Emerging Technology

DENVER — College leaders are ready to try something new, and they’re looking to technology to do it. That much was clear at Educause’s annual conference, held in Denver in October.  

Many college officials have felt like they’ve been treading water for the past couple of years as they’ve battled a health crisis, encountered enrollment challenges and pushed back against doubts about higher education’s value. But they’re using new tools and modalities to improve student experiences and how their institutions operate. 

“Things are different these days — they’re different from the way they were before the pandemic,” said Susan Grajek, vice president for partnerships, communities and research at Educause, during a speech at the conference. “We’re seeing that institutional and technology leaders are ready for a new approach.”

Here are three major ed tech trends colleges can expect. 

Hybrid learning models are still shaking out

The pandemic forced hundreds of colleges to further adopt virtual learning practices, including universities that already had large online footprints. At Arizona State University, for instance, officials had to convert around 900 classrooms for virtual learning in a matter of weeks when the health crisis started. 

Students are now expecting colleges to offer both online and in-person options, according to several speakers and panelists. 

“Our students are demanding different ways to learn,” said Jess Evans, who will soon start as chief information officer at Vanderbilt University. “It is now commonplace to be like, ‘Wait, why do I have to physically walk in when I know we’re having a lecture, and I can attend the lecture remotely?’”

But not all higher education experts believe that hybrid classrooms are the best model. 

John Baker, CEO of D2L, a learning management system company, says that college officials are burning out from implementing hyflex — a hybrid education model that allows students to attend classes either virtually or in person. 

Instead, Baker envisions colleges offering in-person options and asynchronous online classes separately. 

“It’s going to be this pivot to investing now to build high-quality online programs to be able to support both on campus and students that are wanting to do pure online experience,” Baker said.

Technology could be one tool to address equity issues

Equity gaps are pervasive in higher education. For instance, only 46% of Black students who entered a public four-year college in 2011 completed a credential within six years, compared to 64.7% of students overall, according to a 2019 report from the American Council on Education. Hispanic students also had a lower-than-average six-year completion rate, at 55.7%.

The pandemic further entrenched some of those divides. 

These types of gaps can have serious economic consequences, said Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary during the Obama administration, during a panel. 

“We all know that if you drop out of high school, there’s basically no chance to get a good job,” Duncan said. “If you have a high school diploma with nothing else, it’s almost impossible.” 

Indeed, a recent report from Georgetown University researchers found that young adults are facing lengthier and more complicated pathways to good quality jobs — and that someone’s race can mean they face higher hurdles than others while on those pathways. 

“Too often, education actually exacerbates the divide between the haves and the have-nots,” Duncan said. “When that happens, we start to move from a class system to a caste system.”

Technology can help address some of those divides. Duncan pointed to internet access as one way to provide opportunity. He also said that online education could help meet nontraditional students, typically thought of as those who are 25 and older, where they are. 

Colleges are prioritizing microcredentials

The Education Design Lab, a nonprofit aiming to streamline the school-to-work pipeline, has been championing microcredentials for years. The organization has developed several microcredentials to signal to employers that students have mastered certain soft skills, including critical thinking, oral communication and creative problem-solving. 

Don Fraser Jr., the Education Design Lab’s chief program officer, argued that higher education often needs to be spurred to quickly transform, such as through a pandemic, tragedy or public embarrassment. 

“Higher ed can’t keep doing what they’re doing and expecting the world of work to be OK with it,” Fraser said. 

He pointed to the trend of many employers dropping bachelor’s degree requirements for jobs, arguing that they’re looking for clearer signals of applicants’ skills.  

“They’re starting to look at other forms of credentialing,” Fraser said. “This puts institutions in a good position to be able to deliver on that.”

Other ed tech companies have recently been promoting microcredentials, including Coursera, an online course platform, and 2U, a company that helps colleges run and manage online programs. 

Fraser argued that institutions may have other incentives to offer microcredentials. Colleges facing enrollment challenges may see them as a way to strengthen their bottom lines. And microcredentials could help make the job market more equitable for students who don’t go to top-ranked colleges. 

“With this trend where employers are maybe less interested in where you went — but whether or not you have the skills or not — then there’s an opportunity for people who aren’t going to those types of institutions to be able to demonstrate their capability in a different way,” Fraser said.

