience opportunities in the student's field of study prior to graduation.

To support its online faculty, SUNY has created a professional development community called the Center for Online Teaching Excellence (COTE), where they can learn about new online teaching practices and share ideas and techniques with colleagues.

According to information released by the University at Buffalo, which is one of the SUNY universities that has joined Open SUNY+, more than 750 faculty members from throughout the SUNY system are using COTE, and SUNY expects as many as 6,000 additional students to access courses through Open SUNY+ next semester.

Further information about Open SUNY+ is available on the Open SUNY site.