Digital Promise and SRI Launch IES-Funded Community Hub to Accelerate and Scale Education Innovation

Our nation’s education system faces complex barriers and challenges to improving learners’ academic achievement and workforce readiness. Navigating these challenges demands interdisciplinary teams, novel thinking, and rigorous research to transform ideas into scalable, evidence-based solutions. Guided by these principles and a request from Congress, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) established the Accelerate, Transform, Scale (ATS) Initiative to drive research and development (R&D) toward breakthrough solutions.

Digital Promise and SRI have launched the ATS Hub, a new IES-funded project that will provide the ATS Initiative with the infrastructure and resources to catalyze emergence of a strong, robust field that can excel in achieving IES’s goals. In partnership with IES, the ATS Hub is fostering a community hub of innovators focused on developing breakthrough solutions, particularly for those that harness emerging technologies for education. The ATS Hub is steered by an interdisciplinary Technical Working Group of experts across market innovation, research, and practice.

Spurring Innovation Grounded in Evidence

Digital Promise and SRI are leading this effort by leveraging their deep content expertise, strong track record of use-inspired R&D, extensive experience in building cross-sector communities, and capacity to manage large-scale IES-funded programs within the ATS Initiative such as SEERNet and the LEARN Network.

Specifically, the Hub will:

• Support ATS Initiative Applicants: Create and disseminate a shared knowledge base of resources and tools for ATS Initiative grant program applicants.
• Build Capacity Among ATS Awardees: Provide professional development opportunities for existing ATS Initiative grantees, including those in the From Seedlings to Scale, Transformative Research in the Education Sciences, and Using Generative Artificial Intelligence to Augment Teaching and Learning in Classrooms (U-GAIN R&D Centers) programs, to increase ATS grantees’ success in addressing critical challenges in education innovation.
• Engage Stakeholders: Launch an “ideas challenge,” modeled on the National Science Foundation’s successful VITAL Prize Challenge, which was managed by Digital Promise, to stimulate novel concepts and teams and seed the pipeline of ATS Initiative proposals.

To keep a pulse on what is being learned about the most promising education use cases for artificial intelligence (AI), the Hub will also build off of findings from Digital Promise’s K-12 AI Infrastructure Program and will benefit from that program’s focus on data governance, privacy, fairness, and evaluation methods. While the ATS Initiative is not exclusively focused on technological innovation, a substantial amount of the initiative’s investments to date have an AI focus.

Engagement with the Field

The initial members of the ATS Hub community hub include the 10 grantees of IES’s From Seedlings to Scale (S2S), three grantees from Transformative Research in the Education Sciences, and four U-GAIN R&D Centers.

We expect to engage in productive discussions with the community hub and the broader field around questions such as:

• What types of questions require innovative solutions?
• What makes for a productive interdisciplinary team whose goal is to build an evidence-based, scalable solution?
• What does high quality R&D look like at all stages, from initial idea to development to evaluation, when the goal is to achieve a breakthrough?
• What are the highest priority needs in education that could be solved by innovative ideas across pre-K, K-12, and postsecondary?
• What are the most promising outside-the-box ideas for education’s most persistent challenges?
  What are the barriers to achieving breakthroughs in the education sector?

Through these engagements, the ATS Hub aims to increase the number of breakthrough innovations poised to achieve broad reach and impact in education.

Ideas Challenge Coming Soon

Keep an eye out on our website for more information about the ATS Hub Ideas Challenge. The challenge is an opportunity for individuals and organizations to submit ideas grounded in evidence that indicates that a breakthrough is possible within a specified priority area. Winners will receive a cash prize.

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