Dive Brief: 

• Coursera, a high-profile MOOC platform, is laying off employees, though a company spokesperson declined to say how many workers were let go. 
• In a public letter Nov. 9, Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said officials decided to reduce the company’s workforce as it navigates “lower growth rates and environmental uncertainty.” The company has notified all affected workers via one-on-one conversations, he said. 
• Coursera expects to spend between $10 million and $12 million reducing its personnel expenses, including severance and benefit costs, in 2022’s fourth quarter, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company had 1,138 full-time employees at the end of last year. 

Dive Insight: 

Coursera went public in early 2021, riding a wave of enthusiasm for online education that erupted during the pandemic. Although the company's shares debuted at $33 each, giving it a market value of more than $4 billion, its closing price has since plummeted from $45.78 a share on April 1, 2021, to just $12.65 the day the layoffs were announced. Shares rose slightly during the day Thursday, but the company's market cap remained under $2 billion.

“2020 was a moment of extraordinary expansion as our business was propelled by customer demand during the pandemic,” Maggioncalda wrote in his public letter. “And we’re entering a different chapter now.”

The company’s revenue growth has significantly slowed since its initial public offering. In its first quarter as a public company, Coursera earned $88.4 million, a 64.1% increase from the same period a year before. In its most recent quarter, that year-over-year growth slowed to 24.1%, with about $136.4 million in revenue. 

“While the long-term outlook for Coursera remains promising, a deteriorating macroeconomic environment has forced us to sharpen our focus, prioritize our investments, and optimize our structure and operations,” Maggioncalda wrote. 

Coursera isn’t the only large company in the ed tech space that’s resorted to layoffs. 

2U, an online program management company that owns edX — one of Coursera’s competitors — announced across-the-board layoffs this summer. The cuts reduced the company’s personnel expenses by about 20%, officials said. 

This week, 2U announced flat revenue in the third quarter as it adopts a new strategy. It is now focused on using edX, which it acquired last year, to attract students to free online courses before attempting to move them to paid offerings. 

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Continuing education and online learning leaders gathered at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) 2019 SUPER Regional Conference in Denver, Colorado to discuss big-picture strategies and opportunities to lead the way in serving professional, continuing and online learners.

This post summarizes the ideas and best practices identified by institutional leaders at the workshop around a central theme, strategic planning, and the five key areas to address if your institution aspires to be positioned for growth.

1. Leadership and structure within the institution: independent is ideal

Where continuing education (CE) sits within an organization can be a key ingredient for success. Online and continuing education leaders agreed that it's optimal to set up continuing and online educational units independently as their own division, providing services and leading innovation institution-wide.

Less ideally, CE can be centralized within a system or siloed within individual schools. In the case of units that are system-wide, CE teams find it challenging to effectively provide support, advocate for additional resources, and gain system-wide traction. In decentralized environments, leaders noted the duplication of resources and the sharing of best practices as challenges.

2. Stay ahead of market demand

Online and continuing education leaders have paved the way to growth and new revenue streams for many institutions. Online learning has now matured into an established part of higher education and the student experience. Now, it is important for CE leaders to understand where the market is headed—where is the next opportunity for online, professional, and continuing education? CE leaders cited micro-credentials and certificates (stackable for-credit or non-credit) as the next frontier for higher education. The growth of this smaller, bite-sized form of education is outpacing traditional forms and aligns directly with what both students' and employers' value. It's important to understand the idiosyncratic needs and aspirations of each institution's nontraditional and online students.

3. A self-funded model has many advantages

The funding model for CE at the institution is an important factor in the ability to scale and be successful. Many leaders agreed that the self-funded model of many continuing education units gives leadership the flexibility to operate outside of the traditional models of education, develop new and innovative services to support this evolving modality with nontraditional learners, and flexibility with resourcing and reinvestment to fuel growth.

4. Use empirical data to build a case for resources

The ability to invest in resources to achieve growth requires CE leaders make a compelling case to institutional leadership. Successfully building a case for added resources (e.g., staff, technology, marketing, support services) typically requires CE leaders to:

• Demonstrate how added resources will lead to added revenue (and/or enrollments). Showing how revenue is generated from additional resources requires CE leaders to make an educated guess or rely on partners to help forecast the potential market size and demand and correlate investment with growth. At Blackboard Student Services, we have helped institutions like Johns Hopkins Executive Education, Texas Tech University School of Continuing Studies, and Wichita State University Online build similar models and successfully secure resources that helped fuel growth.
• Provide competitive insights into how other successful institutions are resourced (what is their marketing spend, how they are staffed, what technology do they use, which partners do they use to provide additional support?).
• Conduct secret shopping and document findings to highlight opportunities to improve the student experience.

