Project Manager, statewide redesign of the SUNY Online Student Skills Inventory, 2025-present
SOSSI is a free, modular assessment that helps SUNY campuses see how ready their online students are, and check whether the campus is ready to respond to what it finds.
The plan was to update a survey. The bigger move was to put student voices into the redesign, so we interviewed 55+ online students across SUNY campuses about what made their first semester hard.
We expected time management and technical problems, and we heard them. We also heard exhaustion, isolation, and stress, in so many different forms that it took careful analysis to see the pattern. It's the kind of pattern early alert systems miss until a student has already disappeared. Three of our assumptions flipped:
Flexibility became flexibility plus intentional structure.
Belonging in the course became belonging across the institution.
Tech skill became digital resilience: can a student recover when technology fails?
Readiness isn't something a student has or lacks. It's produced in the interaction between the student and the environment they're dropped into. So SOSSI v2.0 treats a student's results as a snapshot of that fit before the course starts, not a verdict on the student. That changes the question for campuses. It's no longer only "is this student ready?" but also "are we ready to see and respond?" Before going live, a campus plans its response to each need. Students with non-critical needs are pointed straight to a resource, and students with critical needs get direct outreach.
Five modules: Digital Resilience, Technical Access & Reliability, Help-Seeking Behavior, Self Regulated Learning, and Online Course Expectations
A multi-campus assessment in Qualtrics, with strengths-based feedback for students and reporting tools for campuses
An implementation guidebook, practitioner workbook, and onboarding curriculum
SOSSI v2.0 is live and free for any SUNY campus, program, or course. Campuses request it through a short form.
WCET, October 2026: Before They Disappear: Rethinking Online Student Support, with Kristin Hall and Susan Warner
SUNY CIT, May 2026: Reaching the Students We Don't See
SUNY Online Summit, February 2026: Before They Disappear [keep the embedded video]
The goal isn't simply to identify online students who may struggle. It's to build environments that can respond before struggle becomes failure.
(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 Skills 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.