Inside the Development of HBCUv, a New Online Learning Platform for HBCUs
What we're trying to do with HBCUv is leapfrog those challenges: think about ways to support student engagement at a higher level, give them constant feedback on what it means to do learning well, to achieve milestones effectively, to ensure they're giving their faculty feedback about how they're learning and how their learning experience is going. At the same time, provide faculty with high-quality learning prompts and syllabi, and ensure they have the instructional coaching they need to deliver learning content effectively. And most importantly, we're trying to find a way to get students to connect outside of just the synchronous or asynchronous learning opportunity. The big question we have with HBCUv is, how do we ensure students are logged in for the other 23 hours of the day when they're not in class? Because ultimately, that's what makes HBCUs special. And that's what's going to make HBCUv special.
Young: The connection aspect is by far the most challenging aspect that we're having to contend with. We knew out of the gate that we didn't want to build another social media network out there on top of a learning management system. But we did want to connect people; we wanted to connect students with each other so that they could do everything from finding the friend to hop on Fortnight with, to finding the next potential co-founder for a new startup. We knew that we wanted to connect faculty members with one another, so that they could do everything from sharing the latest and greatest and what's going on in their field, to collaborating on courses together. And we knew that we wanted to connect all the HBCUs together into one kind of unified campus — so that we could have a much more outsized impact through our ability to network these organizations together. And so that's been an area that we've really focused on. That and enabling more student and faculty interaction. That is really the bedrock of what makes the HBCU experience what it is. The faculty members at HBCUs are extremely dedicated. They forge extremely strong relationships with their students. And it's through those relationships that they're able to create breakthroughs.
Online is often referred to as "distance" learning. And what we want to do in our version of online learning is figure out how we can eliminate that distance as much as possible, figure out how we can enable more interactions between students and teachers, figure out how we can use things like big data to know when a student is struggling and know when teachers need to reach out to provide tutoring options or just have a conversation with a student. If you really want to put what we're trying to do with HBCUv in a nutshell, it's bring the humanity back to online education. We want it to feel vibrant when you log on. We want there to be a reason for you to sign on day after day after day. And by the way, not just while you're a student, but after you've graduated. You want to stay connected with your alumni, or stay connected with your faculty. We are really creating a connected online community in a way that we don't feel any university or online learning technology company has achieved yet.
CT: What will be the defining characteristics of the HBCUv platform?
Young: Community is really at the forefront of what we're trying to achieve. We want to connect students, we want to connect faculty members, we want to connect administrators in a new and novel way.
One of the other tenets of HBCUv is providing cutting-edge learning opportunities. We want to make sure that not only are we providing best-in-class synchronous opportunities, but also best-in-class asynchronous opportunities, and really providing the flexibility that we know that our students need. The vast majority of HBCU students are juggling either family responsibilities or work responsibilities on top of their educational responsibilities. And so being flexible and offering those different modalities in a best-in-class fashion is core to what we're trying to accomplish.