5. Internal collaboration is essential

Internal collaboration, just as much as autonomy, is a key determining factor of success. Successful CE divisions are often the innovation hub for most institutions and help pave the way for the future of education. Bring key stakeholders from across the institution together for an annual or biannual summit to:

• Share mutual successes, resources, and learnings.
• Demonstrate progress and shine a light on innovation.
• Bring students or employers to the table to show other institutional leaders or constituents about their experiences and preferences.
• Develop internal-facing marketing materials such as videos to highlight their approach, reinforce the value CE provides, and continue to get buy-in institution-wide.
• Build relationships.

Innovative technology solutions

Many of today's students are far from traditional, meaning institutions cannot continue deploying traditional service models and expect to drive demand and increase or even maintain retention. Through open and innovative technology solutions and platform strategies, institutions are able to ensure their ecosystem is scalable and sustainable, helping to keep pace with the ever-evolving needs of their programs and users.

Dive Brief: 

• 2U’s revenue was flat in 2022’s third quarter, but officials remained optimistic that the acquisition of edX late last year would attract learners to the company’s online degree and alternative credential offerings. 
• Revenue dipped to $232.2 million, down 0.1% from the same period last year. Meanwhile, costs and expenses grew almost 22% to $336.5 million, largely due an accounting adjustment to reflect reduced asset value. Net loss more than doubled to $121.7 million. 
• So far this year, 2U has spent $29.2 million on restructuring costs, including across-the-board layoffs. Officials said they’ve reduced personnel expenses by 20% since the reductions announced last quarter. 

Dive Insight: 

2U got its start in 2008 as an online program management company, or OPM, meaning it helped colleges launch and run online degrees in exchange for a cut of their revenue. 

It has vastly expanded its reach in recent years, including by acquiring edX, a prominent MOOC platform. As one of the few publicly traded OPMs, 2U’s earnings provide a glimpse into how the sector — as well as online education as a whole — is faring. 

The company's degree segment revenue declined 7.1% to $137.2 million, partly due to enrollment decreases. 2U isn’t alone — enrollment in colleges and universities dipped 1.1% in fall 2022 from the year before, according to preliminary data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. 

But 2U CEO and co-founder Chip Paucek expressed optimism about the company’s future. 

During a Nov. 7 call with analysts, Paucek touted the company’s strategy, which involves using edX — and its free online classes — to eventually attract students to paid options, such as certificate and degree programs. 

“We’re all in on just the notion of free-to-degree, and having steps along the way,” Paucek said. “EdX has the kind of muscle mass on the internet that 2U’s never had before.”

Paucek gave the example of George Washington University, which is working with edX to launch a MicroMasters program in public health, a series of graduate-level courses on the platform that lead to a certificate. If students are then accepted into the university’s online master’s of public health — which 2U helps manage — they will be eligible to receive credit for the certificate. 

“We have many more of these in negotiation,” said Paucek. He predicted these types of initiatives would help drive revenue growth in the degree business near the end of 2023. 

Company officials have repeatedly told analysts that this strategy will help lower 2U’s marketing costs. In the third quarter of 2022, the company decreased its paid marketing costs by $18.7 million from the second quarter, according to a news release. Overall, marketing and sales expenses declined year over year by 20.3% to $94.3 million. 

Paucek pointed to segments of the company that are rapidly growing. Revenue for alternative credentials, for instance, increased 12.3% to $95 million. That was driven by revenue increases in the company’s boot camps, particularly those for web development and cybersecurity.

NEW YORK — It’s a brutal moment for ed tech companies. 

The stock market has been battered over the past few months, and the technology sector has been particularly hard hit. Meanwhile, colleges are experiencing enrollment declines at the same time their coronavirus relief funds are drying up, potentially constraining how much they can spend with vendors. 

Still, ed tech CEOs and investors remained bullish about their own sector’s future during a September conference in New York held by HolonIQ, a market analysis firm. Here are three trends they say are coming down the pike. 

Ed tech will overcome tough market conditions

Stocks have been trending downward for most of the year, reaching a new low after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates again in a bid to fight soaring inflation. 

Ed tech stocks have been feeling the squeeze. Shares for 2U, which owns MOOC platform edX, closed at $5.78 on Friday, down from about $35 a year ago. Shares of Coursera, a prominent MOOC platform, were also trading around $35 in September of last year. On Friday, they closed at $10.25. 

