The white paper focuses on the impact of collaborative online course sharing at historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions and highlights the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium in removing barriers to student success.

The paper focuses on the impact of collaborative online course sharing at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) and other minority-serving institutions (MSI). The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic created an environment where institutions had no other option than online course delivery to maintain teaching and learning. Large-scale online learning was relatively new to the HBCU landscape, but HBCUs and MSIs did what was necessary to develop or update existing online structures and implement programs to provide uninterrupted learning throughout the pandemic. Now, on the other side of the global epidemic, collaborative online course sharing is helping to scale online teaching and learning. Course sharing among HBCUs allows colleges and universities to access or share high-quality courses from like-minded institutions. This report highlights how HBCUs utilize the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium to remove barriers to student success.

The outcomes of course sharing and the HBCU-MSI Consortium are evidenced by HBCU success stories that capture the immediate impact students experienced with securing a consortium course when they most needed it. The findings and lessons learned throughout this initiative include:

• strategies for improving institutional implementation in course sharing collaborations with other institutions, and
• student support services identified as being helpful in assisting students involved in course sharing.

Key words: course sharing, collaborative online learning, historically Black college and university (HBCU), minority-serving institution (MSI), home institution, postsecondary student success, access, retention, innovation

Collaborative Online Course Sharing Supports Student Success at HBCUs and MSIs

HBCUs and MSIs have not historically been on the forefront of online learning. According to Ray Schroeder, “a series of events has converged to put new impetus behind sharing courses online” (2020, para. 1), including the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity for rapid deployment of remote learning, and financial pressure on colleges and universities. Since the occurrence of these events, distance education remains a viable delivery mode for teaching and learning across the higher learning landscape.

In Fall 2021, the SREB HBCU-MSI Collaborative – a strategic partnership with HBCUs and MSIs to increase equity and access in higher education throughout SREB’s 16-state region – responded to the immediate needs of HBCUs and MSIs to offer coursework online as a result of the 2020 pandemic and the suspension of in-person course offerings at campuses across the nation. Collaborative members felt that online course sharing, specifically among like-minded HBCUs and MSIs, would better support the institutional missions and goals as well as optimize each student’s academic experience. SREB former Vice President of Postsecondary Education, Dr. Stevie Lawrence, who led the Collaborative, stated that “SREB’s consortium is an intentional way to guide students towards on time graduation” (personal communication, Feb 21, 2023). Rick Ostrander, Assistant to the President for Innovation at Westmore College, declared that course sharing allows institutions to maintain their own identity, “which is small and residential, but compete on selection and price” (Marcus, 2022, para. 10). Other HBCU and MSI campus leaders affirmed the value of institutions with similar missions and values working together to deliver online education.

Over the course of one year, SREB worked to create the course sharing program structure, partnered with Acadeum for its course sharing technology and platform, sought funding, and finally launched the consortium in Spring 2022 and begin onboarding institutions. As of Fall 2023, 28 institutions participated in SREB’s HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium. The aspirational goal of the consortium was to make membership available to all 107 HBCUs and federally identified MSIs.

Ideation and Creation of SREB’s Course Sharing Consortium

Dr. Roslyn Clark-Artis, chair of the SREB HBCU-MSI Collaborative and president of Benedict College, articulated the value of collaboration, particularly among small, largely under-resourced institutions (Kelliher, 2022). Course sharing emerged as a promising solution to address the institutions’ most pressing enrollment and completion concerns (Kelliher, 2022). Furthermore, Francis Diep (2022) stated that “many historically Black colleges have low graduation rates, which higher-ed experts attribute to the fact that they are under-resourced and tend to serve low-income, first-generation students without financial safety nets” (para 5). Hence, collaboration and innovative strategies, such as course sharing, can support the critical approach to overcome the challenges faced by HBCUs and MSIs and enhance student success.

The Collaborative recommended using Acadeum, a technology company, as the course sharing technology platform for SREB’s course sharing initiative. Alia Wong (2020) recognized other entities who partnered with Acadeum to host online course sharing consortia. The partnerships permitted students at “one college to enroll in an eligible online course offered by another participating institution and have it count fully toward their degree” earned at their home college (para 2). In September 2021, SREB set up meetings with Acadeum leadership to learn more about the course sharing platform’s dashboard, processes, support, and services provided. The cost for an institution to utilize Acadeum’s platform is determined by the institution’s full-time enrollment number. Recognizing the potential benefits of Acadeum’s course sharing network, SREB’s leadership chose Acadeum as its course sharing technology partner and allocated $105,000 in Spring 2022 to support the first ten member institutions of the HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium as home institutions – where students originate – for the first three years.

