Strategy Lab Spotlight: Insights from Pati Ruiz at Digital Promise
During our first edition of the EdTech Strategy Lab Summer Workshop Series, we were able to sit down with Pati Ruiz, the Senior Director of Edtech and Emerging Technologies, who shared insights into some of Digital Promise’s latest work.
A US-based organisation, the non-profit was established by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2008 re-authorisation of the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Today, Digital Promise is working directly to support district leaders and practitioners in making informed decisions about EdTech.
Pati reported the organisation is accomplishing this in a myriad of ways, including supporting research-based product certifications, partnering with both national and international organisations, and trying to bring about more clarity in terms of what constitutes evidence. In doing this work, Digital Promise aims to ensure that they are truly listening to educational leaders, policymakers, and industry experts, but also bringing them together to work collaboratively to clarify for practitioners what counts as evidence. In practice, this work has had a strong focus on co-designing solutions with district leaders and industry experts to optimise their success in practice.
Referencing different possible frameworks that facilitate trust and evidence, Pati spoke about the product certifications that Digital Promise has developed. One example she gave was the product certification that they developed in partnership with The EdTech Equity Project. Together, they worked to build out a product certification focused on identifying products that prioritise racial equity and address racial bias in product algorithms and overall design. The certification also aims to promote transparency and efforts to identify and mitigate racial bias.
This initial project, in collaboration with practitioners and an external organisation, is now being used as the foundation for an ethically designed AI certification which will hopefully help Digital Promise and its collaborators better understand priorities and concerns of school districts in the US around AI and, ultimately, inform a certification requirement for this purpose. The primary goal here is to understand how districts can use this particular product to make better informed decisions about purchasing and procurement in the future.
“[At Digital Promise], we are thinking about how to empower voices across the field so that we see more demand – on the school and district side – for EdTech products that use research to design learning products that really attend to the diverse needs of learners and educators.”
This work has multiple dimensions. One particular focus for Digital Promise is exploring how product design can become more grounded in learning sciences research. Specifically, they want to provide transparency about how this research is driving product design in a manner that develops and fosters trust between companies and learners. These efforts, according to Pati, will increase clarity for both the supply and demand side of the EdTech market.
Recently, Digital Promise completed their 200th product certification. The existence, and continued use, of these certifications has sparked growing interest among school district leaders which underscores the importance of ensuring that research is accessible to all stakeholders within the education system – students, teachers, education leaders, and even families. The aim of the certification processes developed by the organisation is to make it easier to access this research.
To do this, they have launched both evidence-based and research-based design certifications to date. They are also currently exploring another certification that would focus on ethically designed AI products to bring additional clarity to those making procurement decisions.
Additionally, the team is working with partners like Southern Education Foundation to explore outcomes based contracting. They want to discover what is most important for school leaders to know about an EdTech product before they go into a procurement conversation.
One suggestion from an Assistant Superintendent within their network has been the idea of a kind of “EdTech Nutrition Label” where the company would identify and answer upfront many of the questions that the procurement decision makers have in a clear and accessible manner. The goal here would be to have individuals involved in the procurement process coming to the table with a sufficient understanding of the product, providing decision-makers and educators with a baseline knowledge to help them know which questions to ask to get the information they need to make informed decisions about specific EdTech products.
The aim of Digital Promise’s work is to work with different stakeholders across the EdTech Ecosystem and ensure they are working together in the same direction, ensuring that those in the field have the tools and frameworks required to be able to successfully identify products that are accessible, inclusive, secure, evidence-based, usable, and interoperable.
At the end of the day, as Pati puts it:
“We want to ensure our districts, our schools, our teachers and our students have effective tools that create meaningful learning experiences.”