Campus Technology Insider Podcast July 2022
Listen: Putting Community Engagement at the Center of Online Learning
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello, and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
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. In this episode of the podcast, I 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. Here's our chat.
Ed and Nathan, welcome to the podcast.
01:21
Nathan Young: Thank you for having us.
01:23
Kelly: So UNCF and Deloitte Digital recently announced plans to create 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?
01:42
Ed Smith-Lewis: Awesome, I'll jump in. And thank you for having us. We're really excited to be here and to get the opportunity to share with the world what we're doing with HBCUv. HBCUv was first conceived in 2019 BC, before the, 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 HBCUs, over the course of their history, have been historically under-resourced institutions, and because of their high-touch environment sort of stayed away from deep engagement in the online space. When we left that meeting, which we were very excited about the capabilities of technology, we didn't leave excited to support one institution. Instead, thinking about how we could support a consortium of institutions, understanding that HBCUs individually are strong, but much stronger together. So we came back to our, 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. And 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 for the first time in a long time, nearly every person — faculty, staff and student — signed into their LMS. And that proposal we had written became a hot commodity, as the field and with the heightened racial consciousness of the time said, how can we help ensure learning continues, even through the disruption. And so through some engagement and multiple different RFP processes, we landed on partnering with Deloitte and Deloitte Digital to help us make that HBCUv a reality. And so the work, ultimately, is to build an online learning ecosystem for HBCUs by HBCUs, one 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, ultimately.
04:05
Kelly: Man, if you ever needed a sign from the universe that it was time to get moving on that project, I mean, wow.
Young: Yeah, right?
04:13
Smith-Lewis: Yeah, it was glaringly obvious in so many ways. And it's been an exciting project, too, to launch when we're still mostly virtual. You think about a project like this, you might want to get into your war room and have a bunch of stickies on the wall. And we've had our opportunities to do that. But to reimagine what HBCUs can be in an online space, being in a virtual setting ourselves, has been not only a challenge, but something we're really excited to understand about how we can incorporate that into the ultimate product we develop. But sign? Definitely.
04:47
Kelly: So I'd love to hear kind of an overview of how each of your organizations are involved in the project and sort of what, what your roles are.
04:56
Young: For sure, I mean, I can start. So, you know, my role at Deloitte Digital, I head up a unit called Ethos. And what Ethos is purpose-built to do is help brands who are contending with big societal challenges actually create new products and services and campaigns that will make an impact on these big social issues. And so really, you know, our unit was designed to work on moonshots just like this. And so when we got the proposal from the UNCF, we really jumped at the opportunity to respond to the request for proposal and put together some really, really innovative thinking behind how we were going to do this, approach this project, not just from a technology standpoint, but from a, I guess, from a, intentionality standpoint. Over at Ethos, we practice this version of human-centered design that we call equity-centered design. And the questions that you ask in equity-centered design are all centered around, you know, how do we design for the most vulnerable populations among us. So in the case of HBCUs, it's not just, you know, Black college students in universities, but, you know, first-generation college students, you know, students who come from a home where English isn't their first language. And when you design a platform, you know, around the needs of the most vulnerable, what you end up getting is a very, very robustly designed platform that is designed, that's going to better serve basically everyone's needs across the platform. So that was the kind of the approach and, you know, how we got in, and that was kind of how we, we pitched UNCF on how we were going to help. And, you know, that has been largely our role. You know, we've been doing a ton of research with HBCU students and professors and administrators, you know, thousands of hours of research, both on the ground and remote through surveys, and then interviews and ethnographies and whatnot. And then we took all those, all those findings, and all those insights, and, you know, co-created with the partner HBCUs and the UNCF, features that we thought were actually going to make a really solid impact on, you know, kind of approving the online learning modalities. And specifically, trying to translate some of that special sauce of what makes HBCUs so great into an online environment.