Between September 2021 and March 2022, Acadeum and SREB worked together to promote the SREB course sharing initiative to the identified institutions. SREB then convened a meeting, hosting faculty and staff from eight of the ten institutions interested in exploring the features and benefits that course sharing offers institutions. By late March 2022, the SREB-Acadeum partnership was formalized, and the SREB HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium was named. SREB’s HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium held a signing ceremony in May 2022 for the ten consortium institutions (see Table 1).

Table 1
Inaugural Consortium Institutions

Implementation of SREB’s Course Sharing Initiative and Onboarding

The implementation of SREB’s HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium was designed to mature over a three-year period. Year one (2022) emphasized implementation and institutional onboarding, and year two (2023) included data collection and analysis to determine and measure outcomes. Year three (2024) will begin widespread use of Acadeum’s sustainability model that positions consortium member institutions to fund their own membership plus generate revenue for their programs, departments, and institutions. After the implementation process was underway, SREB President Dr. Stephen Pruitt shared the following:

The launch of the Consortium is a genuine example of courage. These institutions came together with the purpose of providing students opportunities to keep up, catch up, or move up toward their degree attainment. These institutions believe in the HBCU-MSI community enough to share and accept courses from others for the sake of their students. In today’s postsecondary world, that is courage.

While SREB financially supported the Consortium’s launch, Acadeum marketed the initiative and signed institutions into SREB’s consortium and onto their course sharing platform. SREB’s investment allowed the 10 inaugural institutions to begin course sharing from a positive revenue perspective rather than a cost recovery situation. Acadeum began scheduling onboarding meetings for the platform members to help them design the best course sharing structure and timeline for their institutions and students. Additionally, the onboarding meetings provided staff and faculty training on how to use the platform and effectively incorporate course sharing into academic advising. Recommendations were also offered on how to effectively manage the course sharing initiative based on the needs of the campus and the size of the student body expected to enroll in online course sharing. Lastly, Acadeum’s onboarding meetings provided course sharing student support best practices to make certain students who enrolled in online course sharing were properly supported to complete and pass these courses.

Acadeum’s onboarding meetings helped to identify barriers to effectively implement course sharing at institutions and provide best practices to overcome those obstacles. At times, institutional teams struggled to coordinate calendars and do the prework needed to make decisions and advance the project. To realize the full value of the onboarding meetings it is important for key campus stakeholders, such as the chief financial officer, registrar, academic affairs, student accounts, information technology, to contribute institutional insight needed to form an appropriate course share model. Once institutions completed all onboarding meetings and finalized the agreement with STRIPE (a fully integrated suite of financial payment products designed to handle all payment-related needs and manage revenue), course sharing could start. Institutions that signed with Acadeum were required to utilize STRIPE to manage all financial transactions, including institution-to-institution tuition payments and refunds.

Demonstrated Success of the HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium

After completing a comprehensive onboarding and training process facilitated by Acadeum, institutions moved to launch their online course sharing model. Institutions focused on small pilot groups of students with specific course needs that the universities could not meet due to faculty constraints, under-enrollment, and/or inconvenient course meetings times. As Acadeum continued to train the inaugural institutional teams, SREB established an annual, in-person meeting to build a learning community focused on sharing best practices for course sharing at HBCUs and MSIs.

From a sheer growth standpoint, the consortium saw a 180%-member increase in its first 18 months of implementation as the consortium expanded from 10 to 28 member institutions. The 1,100 students taking online courses through the consortium demonstrated the potential impact of this consortium to help students maintain steady progress towards timely graduation. In conjunction with the exponential growth, SREB and Acadeum offered Communities of Practice (in-person workshops, virtual coffee chats, webinars, and blog posts) to give the institutions opportunities to talk through the value proposition, training, implementation, and lessons learned from course sharing.

As previously noted, SREB’s support for the initial Acadeum platform fees for 10 institutions over three years removed the financial barrier for institutions that wanted to enter this digital learning space to improve graduation outcomes, but it also jump-started a revenue model that allowed institutions to offset their investment cost and utilize their net revenue to fund their next round of fees, program maintenance, and course costs.

The timing of SREB’s investment increased the availability of Summer 2022 online courses to students while reducing the institutional cost of facilitating an on-campus summer term. Institutions were able to increase their net financial return during a term that has been historically underutilized for many reasons, including low Pell grant awards, cost of tuition, internship or employment conflicts, and the lack of affordable housing. Ideally, this net revenue would be used to subsidize Acadeum’s annual platform fees and contribute to a funding reserve for institutions to use for offsetting future costs to students. However, because of the immediacy of financial issues related to the pandemic, earmarking funds specifically for the course sharing initiative was not implemented at all campuses.

