What Does It Mean to Deliver a ‘Black College Education’ Online?

That’s the objective of a new effort that goals to create a shared digital platform for traditionally Black schools and universities, one they’ll use to ship on-line studying and social experiences that replicate the communities they serve. It’s an endeavor from the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), a philanthropy that helps HBCUs via scholarships to college students, grants to increased ed establishments and advocacy for educating African Americans.

Called HBCUv, the venture goals to roll out a pilot product this fall. Eventually, leaders intend for the platform to embody a catalog of high-quality on-line programs, digital areas the place college students can work together and digital instruments that enable school to collaborate — all shared amongst HBCUs.

The final objective is to assist these establishments develop their income and prolong their attain, constructing off the momentum they’ve recently skilled from increased student interest even as college enrollment more broadly has fallen.

“We fundamentally believe that HBCUs have a unique perspective and a unique learning model that could be scaled to the world if the right vehicle was developed to facilitate that,” says Ed Smith-Lewis, vp of strategic partnerships and institutional applications at UNCF. “We think HBCUv has the chance to disrupt their business model, expand their reach and really get them to work as a network of institutions with a shared mission of serving predominantly Black communities, but increasingly the world.”

Of course, there are many instruments already on the market that help on-line increased schooling. So the large query driving this effort, Smith-Lewis says, is: “What does it mean to deliver a Black college education in a virtual environment?”

To discover the reply, UNCF is drawing on the experience and experiences of professors, directors and college students at HBCUs.

It’s that final group whose views are most crucial to constructing a viable platform, argues Keisha Tassie, an affiliate professor of communication at Morehouse College who will not be affiliated with HBCUv. She advises the trouble to search scholar enter “every step of the way.”

“What we have a habit of doing,” she says, is “we create something first and we just sort of expect the students will enjoy it, get the benefit we would get from it. And that’s not how it turns out.”

‘Collective Genius’

One day, the president of Claflin University, Dwaun J. Warmack, reached out to Muhammad Hossain, the director of tutorial know-how for the traditionally Black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The president defined the concept for HBCUv and requested Hossain for his impressions.

Hossain thought again to his personal time in school. Years earlier than, he had enrolled in Claflin as a world scholar. And he had acquired a scholarship from UNCF, one he credit with serving to him to earn his bachelor’s diploma.

He grew enthusiastic about contributing to the mission of UNCF, which he believes adjustments college students’ lives.

“I told the president, ‘Hey, let’s absolutely do this,’” Hossain says. “And I kind of told him, ‘If I’m doing this, I have to be a dev partner” — that’s, a know-how growth companion. “I want to be able to help build this thing from scratch.”

Claflin is certainly one of three schools serving as growth companions to UNCF to create HBCUv. Six further HBCUs are presently collaborating as effectively. Based on their enter, a consulting agency is at work constructing the platform prototype.

As a part of the early levels of the trouble, Hossain and his collaborators launched into a “discovery” section, interviewing college students and school from totally different establishments about priorities for what to embody within the platform. The conversations additionally explored what the Black school expertise means to college students and professors, and the way it differs from attending or educating at a predominately white higher ed institution.

One precedence that surfaced was creating high-quality on-line programs that provide college students at collaborating establishments extra flexibility and selection concerning when, how and what they examine. The type of shared course library that HBCUv goals to compile may give a scholar at Claflin the prospect to enroll in a distant course taught by a professor at Clark Atlanta University, for instance. It may additionally add selection to the course catalog of every school. And it may assist college students progress even when, say, a diploma requirement isn’t supplied at their dwelling establishment throughout the semester they want to take it.

“Staying on track to graduation, not prolonging your debt — those are real-life issues,” Hossain says.

To assist develop these programs, UNCF recruited school fellows from HBCUs via its new educating and studying heart, providing professors coaching in efficient, partaking and inclusive on-line instruction, in accordance to Shawna Acker-Ball, the middle’s senior director. Fellows have centered on creating enterprise, schooling and basic schooling programs.

Rather than providing “mass-produced courses” on-line, Acker-Ball says, the trouble goals to faucet into the educating experience of the type of HBCU professor “who has students just begging to get in his classroom.”

Another precedence for the platform is the creation of on-line social areas, the place college students can mingle with friends from their very own establishments in addition to from different schools throughout the nation. This may appear to be a “virtual yard,” Hossain says, full with augmented actuality and digital actuality options.

He provides that the platform may additionally function a community for employers to faucet for hiring HBCU grads and as a discussion board for school at totally different establishments to collaborate on analysis.

Now within the design section, there are many particulars that stay to be found out about HBCUv, concerning knowledge sharing, know-how integration, approval for course-sharing, and even implications for monetary support for college kids at collaborating schools. The platform will use a studying administration system that’s already in the marketplace, Hossain says.

