I’m honored to be working with SUNY Online as the Project Manager for the statewide redesign of SOSSI — the SUNY Online Student Success Inventory. This assessment tool helps identify student strengths and gaps in key areas tied to online learning success:
Digital Resilience
Technical Access & Reliability
Help-Seeking Behavior
Self Regulated Learning
Online Course Expectations
By flagging these areas early, campuses can connect students with the right support resources before issues become obstacles.
In collaboration with SUNY Online, I’ll lead a taskgroup focused on:
Reviewing current versions of the SOSSI tool for effectiveness and clarity
Suggesting content and structure changes based on updated research and student feedback
Adapting the inventory for EOP students and other specific populations
Improving access and usability across campuses
Ensuring broad representation from SUNY stakeholders, from advisors to instructional designers
This work supports SUNY’s mission to improve persistence, equity, and success for all online learners.
This is my first opportunity to help shape a system-wide student success tool, and I’m excited to bring my instructional design perspective and my student support mindset to the table. I believe tools like SOSSI don’t just help us understand students better — they empower us to serve them better, with smarter, more proactive interventions.
More to come as the project progresses!
(October 2026) When we interviewed online students across the SUNY system about what made their first semester difficult, we expected to hear about time management and technical problems. And we did. But we also heard exhaustion, isolation, and stress, expressed in so many different ways that it took careful analysis to see it as a pattern. And it’s exactly the kind of pattern that often goes undetected by early alert systems – until a student has already disappeared.
Those conversations, conducted with more than 55 students across a range of SUNY campuses, pushed us to question assumptions: that flexibility is what students need most; that belonging online is something that happens most often within courses; that a student’s prior experience with technology indicates their readiness for online learning systems. The data kept pointing elsewhere.
The SUNY Online Student Success Inventory (SOSSI) v2.0 is our response to what those students told us. A free modular assessment now in full deployment across SUNY campuses, it measures what institutions have rarely thought to ask about – whether students can recover when technology fails them, whether asking for help feels like a real option, and whether their expectations of online learning match what it actually requires of them.
We'll share the three assumptions our research challenged, how those challenges shaped the tool's design, and what institutions of any size or structure can take from that process – including the questions worth asking before building or adopting anything new, and a framework for measuring what has often gone unmeasured in online student support.
(May 2026) Equity in online learning means reaching students before they disappear—but the students facing the greatest barriers are often invisible until it's too late. This session presents a post-registration assessment tool that reveals hidden divides in technical access, digital confidence, and help-seeking behavior. Drawing on current research in online student readiness, we'll demonstrate how early screening uncovers patterns traditional metrics miss and share frameworks for delivering targeted, preventative support during students' most vulnerable early weeks.
(February 2026) You've seen it happen: students enroll with enthusiasm, then vanish somewhere between Week 1 and Week 7. What if you could proactively identify which students need more support? This session explores how readiness assessments can identify critical barriers known to predict early stopout. We'll share research results from SUNY students revealing their key concerns, then hear from SUNY institutions on how they triage and connect students with targeted resources during those critical first weeks.