Inside the Development of HBCUv, a New Online Learning Platform for HBCUs
The United Negro College Fund and Deloitte Digital have embarked on an ambitious effort to reimagine online education for historically Black colleges and universities. Here's how they're leveraging technology to put community at the center of the online HBCU experience.
What would a learning management system centered on culture and community look like? The United Negro College Fund hopes to answer that question with HBCUv, a new learning platform that aims to reshape the future of online education for historically Black colleges and universities. The organization has partnered with consultancy Deloitte Digital on the project, with the goal of providing best-in-class remote learning, community engagement and career pathways to students seeking an HBCU education. We spoke with Ed Smith-Lewis, VP of strategic partnerships and institutional programs at UNCF, and Nathan Young, head of strategy for Ethos at Deloitte Digital, about bringing the HBCU experience to an online environment, the defining characteristics of HBCUv and the equity-centered design process behind their work.
Campus Technology: UNCF and Deloitte Digital are developing a new online platform for community learning, designed for historically Black colleges and universities, called HBCUv. Could you talk a little bit about the ideas behind the project and how it began?
Ed Smith-Lewis: HBCUv was first conceived in 2019 "BC," before COVID, when UNCF was invited by a third-party partner to really understand how we could support HBCUs as they attempted to enter the online space. The short story is that HBCUs, over the course of their history, have been historically under-resourced institutions, and because of their high-touch environment they've stayed away from deep engagement in the online space. When we left that meeting, we were very excited about the capabilities of technology — and we didn't leave excited to support one institution, but a consortium of institutions, understanding that HBCUs individually are strong, but much stronger together. So we came back to our offices and we wrote what amounted to a 25-page proposal that really got everyone excited, but also nervous. After all, UNCF is known as a scholarship organization, not a technology provider. And so we really sat on that proposal for a few months.
Then in mid-March, the world decided that we needed to stay home, and higher education was disrupted like it's never been disrupted before. And that proposal we had written became a hot commodity. Through some engagement and multiple RFP processes, we landed on partnering with Deloitte Digital to help us make HBCUv a reality. The work, ultimately, is to build an online learning ecosystem that really takes what makes HBCUs special — that historic significance, that high-touch environment, that critical lens it places on learning — and to try to provide that to many more students throughout the world.
Campus Technology: How are each of your organizations involved in the project?
Nathan Young: At Deloitte Digital, I head up a unit called Ethos. And what Ethos is purpose-built to do is help brands that are contending with big societal challenges actually create new products and services and campaigns that will make an impact. And so really, our unit was designed to work on moonshots just like this. When we got the proposal from the UNCF, we jumped at the opportunity to put together some innovative thinking behind how we were going to approach this project — not just from a technology standpoint, but from an intentionality standpoint.