The spirit behind SREB’s investment was to develop a sustainable model that positioned institutions to be self-funding within three years. Dr. Stevie Lawrence recognized the model’s value proposition as a solution to address a chronic issue across under resourced institutions, stating “The consortium is an exemplary model for additional revenue-generating initiatives for HBCUs, many of which that are part of the consortium are small public or private institutions. With this self-sustaining model, colleges and universities can pay for their membership as well as generate revenues for their institutions” (personal communication, 2023).

To further demonstrate the HBCU-MSI Consortium’s proof of concept, SREB worked with Acadeum’s Partner Success team to analyze the institutions’ course sharing raw data sets from an enrollment and cost perspective, with the results as follows:

• Institutional membership in the consortium increased from 10 to 28 institutions;
• 779 students were directly supported by the course sharing model;
• Over the total initial implementation period, 1461 course seats across 14 disciplines were provided through the course sharing model (see Table 2); and
• 1421 course challenges were resolved by the course sharing model, which includes pre-requisite sequencing issues, enrollment overload, under-enrolled courses, faculty availability, and lack of multi-modal course delivery.

Table 2
Breakdown of Course Share Utilization by Content Area
and Counts of Consortium Seats

In general, students who do not have access to their needed courses are faced with seeking them elsewhere or waiting an extra semester based on course availability. Depending on advising trends at institutions, students who must register at other institutions as transient students typically pay out-of-pocket tuition for courses whose grades are not calculated in the home institution grade point average. This approach to advising and course availability threatens student progression by adding time and money to the students’ matriculation. However, the Course Sharing Consortium provides students of member institutions with access to many courses and schedule possibilities with heightened flexibility. When their students are retained by pairing them with the needed courses, the institutions also benefit by keeping the students’ tuition in-house, which is significant for institutions where enrollment drives the budget.

 Another cost savings advantage of course sharing is evident by the decrease in an institution’s hiring of adjunct professors. Course sharing is more financially viable as the average seat cost is significantly lower (approximately $500-800 based on the teaching institution’s cost) compared to an average adjunct professor compensation of $2500 per three-credit hour course. Table 3 illustrates the cost savings benefit to consortium schools with a specific focus on total course costs versus estimated cost using adjunct faculty.

Table 3
Estimated Savings Comparing Course Sharing Revenue
to Potential Adjunct Compensation

HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium Sustainability

Dr. Mordecai Brownlee, the President of the Community College of Aurora, Colorado, presented at the 2023 American Association of Blacks in Higher Education’s (AABHE) Conference and shared his thoughts on sustaining institutional fiscal health as follows:

The 2023-2024 academic year will be the first year that institutions of higher education must ensure their financial sustainability without the aid of higher education emergency relief funds (HEERF). Furthermore, institutions will need to determine how to continue many of the high-quality student advocacy resources made available throughout the pandemic that students have grown accustomed to receiving (Brownlee, 2023).

Brownlee’s comments raise two critical elements germane to both institutional and student success. The first factor is that maintaining a fiscally, healthy institution assumes greater meaning in a sector of historically underfunded institutions like tuition-driven HBCUs. Simply stated, HBCUs are singularly focused on increasing their new enrollment while retaining current students. Course sharing is a viable solution that can help institutions on both fronts with minimal financial investment. With respect to the HBCU-MSI Consortium’s initial three-year funding model, SREB clearly intended for the Consortium to be self-sustaining by the end of the funding cycle. SREB’s plan to support institutions to sustainability included empowering home institutions to becoming teaching institutions by strengthening their awareness of what it takes for course sharing to be successful.

Shifting home institutions to becoming teaching institutions seemed like an obvious action step to help colleges and universities generate new revenue streams by offering empty seats in courses with low enrollment on the Acadeum platform. However, the goal was created in a bit of vacuum; SREB had little knowledge of the institutions’ readiness to offer high-quality online courses. Once SREB realized the member institutions were at different points in their online course development journey, SREB pivoted to identify what was truly needed to become a successful teaching institution. Specifically, institutions needed to address funding, instructional design, pedagogical support, and arguably the most overlooked component, designated staff to manage the course share model at the campus level. In order to assure fidelity of implementation, course share should not be simply added in the “other duties as assigned” bucket.