These market trends have important implications for ed tech companies, especially those that had been weighing an initial public offering, according to investors who spoke on a HolonIQ panel Thursday. 

“We see an IPO window that’s closed for quite a bit,” said Shoshana Vernick, managing director at Avathon Capital. “If you’re a company that is needing cash and has to go raise money right now, it’s very difficult.”

Still, speakers listed reasons to expect positive long-term trends. A little over 10 years ago, only about $500 million of venture and growth capital was flowing into the ed tech market, said Michael Cohn, partner at GSV Ventures. 

That’s compared to more than $20 billion in 2021. Despite uncertainty about the future, Cohn predicts an “upward trajectory.” 

Chip Paucek, CEO and co-founder of 2U, acknowledged the tough market conditions. 

“I show up at cocktail parties right now, and people go, ‘How are you?’” he said. “Because, obviously, it’s not been pleasant lately. And we take that very seriously. Our shareholders are a critical community for the company.”

However, Paucek said 2U’s recent moves — which included acquiring edX last year to transform into a company with a consumer-facing platform — are setting it up for the long haul. 

“This company is much, much stronger than it was when we were at our peak price,” Paucek said. 

Microcredentials are higher ed’s future

Chief executives at two large ed tech companies touted new microcredentials available on their platforms, stressing that these smaller offerings will be a key part of higher education’s future. 

In May, Coursera launched Career Academy, a skills training academy where users can earn entry-level certificates from companies like IBM and Meta, Facebook’s parent. Coursera is selling the platform to colleges, which can make it available to their students. 

Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera’s CEO, likened Career Academy to Shopify, an e-commerce platform that enables merchants to quickly set up online stores. Colleges can use Career Academy to launch a skills academy with their own branding. 

“When they graduate they have a college degree, and they have a professional certificate from Google,” Maggioncalda said. “That graduate is going to do better than one who just has a college degree, or someone who never went to college and just got a professional certificate.” 

2U is also doubling down on microcredentials. The company announced Thursday two new credentials it calls Microbachelors, which are programs composed of a few classes that can lead to college credit from edX’s partner institutions. 

The two new Microbachelors, which are both centered on statistics, will be offered through the London School of Economics and Political Science, part of the University of London. The school also launched a introductory math course on the platform that is free to audit.

Students who complete one of the Microbachelors and are accepted into certain programs at the University of London will be eligible to receive credit for two half courses. The programs are pending recognition for credit by New Jersey’s Thomas Edison State University, according to edX’s website. 

“That is a perfect stacked pathway,” said Paucek, 2U’s CEO. “That is much harder to pull off than most people outside of higher ed would realize.” 

Paucek described the offerings as “brilliant for business,” saying it will improve the marketing funnel for University of London’s online bachelor’s degrees offered on edX’s platform. 

Companies will continue to offer educational benefits

Ed tech companies and investors expect learning and working to become more intertwined in the future. 

Coursera, for instance, sells access to its content libraries to companies, governments and other organizations that are interested in training their employees. In 2022’s second quarter, this segment of Coursera’s business brought in $43.7 million, up 55% from a year ago. 

These efforts could help the company reach learners it might not otherwise attract, Maggioncalda said. 

“There’s a lot of individuals who don’t know about Coursera. They’re not going to come to Coursera,” he said. “But they might be in a government workforce development program, where an institution can guide them to where the opportunities for jobs are and can guide them to use Coursera in a certain way.”

Cohn, of GSV Ventures, echoed those comments, saying he expects companies will continue to offer certain educational benefits. GSV Ventures has invested in Guild Education, a tuition benefits platform that connects employers to its platform for online colleges. 

“If it is, ‘Oh, here’s $100 for MasterClass,’ that’s probably going away — you know, superficial, fluffy learning as a benefit.” Cohn said. “But if it’s learning that drives the future-proofing of an organization — the upleveling, the upskilling of the people in a way that is measurable, demonstrable against business objectives — we think that that’s going to be a long-term trend.”

UNCF last year announced it is developing an online platform, HBCUv, with the vision that it will have classes taught by the country's best Black minds.

The way UNCF, which advocates for private historically Black colleges and universities, is pursuing the project is also notable. It's working with nine HBCUs: Benedict College, Claflin University, Clark Atlanta University, Dillard University, Jarvis Christian College, Johnson C. Smith University, Lane College, Shaw University and Talladega College.

