This document discusses the creation of open education at Empire State College and SUNY. It summarizes: 1. Empire State College was founded in 1971 as an "open institution" with open admissions, distance learning, and an open curriculum. 2. SUNY later launched the Open SUNY initiative in 2012 to expand online education across SUNY campuses and increase access through online courses and degree programs. 3. A key part of Open SUNY is recognizing prior learning through SUNY REAL, which assesses work and life experience for academic credit using open assessments developed by SUNY faculty.

1. Creating a Culture of Openness:
Institutional Support for
Open Education
Tom Mackey, Ph.D.
Dean
Center for Distance Learning
Empire State College

2. Empire State College
as an Open Institution

3. NEW UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
1971

4. structure if necessary
An Open Community of Learning.
experimental skills

5. transcends constraints of
space, place and time.
transcend conventional
academic structure.

6. “These dimensions of openness that were
introduced by the UK Open University and Empire
State College remained the principal expressions of
openness in higher education for the next thirty
years. Two dimensions – open admissions and
distance learning – were widely copied and there
are now millions of students in open universities
around the world.”
Sir John Daniel
Former President and Chief Executive Officer
Commonwealth of Learning

7. Open Curriculum:
Multiple Ways of Knowing

8. Open Curriculum
• Mentor-Learner
• Individualized Degree Planning
• Prior Learning Assessment
(PLA)
• Guided Independent Study
• Group Study
• Online Study
• Blended study
• Residencies
• Emerging open formats:
MOOCs, Open Courses, OERs

9. MOOCmania: Explorations in
Connectivist Massive Open Online
Courses (cMOOCs)

10. “The starting point of connectivism is the
individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a
network, which feeds into organizations and
institutions, which in turn feed back into the
network, and then continue to provide learning to
individual. This cycle of knowledge
development (personal to network to
organization) allows learners to remain current in
their field through the connections they have
formed.”
George Siemens
Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

11. “In a connectivist MOOC, people get out of it what
they put into it,” said Stephen Downes of the
National Research Council of Canada, a pioneer
of the early MOOCs. “It’s something like a Yahoo
group or other interest-based community. But it
has a start date and an end date, and it pulls
people out of different networks and plops them
into a new one, which results in new connections
and gets people hearing new voices.”
"Online Mentors to Guide Women Into the Sciences”
TAMAR LEWIN
September 16, 2012

12. Dr. Betty Hurley Dasgupta and Carol Yeager
Empire State
http://www.cdlprojects.com/cmc11blog/ College
MOOC

13. Dr. Betty Hurley Dasgupta and Carol Yeager
Creativity and Multicultural
Communication
• 492 registered participants (387 still registered)
• 14 Registered for credit (13 completed)
• 2 Registered in summer and completed
• 136 tweets
• 36 registered blog feeds
• 78 blog posts
• 36 discussions
• 96 comments
• Facebook group started by participants continues to be
active

14. Dr. Betty Hurley Dasgupta and Carol Yeager
Participant Feedback
• “Thank you, CMC11, I never would have started a blog
without you (I always kind of thought they were silly),
but I’m really starting to enjoy this and see it as a
creative outlet! So I guess the class has been quite
successful for me!”
• “It felt effective and comfortable for me to work
collaboratively with others through a combination of
different Web tools”
• “I LOVED this course! … What an eye opening and
invigorating course ... Hope there are many to come!”

15. Dr. Betty Hurley Dasgupta and Carol Yeager
http://math.cdlprojects.com/

16. Next MOOC for fall 2013:
#L4LLL
Literacies for Lifelong Learning
(a Metaliteracy MOOC)
Mackey, Thomas P. and Trudi E. Jacobson. “Reframing Information Literacy as
a Metaliteracy” January 2011 College & Research Libraries vol. 72 no. 1 62-78

17. Integrating Moodle/Mahara as an
open platform for learning

18. Online Learning Environment
Migration from
Migration from
Angel LMS to
Angel LMS to
Moodle
Moodle

19. Learning environment design: Ellen Murphy and Kathleen Stone
19

20. Every learning activity in Moodle can be
exported to Mahara ePortfolio
-Ellen Murphy
Director of Online Curriculum
20

21. PLA to support open learning and
degree completion
Credit for Prior Level Learning – Empire State College

22. Office of Research, Innovation, and Open Education
• Overall goals of grant project:
• Scale PLA to 64 campuses within SUNY
• Develop assessment structures to evaluate college
level prior experiential and emergent learning for
college credit (including OERs)
• Recruit and train faculty and expert evaluators to
conduct assessments
• Transcript approved college level learning
• Conduct research on PLA practices to maintain quality
and consistency
• Develop process to conduct PLA for non-matriculated
learners http://www.esc.edu/news/releases/2012/lumina-500k.html

23. Office of Research, Innovation, and Open Education
• Phases and goals:
• Year 1: Develop rubric and process for evaluating open
resources (OERs, Saylor open courses), internal faculty
group, external expert panel
• Year 2: Conduct assessments in Humanities and STEM
with internal faculty group and review by external
expert panel
• Year 3: Summer Institute with 20-40 participants to
share processes and assessments; build a consortium
around shared assessments.
Interim Vice Provost Robert J. Clougherty

25. From original Open SUNY proposal, Empire State College

26. Chancellor’s Online Education
Advisory Team Recommendation
The Advisory Team recommends “Open SUNY”
be officially adopted as the name of SUNY’s new
online learning initiative. The term Open SUNY
represents an opening up of the educational
opportunities that SUNY can provide through
the enhancement of existing—and development
of new—online education resources, courses
and degree programs.
Getting Down to Business:
Interim Report of the Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team

27. • Increase student access, time to degree; completion
• Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team
• OpenSUNY Online Consortium
• 10 new online Bachelor degrees in high need areas
• Online opportunities at every SUNY campus (64)
• 100,000 online learners SUNY wide in three years
• SUNY REAL (recognition of experiential and academic
learning) to accelerate degree completion; 3 year
degrees with SUNY REAL
• Built on “systemness” and integrating common
systems throughout SUNY

28. 1. Open SUNY Consortium
2. Open SUNY Degree
3. Open SUNY Complete
4. Open SUNY Resources
5. Open SUNY REAL
6. Open SUNY Workforce
7. Open SUNY International
8. Open SUNY Research
9. Open SUNY Learning Commons

29. SUNY REAL
• Recognition of Experiential and Academic
Learning
• Links the academy to the workplace and to
the community, and OERs to academic credit
• REAL assesses, others accept: use SUNY
faculty
• Provides an E-Portfolio for life
• Develops Open Assessment Resources
From original Open SUNY proposal, Empire State College

30. Tom Mackey, Ph.D.
Dean
Center for Distance Learning
Tom.Mackey@esc.edu