07:24
Smith-Lewis: And when Nathan says partnership, that's what we were truly looking for when we selected Deloitte and Deloitte Digital. And it was that equity-centered sort of design approach that really sold us. And that's partially because as a historic fundraising organization, UNCF was founded in 1944. We've grown that fundraising operation to be one of the largest scholarship providers outside of the federal government. We were not a tech company. We are not a tech company, and we own that explicitly. But we are an aggregator, an influencer, a champion, and an advocate for historically Black colleges and universities. And I have the fortunate honor of leading a team called the Institute for Capacity Building within UNCF. And the Institute for Capacity Building was founded in 2006 by our current president and CEO, Dr. Michael Lomax. And when he left the helm of presidency at Dillard, he basically said, "I was never short of good ideas as president of an HBCU; I was just short on the talent needed to execute all of them." And so he founded ICB to be in a group focused on what we like to call Black college improvement and transformation. We take a continuous improvement and change management approach to partner, through trusting and transparent and authentic relationships with our partnering HBCUs and PBIs, both public and private, to really drive long-term change through leveraging critical best practices from the field. And so that's our role. We take on the role of aggregator of resources and support partners to help execute and build HBCUv, and, as well as torchbearer for those institutions who have historically been excluded from opportunities like this. And that gets us to our institutions. We're working with nine steering committee HBCUs and three development partners: Clark Atlanta University, Claflin University, and Johnson C. Smith University. They are the holders of everything that is teaching and learning and the HBCU culture. When we first laid down the principles for HBCUv, we all agreed — Deloitte Digital, UNCF and our partnering HBCUs — that this project would be for HBCUs by HBCUs. And we really hold true to that. And so those three development partners sit with us in meetings every week, multiple meanings, probably they're probably tired of Nathan and I, but they are part of the decision-making process. We take them through every piece of the design effort. When Nathan says co-create he really means that, and a lot of the work that Deloitte Digital team is doing has been lockstep, not just with UNCF, but with those three development partners and broadly with those nine steering committees. But for HBCUs, their role is to really ensure that the product we create at the end of the day reimagines that HBCU experience for a 21st century.
10:18
Young: Yeah, I mean, if you really just think about the dynamic here, you know, Ed represents the most innovative arm of a social impact organization; I represent the most social impact focused arm of an innovation organization; and then we've got HBCUs right at the core there. So that trio, that relationship has really produced some fantastic results early on, and we're excited to share what we've got with the world in short order.
10:45
Kelly: Yeah, well, before we dive into the platform, I just wanted to hear from you about, you know, you mentioned the pandemic being a disruptive force in higher ed. And of course, I imagine it had a particular impact on HBCUs. So could you talk about what the impact was, and maybe some of the limitations of the current technologies out there that you encountered?
11:08
Smith-Lewis: Absolutely. Well, I think as you know, when America gets a cold, Black America gets pneumonia. And it was no different with COVID, as we saw higher rates of securing the disease, death from the disease, a lot of disruption that we're still continuing this feel the tail of the economic impact of COVID within Black communities. We see an increase, or decrease, in enrollment substantially more by Black students than other non-Black students. And so we're still dealing with the ultimate impact of COVID on our institutions. But unlike past pandemics, or natural disasters, HBCUs actually did disproportionately well in terms of services secured from the federal government, state and local, and their ability to adopt and adapt their model to ensure that their faculty, staff and students were safe. HBCUs were seen as not only galvanizing resources to move students home as quickly as possible, but also letting some students stay just in case that student was safer on campus than he or she might be in their home community. And more importantly, they took their limited resources to ensure that they really practiced good protocols following COVID. We are happy to say, from a UNCF perspective, through much of our advocacy work, through our Public Policy and Government Affairs work led by SVP Lodriguez Murray, that we also saw a disproportionate number of resources through health- and other COVID-related dollars going to HBCUs. I can say today pretty confidently, HBCUs have not had better balance sheets than they do right now for a very long time. All of that said, when we start to think about the real implications, we know that there's a potential to lose a generation in these few short years of not having the opportunity to be in-person and to really support learners on their journey. When we think about the types of students we serve, who are 75% low-income, we're about 60% first-generation, for many of the students to get to college was that life goal. And