An arm of Deloitte Digital called Ethos is developing HBCUv with those institutions. More than $10 million in funding for the project comes from the Karsh Family Foundation, Lilly Endowment, Citi Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bank of America Charitable Foundation.

Higher Ed Dive spoke with two people who are deeply involved in the project to better understand it and how it's intended to be different from the norm in ed tech. Next week we'll publish an interview with Nathan Young, senior manager of Deloitte Consulting and head of strategy at Ethos.

First, here's a conversation with Edward Smith-Lewis, vice president for strategic partnerships and institutional programs at UNCF.

HIGHER ED DIVE: How would you describe HBCUv to someone who's unfamiliar with it?

EDWARD SMITH-LEWIS: HBCUv is designed to be an online learning ecosystem that stretches the boundaries of the campus for students who may be interested in attending an HBCU but have barriers, such as financial or geographic barriers. It is also designed to be a flexibility tool for current students on campus, where they may want to be on campus but take an online course.

What we're trying to do is realize the promise of digital, which we believe is equalizing the playing field and providing access.

How did the project start?

Strangely enough, it was pre-COVID. We were invited by a major tech organization to come learn about some of their products as they relate to digital learning and what capabilities they had. They were interested in supporting an HBCU or two.

The UNCF team came back and said, "How do you pick which institution deserves this opportunity?" Instead of picking one or two, we went back to that organization and said, "What if we did a shared service where we provided this opportunity to many more?"

So we had conceived of HBCUv in November 2019. We wrote a full proposal that we submitted, and everybody's eyes got big in terms of the opportunity — unfortunately, maybe too big, because then there became a question of who owns it and how does it work and all of those things.

So that proposal sat on the shelf for a few months while our CEOs tried to come together and understand how we could actually partner on such a major initiative. Then we were all told to stay home in mid-March, and for the first time in a long time, 90% of higher ed logged into their [learning management system]. And somebody said, "Wait, don't we have that one proposal, HBCUv?"

How will this stand out from a traditional learning management system?

For much of virtual learning, it's about the time you log in to engage, whether it's a synchronous or asynchronous course. It's so focused on that learning moment, intaking or digesting content and trying to own the content that you learn.

But that's not the Black college experience by any sort of measure. We're trying to think about how you keep a student logged in whether or not they're taking that course at that time. We think to keep them logged in is to build community around the learning experience.

An HBCU graduate, nine times out of 10 they'll say it felt like a family because so much of the experience happens when you're walking through campus or in the cafeteria. Those are things that virtual environments can't really replicate, and so we talk about reimagining the HBCU experience.

We're thinking about things like how do you reimagine the yard of an HBCU in a virtual space? How do you allow for students to drive their own connections through social clubs that may be virtual? How do you think about those other opportunities for engagement, and that could be career boosters or mentorship or simple Q&As and message boards.

Do you intend to grow beyond the nine institutions that are a part of the development?

The aspiration is all HBCUs.

We have three development partners within the nine, and those three are in every conversation, so they are meeting with us four or five times a week as we discuss the ins and outs and make decisions — everything from what features and functions of the platform will be to the governance structure and how you maintain the organization around it.

The goal would be, by the fall of next year we will have nine fully on the platform. After that, we seek to scale fairly quickly.

We also are very interested in other institutions that are non-HBCUs in terms of participating on the platform, and so we're trying to understand that as well.

But the goal would be all 102 public and private HBCUs, if they deem that appropriate. We are designing it such that it doesn't have to be your only virtual learning tool, so we're not asking institutions to shift their LMS.

Why involve Deloitte?

We think of it as a partnership. We've designed the work such that we are fully integrated. We see them as an extension of our team.

UNCF, we're known as a fundraising and scholarship organization with a pretty strong and emerging capacity-building unit. But we're not a tech organization. And we're trying to solve for a lack of tech capabilities in a set of under-resourced institutions.

One interesting thing about this project is that it involves branching out into new areas for you. Do you have recommendations or reflections on how organizations can do that?

When you think about all of the innovation that's happened in the tech space and some of the challenges that are replicating themselves from society — solutions being made for certain groups and not others, or being devoid of the diverse thought or opportunities in that space — it becomes really challenging when you say, "Hey, we want to enter but we want to enter it with an equity orientation. We want to make sure the stakeholders we are trying to serve have rights in the decision-making process."

When you think about technology and innovation, it's typically fast and then you're iterating. But when you're doing equity work and working with organizations that have traditionally been in that space, it means you are going slower and focusing on awareness-building and understanding.

