Putting equity at the fore in edtech-college partnerships.
At Educause last week, I was excited to moderate a discussion exploring the digital divide. It also covered ways that edtech companies could be more engaged in solving this problem — not just because it’s a good thing to do, but also, as one attendee noted to me afterward, because it’s a business imperative for those companies.
Especially heartening for me: The discussion was just the beginning. John O’Brien, Educause’s president and chief executive, said during the session that his organization would continue to engage with vendors and colleges to “influence the market” toward partnerships that produce benefits for both the sellers of tech products and institutions buying them. Educause has already helped to define the cybersecurity features colleges could expect in edtech tools, he noted, and in the same vein, it could try to develop a framework to help define the parameters of responsible practices in deals between colleges and vendors.
Makes sense to me. After all, tech is a big expense for many institutions, and unlike other products they buy, it directly touches students’ and professors’ lives.
Educause eventually plans to post a recording of this panel, “Beyond Talk on Digital Equity,” online, but meanwhile, here are a few more thoughts from the session that stood out to me:
From Teresa Hardee, executive vice-president of Claflin University: Many colleges, especially those serving historically underrepresented students, aren’t now able to take full advantage of the pricey tech they’ve purchased. (In researching this topic for her doctoral dissertation, Hardee found that in some cases, historically Black institutions were using only about a tenth of the capabilities of some products they’d paid for.) “Your products should work for us,” Hardee said. But without additional support from vendors, she said, some colleges can’t take full advantage of the tools. Hardee also had some thoughts on the components of a good strategic partnership: scholarships, internships, and assistance in putting the tools to use. Colleges could “require that,” she said, “before we sign on the dotted line.”
From Marielena DeSanctis, president of the Community College of Denver: Access to technology isn’t enough. Colleges also need to equip students with the “digital dexterity” they’ll need to take that tech and use it to “change their trajectory.” Given the limited resources of colleges like hers, she said, “I need the tech companies to come in” to assist with training staff members and even students.
From Ed Smith-Lewis, vice president for strategic initiatives and institutional partnerships at UNCF: Vendors need to understand both the special needs of minority-serving institutions and their assets. On the one hand, he said, some of those institutions haven’t been able to invest as much in tech as wealthier institutions and are staffed by professors and administrators “who are not digital natives trying to deliver high-quality digital education to a group of students who expect it.” But at the same time, he noted, companies could learn a lot if they were willing to work more closely with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and similar institutions on things like discounted products, pilot projects, or even revenue-sharing arrangements if experiments proved fruitful. “There’s enough profit in this space,” Smith-Lewis said, “and there’s enough opportunity yet to be realized.”
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- As enticing as competency-based education may be in bolstering enrollment, it also “requires changes across many areas of a campus, from the way professors teach to the way the registrar awards credit,” as EdSurge reports. Yet the movement still is showing momentum, as advocates noted last month at the Competency-Based Education Network’s annual conference, especially thanks to a growing number efforts led by states and college systems.
- Community colleges and other institutions interested in forging stronger partnerships between local residents and employers should consider a model of engagement known as a “community benefits agreement,” or CBA, Georgia Reagan writes in a Lumina Foundation blog post. A CBA is a formal agreement between an employer and community groups that prioritizes local workers and gives them employment rights and additional benefits that support their career, writes Reagan, the foundation’s strategy officer for employment-aligned credentials. Such an agreement, Reagan notes, can create educational on ramps for local residents that can lead directly to jobs.
- College is becoming increasingly unaffordable to the most financially needy students, a report by the National College Attainment Network shows. The average Pell Grant recipient could afford to attend only a quarter of public four-year colleges in the 2019-20 academic year, while just 40 percent of community colleges were classified as affordable. “Some states provided students with more affordable options than others,” this account in Higher Ed Dive notes. Washington had the highest rate of affordable institutions, at 82 percent, while in Kentucky and New Mexico, three quarters of public colleges were affordable for Pell Grant recipients. And in all three states, every community college qualified as affordable.
- Faced with declining enrollment, nearly two dozen campuses of the State University of New York are now offering students from eight states the chance to enroll for the price of in-state tuition at their state’s flagship. As understandable as this may be as a recruiting strategy, Edward Conroy, senior policy adviser on the higher-education team at New America, suggests in Forbes that the approach may be misguided. Instead of trying to attract wealthier out-of-state students, he writes, “it would be nice to see an institution like SUNY increase efforts into bringing back students who never completed their studies.”
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