All of those concepts require funding. But HBCUs usually don’t have a lot of spare dollars sitting around. So pooling their sources to help a shared digital effort may assist to defray the prices for every establishment, UNCF leaders say. The strategy may additionally enable schools to be taught from one another about greatest practices in on-line schooling, slightly than have every school attempt to invent a system by itself.

“We call this whole thing ‘collective genius’ — bringing together all these brilliant minds,” Hossain says. “I think we can do a lot more doing it together.”

Leaders at UNCF hope that the platform they’re constructing won’t solely assist establishments decrease prices but in addition create new worth and ultimately usher in income for the collaborating schools. UNCF has raised preliminary funds to help the venture from a number of massive philanthropies. But if the platform is profitable, Smith-Lewis thinks it will likely be a “long-term revenue-generation source” for HBCUs.

“We fundamentally believe this is a profit-generating opportunity,” he says. “We want this to be an asset of the institutions participating in the platform.”

From Academics to Aesthetics

Acker-Ball describes the HBCU expertise — the one which HBCUv is making an attempt to replicate on-line — as a “special sauce.”

But it’s not one that may be simply defined in a recipe, she says. Instead, you simply realize it while you style it.

“It’s a feeling,” Acker-Ball says. “It’s a nurturing, it’s a cultivation most do not receive in areas or environments not similar to HBCUs. It’s the first time you may learn about contributions made by your ancestors. It’s a feeling and a connectedness and a pride that is espoused in everything you do.”

For Smith, the scholar at Howard, the flavour of this particular sauce derives partially from who’s current in an HBCU classroom, whether or not bodily or digital. It’s a distinction to her highschool in Phoenix, the place she didn’t have many Black classmates in her International Baccalaureate courses.

“Coming from an environment where you don’t see a lot of Black excellence, or Black people in spaces you’re in pursuing higher education, and then coming to HBCUs, which literally embody Black excellence, it’s a stark difference,” Smith says. “At HBCUs, there are Black people from so many different parts of the world, the country, socioeconomic backgrounds and upbringings. The variety of the Black experience in one place, it contributes to the type of education you get.”

To benefit from this class composition, Smith says it’s vital that on-line programs at HBCUs be designed to facilitate energetic dialogue amongst Black college students.

“It’s really hard to stare at a computer screen and listen to a professor for an hour and a half if you never have a chance to vocalize your own opinion,” she says. “Classroom engagement and participation is probably the only key to making online courses more engaging.”

For Tassie, the professor at Morehouse, a part of the importance of the HBCU expertise comes from the matters which can be mentioned in programs in addition to the educating strategies instructors can make use of.

“I love being able to be blunt, honest, and know that the students who I’m teaching understand, intimately, the experiences I’m sharing,” she says. “And that they understand the professor who is teaching them understands, intimately, the challenges and experiences and successes they’ve experienced as well.”

Having taught via Morehouse Online, a diploma program that Morehouse began two years in the past, Tassie acknowledges that in-person and distant lecture rooms supply totally different experiences. But the standard of instruction and dialogue ought to stay excessive, she says: “Direct, open, honest, authentic conversions — no reason for that to change in the virtual classroom.”

Additionally, Tassie appreciates that HBCU campuses have particular visible markers, like statues and posters that replicate Black achievements and creative actions. She believes that HBCU digital areas must also be designed with “aesthetics and visuals that relate to Afrocentricity.”

As an instance, she mentions Blackboard, a course administration system used at many schools.

“They give you lots of different designs you can chose from. None of them speak ‘Black space.’ Could they do it? They could. They haven’t yet,” Tassie says. “I would not want this initiative to become a classroom that could have been any classroom on any campus. It needs to resonate, ‘This is a Black space.’”

Both Smith and Tassie see the worth in a proposed on-line platform meant to invite extra individuals into the HBCU expertise. Smith notes that such a system may assist expose extra college students within the West, the place she grew up, to these establishments, most of which are located in Southern and mid-Atlantic states. And Tassie appreciates the best way that on-line studying could make increased schooling extra inexpensive for extra individuals.

“I am a huge proponent of virtual classrooms,” she says. “It opens doors. It provides greater accessibility to education, which has a huge impact on life chances.”

Creating a platform like HBCUv will take a lot of labor and ingenuity, Tassie acknowledges. But she thinks there could possibly be “a huge payoff,” so long as it’s designed rigorously and in collaboration with college students.

Perhaps, she provides, such a venture may even develop to assist traditionally Black schools attain college students worldwide.

“If they were even to expand to the continent of Africa,” she says, “that would be even more thrilling and exciting to me.”