Digital Learning Assessment

Are you looking at digital learning in all the right ways? Do all your students have the opportunities they need to succeed? Do your enrollment options give families confidence that their needs can be met without going elsewhere? Are your programs sustainable, cost-effective, and demonstrating positive student outcomes? Are your teaching and learning resources sufficiently digital and well-implemented to meet stakeholder needs, support continuity planning, and facilitate sustainable and cost-effective budgeting? Do all of your stakeholders understand how your different efforts inter-relate to support students and their families? Are your digital learning efforts effecting positive change in traditional classrooms? How are you continuing to explore and adapt to new digital learning challenges and opportunities in everything from parental concerns to generative AI?

Evergreen Education Group can help you answer these questions. Not by facilitating another stakeholder engagement or planning process, completing readiness checklists or writing compliance documents: Chances are your organization has done a lot of that. What Evergreen can do is bring 25 years of digital learning experience and an unparalleled wealth and range of practical knowledge to the role of peer reviewer, critical friend, and strategic analyst. With Evergreen, a digital learning assessment consists of an investigation of existing plans and programs underway, an analysis of available facts against internal expectations and external norms, and recommendations based on a strategic assessment of the challenges and opportunities of the next three to five years. 

Why now? Schools, districts, operators, and many other education organizations are heading into a particularly consequential three to five-year period in which digital learning will play an important role in meeting student and family needs, ensuring essential resources, expanding opportunities and improving outcomes, and enabling sustainable organizational and financial arrangements. At the same time, many face the need to clean up a confusing array of hastily executed pandemic-era efforts and address financial or other pressures, and need information and expertise to help cut through the hype about everything from generative AI to the fiscal cliff so they can fully consider the potential options and prepare for the likely contingencies.

A digital learning assessment involves the following:

  • Initial assessment of the organization’s implementation and capabilities, stakeholder and regulatory context, and specific opportunities and challenges concerning digital learning. This assessment coincides with planning and launching the following steps, or it can be a separate, more limited engagement resulting in a more detailed proposal.

  • Review of all available and provided planning and reporting documents concerning digital learning. Typically, previous plans, reports, surveys, financial projections, and other resources exist but have been often forgotten or ignored, and Evergreen’s knowledge can help unearth these. 

  • Engagement (workshops, interviews, observations, surveys, correspondence) as needed to clarify plans, goals, and strategies, and to understand how existing programs are actually functioning. Areas of focus typically include: 

    • Digital-first curriculum, instruction, assessment, and intervention

    • Digital tools and resources in use: overlaps, gaps, costs, goals, usage, outcomes

    • Instructional continuity and support

    • Integration of hybrid and blended approaches into the core instructional program

    • Online courses that expand options, support credit recovery, address staffing challenges, and improve staff utilization.

    • Use of alternative programs to meet needs and retain students and families

    • Equity and inclusion, ethics, and psychological health and safety concerning student access to and benefit from these efforts

    • Organizational capacity to sustainably manage these efforts and continuously improve their contribution to efficacy, efficiency, and equity.

  • Additional, targeted analysis and assessment of capacity, sustainability, and impact (again including cost-benefit analysis) focused on the following:

    • Students, which may include attention to enrollment goals, target populations, outreach, admissions, enrollment, retention, and outcomes. 

    • Teachers and other vital roles, which may include attention to job design, recruitment, onboarding, professional development, mentoring, efforts to retain and further develop people for needed positions, and contracting for services.

    • Curriculum, which may include structure, standards (quality, accreditation, accessibility, equity, outcomes), development, and cost-effectiveness. 

    • Instruction, which may include format and structure, pedagogy and strategies, learning resource adaptation and integration, approaches to feedback and assessment, data analytics, and student inclusion and engagement.

    • Tools and Resources (software, hardware, connectivity), which may include requirements, integration, maintenance, support, data management and analytics, and lifecycle.

    • Support, which may include family and student help desk, technology support, academic counseling, social and emotional learning, and support.

    • Oversight and management, which may include regulatory compliance, governance, policy, accreditation, licensure, leadership, budgeting and organizational design, management, and administration. 

  • A presentation including an assessment of existing digital learning-related initiatives' status, and recommendations for improving student opportunity, outcomes, and financial and operational sustainability of digital learning-related efforts. 

  • Ongoing support for the interpretation and application of the recommendations and support for participation in a community of practice for organizations that have gone through the Evergreen Digital Learning Assessment

The value of a Digital Learning Assessment is dependent on access to key people and relevant documents and data, and sufficient opportunity to discuss these and to ask follow-up questions. Assessments typically involve an early site visit to establish relationships and provide context, additional in-person meetings can be scheduled as appropriate. Assessments can also be conducted entirely virtually to help minimize expenses. Where exact data is unavailable (e.g., staffing costs), assumptions will be made to provide illustrative findings. 

To learn more about how your organization can benefit from a digital learning assessment, please fill out our contact form here.