then they got to college and was told to go back home. And so to imagine how demoralizing that might have been for those students and those families, is something that we are still going to experience the net results of, and we don't really know, there's still a big unknown there. When we started to think about technology, many of our HBCUs are in the original Black Belt. So think about the Southeastern United States, where economic mobility is low, but also economic development isn't as rich as it might be in some urban areas. And so things like tech infrastructure and stable WiFi became a challenge. Having the hardware necessary to do the work became a challenge. Really understanding how to engage effectively in the learning environment through tech-based tools is still a challenge that we're, that we're addressing, both on the student learning side, as well as the faculty teaching side. UNCF, through the course of the pandemic, supported 2,600 faculty in training and how to do online learning effectively, and how to deepen student engagement through that online learning platform. But because of their aversion, and some would say is that a push or pull because of the lack of resources at these institutions, to investing heavily in the digital learning infrastructure, much of the work had to be adopted and adapted very quickly. And so today, when we look at what the tools out there, and some of the challenges of doing online effectively, we know that the lived experience of students and families and the capabilities they have in the home, both in terms of hardware and technology and WiFi and broadband, but also in terms of space, just to be quiet and focus on studying, are all challenges that our institutions have to face from an institutional learning, teaching perspective, really making sure that our faculty are fully engaged. HBCU faculty, through a survey that we did thank you to Educause, showed that our average age was 52 years old. And when we asked faculty what was their primary source for learning how to do online, they, they talked about Al Gore's internet. So when we think about what the possibilities are, we know that there's decades of catch up that our institutions and likely many other lower-resourced institutions have to do. And 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 does it mean 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, providing faculty with high-quality learning prompts and syllabi, ensuring they have the instructional design, instructional coaching they need to deliver effectively. And most importantly, with HBCUv, trying to find a way to get students to connect outside of just the synchronous and 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.
16:23
Young: Yeah. The, you know, the connection aspect is by far the most challenging aspect that we're having to contend with, between decisions on what is the right level of connection that we want to enable. You know, we knew kind of 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, you know, could do everything from you know, find the friend to, you know, get on, hop on Fortnight with, to find the next, you know, 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, you know, kind of sharing the latest and greatest and, you know, what's going on in their field, to collaborating on courses together. And we knew that we wanted to not just connect students to students within their own campus, and faculty members and faculty members within their own, you know, institution, but we wanted to connect all the HBCUs together onto one kind of unified campus so that we could have a really much more outsized impact through our ability to connect, through our ability to network these organizations together. And so that's been an area that we've really, really focused on. That and, you know, probably really 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. So when you think about online, online is often called and referred to as distance learning. And what we wanted 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 provide teachers with information that they need just in time to know when a student is struggling and know when they need to reach out to provide tutoring results, or, you know, just even have a conversation with a student. These are all things that, you know, when you think about online, you might see it as a problem. But if you kind of change your perspective, it actually offers enormous opportunities to kind of create different educational opportunities than are available on campus.
18:50
Kelly: I really like how you brought up the point that the word distance or remote, you know, it's just, it's all very sort of impersonal, I guess, you know, just the, in the whole, the term itself.
19:03
Young: Yeah, no, that, that is, if you really want to put what we're trying to do with HBCUv in a nutshell, it's we want to bring the humanity back to online education. You know, we really want to create, you know, I think Ed has used the word, we want to reimagine the HBCU experience. We want it to feel vibrant when you log on. We want you to log on not just for your class, but as Ed said, what are you going to do with the other 23 hours a day? 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. Or while you're enrolled, you want to involve your parents and your family and, you know, friends from your home institution and your educational journey. We are really creating a connected online community in a way that, you know, we don't feel any university or online learning technology company has achieved yet.