Finding partners who understand that and are willing to slow down and sort of eat some of the investment associated with slowing down is very difficult.

Is this something that could have an effect at institutions that aren't HBCUs?

We think our new operating model is going to challenge higher ed. As opposed to chasing Harvard and trying to be No. 1, how can we collectively be a much more inclusive and sharing body of institutions that are promoting our mission across all institutions — and that's the education of our society. Can we all be much more inclusive institutions?

Michael Crow talked about the new American university, and he's done a great job with that at Arizona State University. I think you see other institutions trying to follow that model of the mega-institution. How can you be a 100,000-person institution? That's a model.

But there's something about the diversity of institutions and the smallness, especially for first-generation, low-income students, who for the first time reached their ultimate goal. Their ultimate goal was to get to college, and now they get lost.

Institutions need to wrap those students in the most support possible, and it gets very difficult to do that with 150,000 students. It's much easier to do that when you're 400 students. Unfortunately, 400 students doesn't work in today's higher ed business model.

So my question is, what if I link that 400-person campus with the 1,200-person campus and the 5,000-person campus such that the economics of operating the institution can shift?

I think that's a model for rural colleges, community colleges, you name the small liberal arts colleges. Because they are incredibly important and vital to the communities they serve.

How do we flip it on its head and challenge the exclusionary push that's happening in higher ed?

Historically Black colleges and universities are today receiving enormous amounts of resources — from philanthropist Mackenzie Scott’s transformative multimillion-dollar donations to billions of federal dollars flowing to HBCUs through COVID-19 relief funding. Though these investments in HBCUs are long overdue, they are still welcome developments that shine a well-deserved light on these institutions.

HBCUs have a capacity for resilience and innovation that has gone unappreciated for far too long. They’re places where Black students thrive, often against long odds and a chronic shortage of resources. They make up only 3% of all colleges and universities in the United States, yet they produce 20% of our nation’s Black college graduates, a quarter of this country’s Black STEM graduates, half of all Black attorneys and 80% of Black judges. And as society and higher education have begun the long process of broadly acknowledging and dismantling systemic racism and injustice, they have sought support from HBCUs. 

Black colleges and universities, which have too often been underfunded at a federal level and overlooked by the general public, are at long last beginning to get their dues. It’s time to share their value and uniqueness with the wider world. We need to move beyond the traditional — and in many ways tiresome — deficit-based understanding of HBCUs and toward an asset-based view of their innate strengths and potential. 

In fall 2021, Complete College America launched the HBCU Digital Learning Infrastructure Initiative alongside the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work with historically Black institutions to co-design a long-term strategy for building a foundation for successful digital learning. This initiative will invest in new digital technologies and practices that will play key roles in the future of the college experience — and provide a comprehensive view of how HBCUs are maintaining their digital cultures online. The rapid digitization of everything on campus, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has laid bare the stark structural inequities in digital learning infrastructure at HBCUs that threaten the progress of student success initiatives.

As we began this bottom-up effort to document and surface best practices, we saw the wisdom and insights of HBCU students, faculty and administrators. Every focus group, every interview and every campus visit reinforced our belief in the beauty and possibility of America’s Black colleges and universities. These institutions are demonstrating passion, creativity, innovation and hope. They are a breath of fresh air against higher education’s backdrop of change, challenges and uncertainty.

One crucial question confronted us at the beginning of this work: Given all this opportunity, what do we prioritize? Four key areas have emerged.

Belonging

HBCUs are places where Black students experience a deep sense of belonging. Repeatedly, the students we’ve met described a sense of "home," cited the importance of traditions and talked about the culturally affirming aspects of their campus experiences. 

Engagement between students and faculty, from shared meals to long conversations outside the classroom, plays a central role in creating this sense of belonging. Connection reaches all aspects of students’ lives, including academic and non-academic support as well as help to meet basic needs.

The difficulties of COVID-19 showed just how important belonging really is to students and families alike. It also revealed the difficulty of digitizing something so organic and personal. A key challenge for the Digital Learning Infrastructure effort will be translating a supportive campus environment into a digital learning space.

Connectivity

Given the prevalence of technology in our lives, it can be difficult to imagine a world in which basic connectivity is a barrier. On some HBCU campuses, especially those serving rural communities, access to technology can be more tenuous than it should be. 

