837: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Dr. Valora Richardson⁠, Director, Digital Solutions & Innovation, ⁠UNCF⁠, & Product Owner, ⁠HBCUv⁠

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. For the final time here at Insights EDU. Maybe. No, I'm not doing anymore. I'm only doing this one because I promised this young lady that I would and she has a really cool initiative that I like. We've got to get this podcast out. And she was awesome at dinner last night where we had the best table. Let's be honest, we had the best table. We had a good old time, and we've interviewed 25 people here at Insights EDU, which sets an all-time record for us over a two-day period. Previous record was 23. My voice is scratchy, my throat hurts. I'm tired. But I am so excited to talk to my guest today. I'm going to let her do most of the talking. I'm just gonna ask a couple cool questions. Ladies and gentlemen, here she is. Dr. Valora Richardson, director of digital solutions and innovation at the United Negro College Fund and the product owner of HBCUV. Valora, how are you?

Dr. Valora Richardson: I'm doing fantastic. I'm glad that you decided to come back and get on this podcast.

Joe Sallustio: And we had a great conversation last night about HBCUV. Yes. And I want to talk about that, but I want to wait on that. And I want you to first talk about your role at the United Negro College Fund and how HBCUV has come to be. Tell me the whole story.

Dr. Valora Richardson: OK, I will. And I'll try not to be too long with the story.

Joe Sallustio: No, you can go as long as you want.

Dr. Valora Richardson: All right. So it all started back in 2019. I had an amazing job at a predominantly white institution and I just loved the job, but I kept having this inner nagging like, "Valora, you need to do something for your community." Just as I was having that reckoning with myself, I got an offer to go work at an HBCU in Virginia.

Joe Sallustio: And your inner voice said, absolutely.

Dr. Valora Richardson: It did. And I took that big risk and I started working there in January 2020. When I got there, I immediately realized that there was this huge disparity from where I worked before. At my previous institution, there were 50,000 students, 5,000 faculty. I had 10 people on my staff and we supported those faculty in learning digital technologies. So I was like, well, it's a small group of students and teachers. I can handle this. But then March happened.

Joe Sallustio: What happened in March of 2020? Are you kidding me?

Dr. Valora Richardson: Yes. And so we were stuck.

Joe Sallustio: Right after you started.

Dr. Valora Richardson: Right after I started, not even 90 days in. And so it was a struggle for us to really bring our institution and our faculty up to speed in online learning. I stayed there for about a year. Then I came back home. In parallel to me working at the institution in Virginia, something was going on in UNCF. My leader, Ed Smith-Lewis, and my colleague, Julian Thompson, had this fantastic idea about developing a platform for HBCUs for online learning.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing!

Dr. Valora Richardson: And so they presented it to the leadership and the leadership said, no, we're not a technology company. They put it on the shelf.

Joe Sallustio: Then March happened, COVID.

Dr. Valora Richardson: And then they said, let's pull this off the shelf.

Joe Sallustio: It changed their minds, yes.

Dr. Valora Richardson: And then our paths collided in fall of 2022. I joined UNCF, and they asked me to lead this project. It's called HBCUV.

Joe Sallustio: The V does stand for virtual, not Valora.

Dr. Valora Richardson: It's debatable, right? It is a learning technology ecosystem that seeks to reimagine the HBCU experience in a virtual space.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing.

Dr. Valora Richardson: So we're not trying to replicate it. We're trying to take the best of what it is in our HBCUs and manifest that in the online environment. Right now we have nine development partner institutions that we're bringing together. We started with 3,300 hours of research with those institutions, asking them what they wanted and what they needed. Over the past two years, we've been working with our technical integration partner, Deloitte Digital, to build this platform. We say it's for HBCUs and by HBCUs.

Joe Sallustio: Tell them like it is.

Dr. Valora Richardson: And it's absolutely that. Most of the decisions we make are made with our development partners. We meet with them every week. And I'm happy to say we had a soft launch in January of this year.

Joe Sallustio: That is amazing. Nine institutions. How do you manage the personalities and priorities that come from those members of the nine institutions with a single product that's supposed to realize all of those different visions? I know the vision's probably the same to serve students at HBCUs, but everybody might have different ways of coming at it.

Dr. Valora Richardson: Right, so you said it a little bit already. First of all, acknowledging the commonalities. There are a lot. We understand that our institutions have a lot of commonalities, especially with challenges and opportunities. And once we do that, we also realize that our institutions have different cultures themselves, right? Different politics, things like that.

Joe Sallustio: 100%.

Dr. Valora Richardson: So what we end up doing is really taking individual time with each institution to understand what their challenges are, especially with the technical integration. Each institution might not have a fully resourced IT staff. So we listen to them and we provide support where they need it.

Joe Sallustio: What happens next? Is it phased? Like phase one's a soft launch. We launch with X programs or X more programs or some other new technology. Can you talk about what's the hard launch? Is that coming down? Talk a little bit about how you roll from here.

Dr. Valora Richardson: Okay, so right now, as I mentioned, we have the soft launch. During this phase, we are working with our faculty to put courses onto the platform. By fall of 2024, that's when we will have about 18 courses with our pilot institutions. And then by spring, we will have more courses from those pilot institutions and more students.

Joe Sallustio: Undergrad courses, graduate courses, both and/or?

Dr. Valora Richardson: Undergraduate courses for now. And then we do seek in the future to have non-credit courses like certification courses. Then I think, and I'm not sure if I made it clear, it's not just the learning management system, it's also a social engagement platform.