20:06
Kelly: Could you talk about kind of, I mean, obviously community is a big, a big one, but kind of the defining characteristics of the HBCUv platform? Do you have like a list of key goals?
20:21
Young: Yeah, I mean, we have a list of key goals in terms of what we're trying to achieve. You're correct, community is really at the forefront of that. We want to connect students, we want to connect faculty members, we want to connect administrators in a really new and novel way. I think, you know, one of the other tenets, if you will, of HBCUv, is really providing cutting-edge learning opportunities. We want to make sure that, you know, 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. You know, many, the vast majority, actually, 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, you know, in a best-in-class fashion, is really, really core to what we're trying to accomplish. Outside of that, we do want to leverage the best, you know, in breed in terms of big data and algorithms. I think I mentioned earlier, we want there to be predictive analytics, so that we can help teachers know when a student's in trouble. But we also want that data to be a two-way street. We don't just want it to be, you know, teachers monitoring their students for opportunities to improve and evolve. But we also want teachers to be able to provide real-time feedback to the faculty members. Could this course be more engaging? You know, where, did you lose me somewhere in this lecture? You know what I mean? Was this confusing? Was this homework fair? Those are all questions that have never really been asked and data that has never really been collected in the higher education environment that we're going to attempt to collect, in order to make it a more equitable space.
22:11
Smith-Lewis: I would say more than sort of the features and functions of the platform, what gets us excited is about who's at the table, deciding how we want to implement and use those features and functions. So when we think about what HBCUv will be, we will likely not create a new method of chatting online; we're likely gonna get, leverage a chat tool. However, we want to redefine what those tools are used for, how they ensure that students are engaged, how they connect faculty to faculty, and administrators to administrators, and really network a set of institutions with a shared mission and a shared vision for disrupting intergenerational poverty and communities where that goal has yet to be achieved. And we think technology is the great equalizer. The challenge is often the technology and its capabilities don't meet the community and its needs, because we often don't take the time to work with them directly to solve for their challenges, leveraging technology. As opposed to the other way, where we solve for technology and expect others to adopt it. So we're taking a fundamentally different approach, and that's what gets us excited. It's not going to be the features and the functionalities necessarily on their own. It's going to be the integration of those features and functionalities, and how the institutions decide to use them to ensure that we deliver a student focus, a student engaging, or an engaging student online learning platform.
23:52
Kelly: I like that. It's like you're considering the student outcome and, or the student engagement first and technology second, I suppose.
Smith-Lewis: That's right.
Kelly: So yeah, I wanted to ask about the development partners, you said you're working with three HBCUs. And you mentioned maybe integrating, you know, existing, an existing chat tool or, you know, so I'm just wondering how, technology wise, is this being built from the ground up? Are you looking to leverage, you know, and integrate existing products? Like, where do you start?
24:27
Smith-Lewis: Yes. Is that a fair answer? Because everything's on the table. What we've been very intentional about from the very beginning, is that we have a limited set of resources. We have a timetable. But beyond that, the world is our oyster in terms of what we really want to create. And so we are talking to existing tech platforms and providers about their opportunity to support us and the execution of HBCUv. But at the same time, we're thinking about those opportunities that we have yet to fully see. Right? If there's not a solution, Deloitte and Deloitte Digital are open to the idea of creating that solution. But if there is a critical path that exists already, then we're also opening, open to leveraging that critical path. So the short answer is, in the light is, it most likely will be a combination of them all. We will leverage some existing products, potentially create some new ones, but it's really the integration of those tools. Back to that engagement focus, how do you integrate those tools into a seamless experience for students, faculty and staff? That's where we think the innovation and the work that Deloitte Digital is leading is truly going to be impactful to our community.
