Centering Community College Learners in EdTech Decisions

Community colleges enroll nearly half of the undergraduate students in the United States and play a critical role in furthering the education and careers of millions of adults each year. These institutions provide education for an incredibly diverse student body, but education technology (edtech) is often not designed with the community college learner in mind, and research on edtech in higher education often does not differentiate between two- and four-year colleges. Community colleges face distinct challenges that impact successful technology use including many students who lack consistent access to devices and high-speed internet, may be less experienced with digital tools (especially older learners), and can be put off by the high friction of creating multiple new accounts on the many platforms required.

Like many educational institutions, the California Community Colleges (CCC) Chancellor’s Office (CO) did not have the capacity to carry the heavy burden of evaluating each edtech option available. Furthermore, the team felt they were not sufficiently leveraging the range of expertise across staff necessary for holistically evaluating tools. The CO recognized they needed a new approach to edtech evaluation that centered the range of backgrounds, technical expertise, and learning needs of their community college classrooms.

The CO and Digital Promise collaborated to develop a new edtech evaluation framework for the CO to identify edtech that supports the full spectrum of community college learners. By centering educator and learner priorities through a co-design methodology, the project resulted in an evaluation process that is designed to find the tools that are best positioned to successfully support community college learning environments. Through this work, we learned students want to play a role in the edtech evaluation and procurement process, and that they have concrete ideas about edtech quality. Similarly, we learned that instructor and administrator expertise offers critical considerations that need to be built into the evaluation process to ensure tools are valuable tools for instruction.

“I wanted to be a part of making the experience [of college] a lot smoother for students. I loved that there was a project out there that was thinking about how to make this better,”
-Hugo Morales, Student Co-Designer, Cabrillo College, Santa Cruz, CA.

A Community-Designed Evaluation System

The resulting evaluation system included two assets, the contact initiation form (CIF) and three product badges. These badges translate student and faculty priorities into measurable criteria for vendors to meet. The badges are: (1) Centering Students’ Diverse Lived Experiences, (2) Commitment to Continuous Improvement, and (3) Faculty Agency and Connection. The CIF requires vendors to provide comprehensive information about the product before contact from the CO, and the product badges allow vendors to demonstrate product alignment to student and faculty priorities.

The Centering Students’ Diverse Lived Experiences badge directly addresses barriers identified in the co-design process, ensuring edtech works for students who are on the go, navigating unreliable internet, and have varying levels of digital fluency.

• Accessibility: To earn this badge, a product must provide evidence that it can be used on different devices (mobile phones, laptops, and tablets) without diminished capabilities for student users, and it must enable students with low internet bandwidth or unreliable connectivity to accomplish the same tasks as those with high bandwidth connectivity.
• Usability: The badge also mandates that products support users with a range of digital skills and that they support user authentication beyond unique login credentials, such as Single Sign-On or integration with a learning management system.
• Equity: Finally, the badge requires vendors to demonstrate that their research and development includes community college students with diverse identities to center equitable access to product functionalities in the design.

“I appreciated that they wanted student input. When people develop products, they’re often not thinking about the students sitting at their kitchen table or in their dorm room with differing internet accessibility and differing skill levels. It’s good to have student perspectives because that experience is so different from product designers’ test labs,”
-Becky Fraker, Student Product Badge Assessor, Columbia College, Soulsbyville, CA.

The report serves as a playbook for community colleges and community college systems to engage directly with students, faculty, and administrators to collaboratively design and codify an edtech evaluation system that meets the needs of their community.

In addition to framework to lead this work, the contact initiation form, and instruments to conduct these conversations in your community, the report also highlights the specific experiences of one student and one administrator who participated in the co-design of badges and of two students who served as assessors for vendor applications for product badges.

Design a process that centers the lives of your learners

Explore the full report “Putting Learners First: Broadening Access Through Technology Evaluation in California Community Colleges,” to discover co-design strategies and student stories that can help you transform your institution’s approach to edtech evaluation.