Joe Sallustio: How do you mean?

Dr. Valora Richardson: So one of the highlights or main points of an HBCU is something called the yard. And on the yard is where the sororities and fraternities get together. They have conversations. You can meet faculty on the yard. They can have different kinds of ceremonies and things like that on this yard and events. And so what we're doing is doing the same thing in this virtual space. There's a space where students can communicate with each other at their institution or across institutions. And then they can also share events. Hopefully, we'll have live streaming from different campuses as well.

Joe Sallustio: So you've developed an online retention community, almost like an online engagement community because you know, the more connections you have, the more likely you are to stick it out. If you're a black student in an HBCU, and we know one of the areas that HBCUs are dealing with right now, actually, across the country, is black men. There's not many black men in college. So if you have moments where you're thinking about whether this is for you and you can connect with somebody that says, you know what, you can stick this out. Because if you're online, you can be isolated. So you have to reduce the isolation factor. Is that what it's all about?

Dr. Valora Richardson: Yeah, that's part of it. And we also want to provide opportunities for our institutions to have access to courses that they might not already have access to as well.

Joe Sallustio: OK, so if I'm in one institution among the nine and I have a student that needs this undergraduate course for their major. Maybe I'm not offering that course anymore, or maybe I'm not offering it for six months from now because of the cycle. Well, this institution over here, number seven, is offering it. And my student from my institution could take that course through HBCUV. It's offered by, it's like a consortium agreement almost, offered from, and we'll figure out shared revenue and all that kind of stuff. My student remains at my institution, but takes a class at yours.

Dr. Valora Richardson: Absolutely. Yes.

Joe Sallustio: So it allows that. OK. This is really interesting. And how needed is this in the HBCU community? HBCUV must be needed if it's continuing on. But how needed is it?

Dr. Valora Richardson: Well, we'll find out that some of our institutions don't even have an LMS.

Joe Sallustio: Wow.

Dr. Valora Richardson: And that's unfortunate because if you don't have online learning or the capabilities, it puts you at a disadvantage.

Joe Sallustio: Big time.

Dr. Valora Richardson: And so what we want to be able to do is to make this a community asset for our institutions. It's not like a traditional OPM. It's not even an OPM because our institutions own it from the very beginning. And so we're hoping that by the time we reach profitability, our institutions will get a profit back from being on the platform.

Joe Sallustio: Tell me again how you went from a director of digital solutions at United Negro College Fund to being the product owner of this. Did you have the reputation from the HBCU you worked at that if Valora could do this? How did you get named product owner?

Dr. Valora Richardson: You know what? They trusted me and they saw my credentials from what I've done before. I was working on a master's degree in information technology. And so that probably convinced them that I had some experience. I've always had a propensity for technology and the product was already in motion and they just needed somebody to drive it with our technical integration partners.

Joe Sallustio: You're the product owner. Is the product meeting your expectations so far?

Dr. Valora Richardson: No, it's surpassing it.

Joe Sallustio: She had me for a second. Well played. She had me. I was like, I'm never playing poker with you. Good poker. Nailed it. Nailed it.

Dr. Valora Richardson: It really is. When I saw the product for the first time in January, I was almost in tears. Because our students deserve excellence, high-end, engaging environments. And that's what this product is giving to them.

Joe Sallustio: Wow. I have a question. So you're here at Insights EDU. Tell us a story about how you got here, your panel, what kind of questions they asked. How has it been?

Dr. Valora Richardson: That's a great question.

Joe Sallustio: He only asks great questions once in a while.

Dr. Valora Richardson: Once in a while. Yeah, that's right. It's a tricky question though. One of my colleagues comes to the Insights EDU all the time or has done it before. And they needed someone to speak on revolutionary products in course sharing. And that's what we talked about. We talked about some of the things that you asked about earlier, about what are those challenges that we faced and we talked about the different institutions, you know, and having different cultures, different types of politics on the campus that you have to work through. But one thing that we're fortunate about is that UNCF is a trusted partner for these institutions. I don't know if anybody else could have done this, right? Because we have a long-standing relationship with these institutions. We're celebrating our 80th anniversary this year. And so when we say we want to help you, they believe it.

Joe Sallustio: It's like the third-party trust and the pedigree, the focus, knowing that the UNCF is looking out for all the institutions, that there is no agenda other than serving black students. Right. That's the only way you can get it done. Right. I want to give you space right now. What else do you want? Not physical space. She's looking around. I want to give you the space on the mic. I don't want to ask you a question, but I just want to give you the microphone to close us out. Anything you want about HBCUV, anything else we need to know or you want to say?

Dr. Valora Richardson: Well, HBCUV is Black Education Reimagined. And it's not just for African-American students or Black students. We believe that what we learn and what we're doing with this product will help all students in some form or fashion.

Joe Sallustio: You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen. I will tell you that one of the things you have to have in this business when you're doing the hard work like Valora is, is a sense of humor. And we were laughing pretty good last night, having a good old time. You can't take yourself too seriously and you have to know that everything you're doing is to serve students. And we applaud you in this effort. HBCUs serve, I think only two or 3% of the overall population, but growing and have received some recent philanthropic dollars from MacKenzie Scott and seen resurgence in enrollment in many cases. They have great university presidents, many of which we've interviewed here on the podcast. Congratulations to you, Valora, for hitting the soft launch.

Dr. Valora Richardson: Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity to talk with you today.

Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here. She's your guest today. Dr. Valora Richardson, director of digital solutions and innovation at the United Negro College Fund and product owner. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just EdUp'd.