25:38
Young: Yeah, and we're also cognizant of the fact that we are standing on the shoulders of innovators who have been in this game for a very, very long time. We don't think that, you know, all LMSs are bad. And, you know, we just feel like LMSs were built for a different time. And we feel like this is our opportunity, in this moment, both as, you know, leaders in higher education, as leaders in technology, and you know, faced with the, you know, unique challenges of the moment that we're in, to contribute to the kind of larger ed tech conversation in a real way. As Ed mentioned, we are going to build off of existing technology, but we're going to be also contributing to that technology in an open kind of fashion, so that, you know, it's not just HBCUs who can take advantage of any new and novel technology that we can create, but all higher ed institutions down the road.
26:35
Kelly: It's also, going back to the importance of community and like engaging students and wanting them to be, have a reason to visit the platform, you know, the other 23 hours of the day. I know that like that, that's kind of the dream for any, for any LMS-type platform. So I'm just wondering, do you, have you figured out the secret sauce? Like, how are you going to do that?
26:58
Smith-Lewis: Well, that's why Deloitte's getting paid the big bucks. No. Okay. We are, we are fundamentally asking that question. We know what makes HBCUs special. As, as Nate indicated, we've done ethnographies, we've done site visits, we've done surveys, focus groups and co-creation labs. And the reality is, it is the community that one builds, one where you don't have the weight of the world assuming you are a certain type of person, or you have a certain lived experience, that you're really free to be your whole self. What we love about technology is that enables, that enablement is there as well. Right? When you think about the proliferation of Facebook and Twitter and how free people are, how free people feel to express themselves, we know that technology can be a community builder. Technology can be a self-actualizer. Technology can be a connector for people in spaces and places where they may not have the connections they need to be their most successful. What we're trying to figure out is, how do we build into a virtual environment that same opportunity that you get walking across the yard of an HBCU, where you bump into a person who becomes your lifelong friend? And so we're looking at things like, what makes the yard special? How do you allow for differing opinions and thoughts and activity and interest to just permeate on the platform? Well, that most likely means there are some student-led pieces of the platform that we must, you know, control, we're higher ed institution, or we are working with higher ed institutions. But ultimately, how do you let free expression drive what's on the platform? How do you ensure that there are opportunities for people to connect with sort of like-mindedness or similar career aspirations or similar backgrounds across boundaries? Well technology can enable that. And so what we're trying to do is find out, what makes people distinctive? What makes people want to connect with that distinctiveness? And then how you facilitate that through connection chats, tags, profiles, etc., where students can then leverage the online community for what they're doing in many other spaces already, but for the sake of lifelong and continuous learning.
29:27
Young: Yeah, and this goes back to, you know, what I was saying earlier about us really building on the ideas and, and the work that has done by visionaries before us. Many LMS kind of platforms have really cracked the code on, you know, the best way to turn in your homework or the best way to grade assignments in an efficient way. And because they've focused on that and they've done that so well, we are free to kind of singularly focus on, what would an LMS centered around student expression look like? What would an LMS centered around connection look like? Because those other questions have been answered by people who have come before us, we just get to uniquely and singularly focus on those questions. And when we combine our technology with that existing technology, what we're going to get something that's best-in-class, that feels radically different than other LMSs that are existing on the market.
30:25
Kelly: I like that: putting the connection at the center, as opposed to like the course or the learning, instruction. I mean, that's a huge part of it, but …
30:32
Smith-Lewis: Let's call a spade a spade. Most LMS systems were designed to make faculty teaching easier and to execute the act of delivering learning opportunities to students. We did not design LMS platforms to engage students in their own learning journey, meeting them where they are. Now the capability's there; we know that for sure. But today, to think about students first, and then to leverage technology to meet them where they are, especially the set of students that we're engaged with, to Nathan's earlier point, we think can be a value add to all of higher education, not just HBCUs.
31:13
Kelly: Yeah. So what does the timeline look like? When are, when are you expecting to complete this platform?
31:19
Smith-Lewis: Nathan has not allowed me to answer that question, so I'm gonna turn it over to Nate.
