This SBIR Phase I project will create the first trusted source where parents and teachers can easily find, buy and adopt high-quality digital content for their children. Games, e-books and other digital learning tools show significant potential for improving lives. Children in low-income families (43% of all U.S. children) spend more screen time than their higher income counterparts, and their teachers are twice as likely to report improved student achievement from using educational technology. Despite increasing supply and demand related to digital learning tools, great content is buried within current distribution platforms and educators do not find choices mapped to their needs. As a result, 30 million U.S. children living in low-income families lack access to relevant content, 55% of parents and 80% of teachers cannot find what they are looking for and content producers face significant challenges to sustainability. By offering a broad selection of high-quality, cross-platform digital learning content via a platform optimized for adoption by educators who serve low-income communities, this project will achieve significant advances in access, impact and revenue. Using feedback from a Phase I prototype, this project will scale to reach the 3 million U.S. teachers who currently use digital learning products in the classroom and the 30 million U.S. families who use digital learning products at home. A revenue share with digital learning providers will establish a dedicated, sustainable channel within the $20 billion global e-learning market. This project is a systemic solution to digital learning distribution that meets teachers and parents where they are, but fundamentally disrupts their current expectations for effective content. As the first project to connect web-based, evidence-based digital learning tools with educators at scale, there are significant risks. The technical requirements for creating a one-stop shop for web-based learning tools are evolving daily from how to support the development of more high-quality HTML5 content, to how to best sell and deliver access codes for cross-platform/cross-device delivery, to how to ensure ease of download and adoption by educators despite limited bandwidth. Development in HTML5 offers an emerging opportunity to more efficiently target a global audience without maintaining multiple versions of the same application and improve educational connections between home and school. However, many digital learning developers lack the resources to convert high-quality content to HTML5 without the support of a sustainable distribution platform. This project will create a web-based e-commerce application optimized for delivery of cross-platform content, a searchable inventory of high-quality digital learning products mapped to educational standards and a data/feedback loop designed to improve long-term satisfaction, sustainability and efficacy. Phase I R&D efforts will use surveys, virtual focus groups and educator journals/interviews to test the technical and commercial feasibility of both the supply side and demand side of a new platform. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