Acadeum attempted to support this goal of shifting home institutions to teaching institutions, but ultimately, the institutions had to self-evaluate and embrace some hard truths about not only the design of their online course offerings but also the number of credentialed faculty who were effective in the virtual classroom. Despite the ardent desire of SREB and Acadeum to convert more HBCUs to teaching institutions, the institutions could not be rushed into this process. To date, five institutions in the HBCU-MSI Consortium are teaching institutions, with three prospective institutions slated to transition to teaching institutions in 2024. Although shifting home institutions to teaching institutions was a key goal, it was not the sole determinant of institutional course sharing success. It is important to note that 84% of consortium members are home institutions only; yet, they still generate additional revenue and support students to degree completion through an expanded, high-flexible online course inventory.

The second factor raised by Brownlee’s comments focuses on the necessity for institutions to determine how to maintain effective, high-flex solutions for students made available during the pandemic. Course sharing is a strong example of a student-centric option, but they must commit to strengthening their knowledge of how to build a strong course sharing model within its current systems to drive institutional sustainability. Although Acadeum mandates that institutions complete a thorough onboarding training, this training cannot and does not account for the infrastructural limitations that may cause schools to stall out or fail to launch the initiative altogether. Often, these limitations become evident by a lack of specific unit capacity: registrar, department chairs/deans, student success, and financial services. However, through training and implementation, the online consortium member institutions learned it is essential to frame course sharing as a solution to maximize student success based on work in which the college has already engaged (i.e., advising, degree mapping, outreach to targeted populations, academic interventions). If course sharing is presented as extra work on top of already full schedules and responsibilities, gaining institutional buy-in across the campus will be difficult and challenging. In this partnership, Acadeum became acutely aware that many HBCU faculty and staff manage a myriad of extra duties, and the mere volume of these multiple responsibilities can discourage willingness to engage in new initiatives.

An institution’s inability to maintain course sharing would adversely impact students who need expanded, flexible course inventory and could potentially promote independent studies that students often use to stay on track toward graduation. Thus, sustainable course sharing as a home institution requires intentional planning and structure to ensure the usage is guided to minimize costs while providing maximum benefits to the student and the institution through responsible course selection and preemptive advising. Institutions with limited funding must forecast their needs and deliberately structure course sharing so that it efficiently supplements their internal courses without supplanting them. Considering the variability of course costs (including possible material costs), course lengths, and session availability, successful institutions must identify common course needs early in the process and begin researching the course sharing inventory to select the most cost-effective courses that meet their student learning outcomes (SLOs) and calendars. Preemptive advising enables the advising team to assess students’ needs before they become critical, guiding them into summer or winter terms. This approach minimizes the impact on their master schedule and ensures students can complete necessary courses without hindering their enrollment in the next scheduled Fall or Spring in-house courses.

Positioned outside of the institution’s standard revenue model, these summer and winter sessions also allow the home institution to retain the net revenue earned by using course share courses at a cost less than hiring an adjunct to teach the course (see Table 3). The difference between the course cost and student tuition is retained as revenue for the institution. This practice has proven profitable for the Consortium institutions that have adopted it. The intention has been to expand the adoption of this model to ensure the remaining Consortium institutions will be able to cover their costs and add additional resources to support their course sharing efforts. Given the proven success of the course sharing model within the HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium, it is fiscally prudent and effective to develop a sustainability plan that covers platform access costs and the expenses for the necessary support staff to manage the initiative.

Due to course sharing being student-centric, its implementation directly reflects students’ academic needs and institution’s curricular gaps. SREB president Dr. Stephen Pruitt asserted,

“Sustainable systems are always dependent on those served by the system. Given the commitment of the institutions combined with open conversations regarding revenue and marketing of the opportunities, this consortium will grow and sustain these opportunities for students for years to come” (personal communication, August 10, 2023).

Pruitt’s remarks raise a valuable point about the need for institutions to be fiscally transparent and innovative to protect their enrollment and graduation rates. Course sharing will be seen as a genuine opportunity to support student success and degree completion only if campus champions actively promote it within academic departments.

Discussion: Lessons Learned and Mitigating Barriers

Through this paper, the authors examined how collaborative online course sharing can enhance student success at HBCUs and MSIs by examining the conception, development, implementation, and sustainability of SREB’s HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium. One key lesson learned was the importance of recognizing and addressing institutional practices that created challenges, impeding the successful launch of course sharing on select campuses. For instance, some institutions stalled soon after signing the participant agreement and joining the Acadeum platform. The member institutions started their course sharing implementation work at the onboarding phase facilitated by Acadeum, but their inability to follow the onboarding process created an immediate barrier, delaying the launch date. Hence, early awareness of institutional practices that may hinder onboarding would help in developing strategies to mitigate this barrier.