31:24
Young: Yeah, no. So when are we going to complete it? We're never going to complete it, right? You know, this is going to be something that is going to take decades to really fine-tune. We imagine HBCUv being a platform that, you know, doesn't just exist for a couple years and goes away. This is a long-term investment that is going to serve students at HBCUs for generations. This is really an asset that is owned by and designed for HBCUs. We expect it to, you know, really be a very, very long-term play. In terms of when are we going to see the first classes executed on HBCUv, when are we going to see the first glimpses of the technology in action, I think the first classes we can commit to, we'll execute the first classes within 2023. I think we're going to have more to announce in terms of the technology and how it functions within the coming probably two to three months. And so we're basically working as rapidly as we can to get like an MVP, a minimum viable product out together. From there, we're working with our institutional partners to kind of pilot it. And then from there, we're going to expand beyond those first three, into the nine, and beyond those nine into potentially every HBCU out there in the U.S. So that's a quite the journey that we have to go on. It's going to take time, but we've got the resources, the expertise and the passion to stay committed to that for the long term.
32:54
Kelly: And how do you think this platform will sort of change the future of online education for HBCUs?
33:01
Smith-Lewis: Well, HBCUs have always had sort of an outsized impact on the communities and the students that they serve. We think we're just going to accelerate that. As we think about the challenges that many of our students face, mostly financial, responsibilities at home, a need to be close to family, HBCUv removes the need to be physically on campus at an HBCU. Prior to the pandemic, 54% of higher ed institutions had online programming, to just north of 20% of HBCUs. We fundamentally believe HBCUv will not only accelerate their entry into the online space, diversify their revenue model to really think differently about student enrollment and student engagement, but lead these institutions to be more inclusive, as we start to think about different ways of increasing student flexibility with current students, thinking about students that we lost and adult learners in terms of lifelong learning engagement, upskilling and reskilling in the communities in which they serve, again, mostly in the economically deprived Southeastern United States, and the ability to reach students far across the globe. We fundamentally believe a student at any one of America's 6,000 higher ed institutions would love to take a class from a professor at a historically Black college, just to say they did. And opening up that opportunity for HBCUs, we think will not only spread the learning experience that that they provide, but that community uplift and enrichment that they instill in every graduate that leaves these very storied institutions.
34:48
Young: Ed put it very well. I think it's really about access — it's going to increase the opportunity of more students to attend an HBCU. If you're on the West Coast, it's very, very difficult for you to imagine attending an HBCU, which is in the South. When you open it up to an online opportunity, it just is going to increase the access exponentially not just to folks on the West Coast, but folks globally. I think influence is the next area that we're going to be able to make a huge impact. Not that many people get an opportunity to listen to some of these amazing lectures, to listen to some of these incredible faculty members talk about subjects that often aren't taught at primarily white institutions. And so being able to really, really increase the influence that these faculty members have by opening up to a broader audience is really, really incredible. And I think the last area that we're going to make a tremendous impact is on opportunity: opportunities for students, both in terms of the ability to connect with folks, and you know, go their own way, enable entrepreneurship, but also by connecting them to good, well-paying jobs. You know, every company out there right now is complaining about how they don't have access to enough Black talent in their workplace. By creating a connected online community, we have an opportunity to, you know, connect the students who are enrolled in an HBCU to those top employers, teach them skills that are going to give them a leg up in those entry-level positions, and give them a really, really clear path from enrolling in college, to realizing a better life, realizing a better, more prosperous life. And so that, I think, those three things are really at the core of what HBCU can promise for the future of education and for Black futures in particular. And that's what, you know, makes me excited to go to work every day.
36:38
Kelly: Something I think it's going to be so exciting to watch develop. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Smith-Lewis: Thank you for having us.
Kelly: Thank you for joining us. I'm Rhea Kelly, and this was the Campus Technology Insider podcast. You can find us on the major podcast platforms or visit us online at campustechnology.com/podcast. Let us know what you think of this episode and what you'd like to hear in the future. Until next time.