The EdTech Procurement Framework is a six-step process to help education leaders develop and improve infrastructure around edtech selection, implementation, evaluation, and procurement to drive student learning.
This framework is designed for edtech purchasers to maximize their return on investment (ROI) to ensure strategic resource allocations. Following these steps will help you select tools that should demonstrably benefit your students.
Check out each step to learn more about that phase of the procurement and pilot process and access helpful tips and relevant tools and resources.
Follow these six steps for education leaders to develop and improve edtech selection, implementation, evaluation, and procurement.
Intentional edtech selection begins with cross-departmental analysis of formative and summative data to identify priority learner populations, instructional gaps, and the root causes driving those gaps. The selection process is a chance to take stock of the interventions already available, including edtech, to determine whether a new edtech tool is needed.
Establish evidence-based selection criteria and instructional alignment in a discovery or request for proposals (RFP) process to identify edtech designed to meet the needs of your priority learner populations. Select the product that best demonstrates it will meet the identified instructional needs.
Collaborate with your educators and school leaders to build a professional learning and measurement plan for monitoring implementation fidelity and evaluating impact on your targeted teaching and learning goals.
Provide professional learning throughout the pilot period to ensure educators are prepared to effectively use the tool, including leveraging real-time data dashboards to monitor and modify implementation approaches and ensure the tool usage aligns with dosage requirements.
Analyze pilot data to determine whether the tool sufficiently addressed your targeted teaching and learning goals.
Share the pilot results with critical partners, such as the school board, community partners, funders, teachers, and students, to collaboratively develop a comprehensive plan for expanded and/or long-term use of successful tools.
Denver Public Schools is always looking to improve our edtech procurement processes while being innovative. … Having specific, tangible resources from the Edtech Procurement Framework will help us better serve our students while being efficient with our funds.
Check out these pilot micro-credentials and earn badges as you build your evaluation skills!
Do you have a free tool or resource to add to the EdTech Procurement Framework? Add it here.
The Pilot Study Briefs provide findings from school district-led edtech pilots to help you make product selection decisions based on evidence. Read them here.
Have you or your district conducted an edtech pilot? Summarize and share here for district leaders searching for tools.
At a time of rapid technological change, our partnership with Digital Promise allows us to improve learning with the power of technology in a purposeful way—using the Edtech Pilot Framework to guide disciplined experimentation, thoughtful implementation, and scalable impact.
The EdTech Procurement Framework highlights a six-step process to support education leaders in making informed, evidence-based edtech decisions. The steps—analyze and inventory, discover and decide, design and plan, mobilize and implement, evaluate and reflect, and sustain and scale—guide districts from identifying needs through long-term adoption, providing a structured pathway and supportive resources for improving procurement infrastructure at every stage.
The Pilot Study Briefs provide synthesized findings from edtech pilots to help education leaders make evidence-based product selection decisions. To find out more about which products work best in which context, explore the briefs below.
The EdTech Procurement Framework is a revision of the EdTech Pilot Framework, which was based on Digital Promise’s EdTech Marketplace research. The EdTech Procurement Framework was driven by best practices identified by observing and conducting pilots with League of Innovative Schools districts, co-designing product certifications with education leaders and providers, and engaging in edtech procurement and implementation research. Learn more about the research efforts that drove the design of this framework here.
This framework was co-developed by Sierra Noakes, Megan Pattenhouse, AJ Foster, Andrew Vollavanh, with feedback from district leaders to guide the usability and content within the framework.
We launched the first product badges in higher education, developed through a multi-year co-design process with the California Community College’s Chancellor’s Office. We also published a report describing the learnings from the first cohort to engage in outcomes-based contracting with edtech and, in partnership with the EdTech Quality Collaborative, published the Indicators Guide in alignment with this framework.
We launched the Responsibly Designed AI product certification to recognize products designed to serve all students fairly and securely. We also published a report describing the learnings from our implementation research with Denver Public Schools to study their new edtech evaluation process.
In partnership with 1EdTech, CAST, CoSN, InnovateEDU, ISTE, and SETDA, we collaboratively launched the Five Quality Indicators for EdTech and AI Products to unify product evaluation frameworks for education leaders.
We launched and awarded the first set of Product Certifications, including Research-Based Design for Instructional Learning Products and Learner Variability.
Based on four years of research in partnership with practitioners, we launched the EdTech Pilot Framework to share our synthesized eight-step pilot process, along with more than 150 free, open-source tools and resources.
The League of Innovative Schools surfaced shared challenges around edtech selection and procurement, and we first committed to supporting districts in making evidence-based decisions around technology tools.
Digital Promise has developed additional guidance for school and system leaders navigating edtech procurement. Digital Promise spent the last decade studying procurement processes and analyzing innovative edtech purchasing models, such as Denver Public Schools’ cross-functional evaluation approach, the inaugural national cohort leveraging outcomes-based contracting (OBC), and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office’s learner- and practitioner-centered co-design strategy.
Explore the guides and reports to ensure intentional edtech procurement in your system.