Another lesson learned was the importance and impact of onboarding to the Consortium launch process. Upon a review of select consortium members’ enrollment activity, Acadeum quickly noticed that institutions that failed to complete onboarding also had zero course share enrollments. Specifically, failure to complete the onboarding process was the result of 1) not activating the payment system (STRIPE), 2) not securing administrative/faculty buy in, and/or 3) not identifying key operational stakeholders on campus. Specifically, a major factor hindering institutional progress in launching the consortium was the limited faculty and staff capacity at HBCUs and MSIs. Onboarding often encountered delays and issues due to the unrecognized need to establish a core working team responsible for the course sharing process, from sourcing courses based on student needs to managing multiple add/drop dates set by various teaching institutions. This team must be collaborative in nature as course sharing is a dynamic initiative with several moving parts. Institutional or departmental leadership should identify these team members prior to any onboarding meetings and ensure these individuals are committed to and willing to undertake the work. In addition, online course sharing at its best requires a designated coordinator, which may result in creating a new institutional role – an actionable step that many institutions were not prepared to make or take.

Through this report, SREB served as the HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium’s anchor amid the institutions, course share partners, and course share technology. Thus, SREB served as the support partner for all course share participants. Trust in the community was built when SREB convened this group, and success stories were shared. As a result, home institutions were more likely to enroll students in course seats at teaching institutions represented at these convenings.

Ultimately, Acadeum offered more than a straightforward access to the open course seat inventory. As a vested technology partner dedicated to student success, the company realized that it needed to go beyond the initial onboarding training and expand its services to include student and institutional support. It was this responsibility to student success that distinguished Acadeum from simply providing a product to growing partnerships with member institutions. As a responsible partner, Acadeum illustrated its commitment to helping institutions design and activate strategies with the intent of sustaining a robust course share relationship over multiple years.

Once faced with strategic planning work, assigning responsibilities to campus stakeholders, and effectively integrating course sharing into the academic model, the institutions needed the highest degree of technical assistance from Acadeum and SREB to align the course sharing with the institutions’ priorities. Appropriately, scholar Vincent Tinto reminded higher education professionals that “access without effective support is not opportunity” (2008, June 8, para. 24). Similarly, the mere ability to view and select open seats through a portal does not qualify as a true opportunity for institutions and learners. Rather, the strategic utilization of specific courses to meet students’ curricular needs and advance them closer to degree completion marks the opportunity for institutions to redirect scheduling challenges with seamless, flexible pathways.

A final critical lesson learned was that data collection and sharing between the SREB’s HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium and the consortium member institutions must be a requirement in the consortial agreement. For the current, perpetual agreement, a provision or mandate for member institutions to capture or report their course share utilization data – enrollments, completion, and pass rates (to include DFWs) – to SREB for analysis was not included. Without data provided from the institutions, the SREB HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium cannot fully measure the effectiveness of the course sharing partnership. To address this need for access to additional data, the HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium has incorporated an addendum for a course sharing data-sharing requirement to the initial consortial agreement.

HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium has also been working with the members institutions to address barriers to capturing, storing, and analyzing retention and graduation data. Some institutions overlooked the importance of tracking key student demographics against performance rates to measure retention and persistence. Additionally, some institutions missed the opportunity to monitor curricular needs that create gaps in their master course schedules, which delayed student progress to degree completion. Therefore, data analytics must be included in the course sharing experience.

So Where Does Course Sharing Go Now?

The SREB HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium continues to provide collaborative online course sharing at HBCUs and MSIs to proactively support student success efforts by expanding course offerings and providing opportunities to students to graduate on-time. Through the development of this consortium, member institutions recognized the value proposition of the model as a direct response to the persistent enrollment and completion concerns across institutions. SREB president Stephen Pruitt captured this sentiment best, acknowledging the initiative’s impact, as follows:

Success is not always seen in pure numbers but is always seen in pure action. The immediate interest and commitment on the part of these institutions constitutes a success measured by commitment to student success. Numbers are always indicators of success, but the impact on student success will be measured by the differences made in students’ lives (personal communication, August 10, 2023).

Realizing the value of course sharing did not come without its challenges. The lessons learned and the strategies designed to mitigate common barriers paved the way for new institutions to join the consortium with a roadmap for course sharing implementation based on best practices learned on this journey. Navigating sensitive campus politics while forging cross-unit relationships to implement course sharing is essential to successful implementation. Course sharing is a highly nuanced model that requires collaboration within an institution between faculty from various fields of study and staff support from the offices of financial aid, student affairs, and academic affairs.

Overall, SREB HBCU-MSI Course Sharing Consortium institutions evaluate the initiative as a success based upon by the 975 students who gained access to additional courses offerings when they needed the courses to keep them on track toward graduation, by the professional and leadership development experiences that were a part of putting this initiative together, and the opportunity to reduce costs and increase revenues.

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