Decades of underfunding have created large gaps in basic technology infrastructure — unstable or nonexistent campus Wi-Fi, outdated hardware, a lack of interoperability between data and software systems, and necessary systems that don’t talk to each other. This last-century technology leads to a lot of duplicated tasks and wasted time.

Moreover, student support is often spread across multiple portals, departments, hotlines and help desks, making it difficult for students to get the right resources at the right time. Given the number of academic, advising, financial, health and other resources available on any given campus, this disconnect leads to lots of time searching for assistance instead of providing it.

Talent

Many faculty members reported feeling unsupported in their efforts to optimize the use of new technology, especially in the classroom. Their talent as effective teachers did not translate easily to the online learning environment — and required unique ways to maintain the cultural connection HBCUs are known for. Nearly everyone we talked to was eager for technology to enhance in-person, hybrid and fully remote learning experiences if institutions could figure out how to support the proliferation of new platforms.

HBCU faculty and staff also want professional and talent development — not just more of it, but new innovations in the ways technology is used to deliver professional training. They also want this training for more than just teaching and learning. It must be extended to critical IT and data functions that make digital learning infrastructure work for the entire campus community. 

Systems

Systems can either hinder or enable the success of creating a digital learning infrastructure. HBCU leaders, faculty and technology staff say there are opportunities for greater alignment on both system and institutional policy, including ways to think differently about funding and investment.

But given the massive changes taking place at colleges and universities, many we spoke to expressed skepticism about the rapid shift to digital learning and experiences on campuses. As we think about how to sustain change on campuses, it’s critical that we align the perspectives of detractors and optimists alike to ensure that digital learning infrastructure thrives.

Even with the right policy and perspectives, the nuts and bolts of digital transformation will undoubtedly demand new skills, habits and procedures for all involved in building a more digitized college experience. The need for new practices — specifically around change management for such wide-reaching initiatives as digital transformation — is an opportunity for investment by philanthropy and government leaders. 

Ultimately, innovation in higher education is about more than just following the shiny allure of technology for its own sake. It’s about equipping people — educators, leaders and learners alike — with new tools to improve learning outcomes and enhance the educational experience. The ideas and opportunities incubated at HBCUs across the country will create value at all other institutions committed to creating innovative digital learning cultures where Black and other historically excluded student populations can feel a sense of belonging and thrive.

Dive Brief: 

• Higher education investments in student technology systems doubled in 2021 compared to the year before, marking the largest annual increase over the past decade, according to a new report from the Tambellini Group, a technology research and advisory firm. 
• However, many college leaders are hesitant to invest in modern cloud student systems because most of these products still lack the functionalities institutions seek. The Tambellini Group based its findings on technology spending by more than 3,600 U.S. institutions. 
• Vendors are adding new tools and enhancements to their student technology systems to respond to increased pressures on colleges to improve their enrollment, retention and other student success metrics. That includes by providing engagement analytics and automated alerts. 

Dive Insight: 

Student systems are intended to link all the services students use and make the learning environment user-friendly, according to the Tambellini Group. Although they comprise part of a college's core technology infrastructure, many institutions' student systems are outdated and lack security features and modern tools.

Compared to other types of technology infrastructure, new student systems can be difficult to implement because they require vast change across an institution. Investing in cloud-based student systems is expensive, costing between $5 million and $100 million in the first five years, according to the report. 

Colleges have been interested in student systems that can automate services and modernize the student experience, according to the report. Investment growth in student systems in 2021 partly stems from "pent-up demand" from colleges as they waited for new systems to be available "with enough functionality to give institutions confidence," said Vicki Tambellini, CEO and founder of the Tambellini Group. 

"And then, with the pandemic, we saw that institutions determined that there was functionality that was required for self-service and for automation that became imperative," Tambellini said. For example, colleges needed tools that could automatically route forms because some students were no longer on campus to take these documents from department to department for signatures, Tambellini said. 

Vendors are responding in other ways to improve their student systems. As colleges face high employee turnover in their financial aid departments, these systems are being designed to highlight student status changes that could affect their award packages. Vendors are also adding centralized platforms that allow students to receive on-demand and personalized services. 

Large colleges have the fewest viable options for modern cloud student systems, according to the report. Institutions with more than 10,000 full-time-equivalent students accounted for just 5% of student system selections in 2021. Colleges with fewer than 5,000 full-time equivalents represented 72% of selections — even though they enrolled just 21% of students. 

Six different vendors had at least 1% of the higher ed student systems market: Anthology, Ellucian, Jenzabar, Oracle, Thesis and Workday. Colleges selected Jenzabar and Workday most often in 2021. But large institutions seeking modern cloud systems have chosen just Oracle or Workday in the last three years.

The biggest institutions are largely waiting to make selections because their current setups are working and they expect vendor updates in the coming years, Tambellini said. 

"They're not feeling any significant pressure to make a decision right now," Tambellini said. "The smaller institutions are the ones that have been feeling pressure to modernize their environments." 

Pencils down. 

Students will soon no longer take the SAT in a traditional paper format and will instead do so digitally, the College Board, the exam's provider, announced in January 2022. The new virtual versions of the test will start internationally in 2023 and in the U.S. in 2024.

Students still must sit for the exam at a school or testing center, however. They will be able to use their own laptops or tablets, or one their schools or the College Board gives them.

The nonprofit testing provider says the changed format benefits students and educators, simplifying it while preserving the exam's core structure. 

It also said it plans to address students' unequal access to technology while moving the exam virtual, but skeptics doubt the changes will fix broader equity issues related to the test. 

"I don't think this will support access to higher education any more than a paper test does," said Collin Palmer, director of undergraduate admission at the University of Toledo, in Ohio. 

Years in the making

Enrollment managers have long assumed an electronic SAT was in development. 

In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, the College Board and its competitor, the ACT, said they would craft at-home versions of their products in case social distancing was still in effect at the height of testing season. 

The College Board scrapped its plan in 2020, citing the challenges of test takers finding a reliable internet connection for three hours. It also faced criticism during that time for its online administration of Advanced Placement exams. Students who said they couldn't submit their AP exam answers sued the College Board that year. 

The organization went on to pilot another digital iteration of the SAT in November 2021 with fewer than 500 students, and said they, as well as educators, met it with approval. The College Board touted how it is streamlining the assessment, trimming it from roughly three hours to two hours and shortening reading passages. The new version will still be scored on a 1,600-point scale. 

"The digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant,” Priscilla Rodriguez, a vice president at the College Board, said in a statement. 

The pandemic hampered students' testing at traditional sites, prompting wide contingents of colleges to no longer require SAT or ACT scores, albeit some temporarily. More than 1,800 four-year colleges aren't mandating scores for fall 2022, according to FairTest, a group advocating for limited application of standardized assessments. The count includes institutions that were test-optional prior to the pandemic. 

Boons to the test-optional campaign have continued, with the University of California system abandoning entrance exams entirely, and the California State University system signaling last year it will likely do the same. California is one of the top testing markets in the country. Harvard University also extended its test-optional policy through fall 2026. 

These shifts spell trouble for the testing giants, which have hemorrhaged revenue as fewer students sat for the SAT and ACT. About 1.5 million students in the class of 2021 took the SAT, down from 700,000 students from 2.2 million in 2020.

Critics remain unconvinced

Critics of entrance exams say they are racist instruments that favor wealthy students who can pay for extensive tutoring while boxing out disadvantaged populations. The testing providers have denied these accusations, saying the exams buoy low-income students by giving them a chance to showcase their academic prowess and linking them to financial aid. 

This is the University of Toledo's second test-optional year, Palmer said. African-American applicants have increased by 33% in the last year, and Hispanic and Latino applicants have increased by 19%.

He said the digital exam also doesn't correct problems accessing test sites amid the pandemic. The SAT simply doesn't fit admissions workers' goal of equity, Palmer said

The College Board put a fresh coat of paint on the test, a typical move in its playbook, but did not remedy the systemic problems, said Andrew Palumbo, vice president for enrollment management at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts. WPI is a test-free institution, meaning it declines to review scores at all.

Palumbo said he doubts the College Board will be able to handle the complex logistics of delivering a digital test, citing security issues with international administration of the paper SAT, as well as the Varsity Blues scandal, which involved bribing test proctors. 

The College Board said Thursday the virtual test will be more secure, as each student will be given a unique form, making it difficult to share answers. 

"This is not something that's important, it's not a rite of passage and all of this shows it's not a great equalizer," Palumbo said.

FairTest's executive director, Bob Schaeffer, in an email called the digital exam "primarily a marketing ploy."

"Shifting an unnecessary, biased, coachable, and poorly predictive multiple-choice exam that few schools currently require from pencil-and-paper delivery to an electronic format does not magically transform it into a more accurate, fairer or valid tool for assessing college readiness," Schaeffer said.