As of now, edtech designers don’t have a single, centralized place to find equitable design strategies and resources. Take a look through our slides or read below to learn more about our prototypes to address this challenge:
Prototype 2 Slides-compressed.pdf
While useful equitable design principles exist, and while innovative companies of all sizes are finding new ways to design equitably, there is no unified guidebook or resources edtech designers specifically can look to for strategies.
To address this challenge, folks at the design sprint developed the idea of a rubric for edtech designers. Through testing, this idea has evolved to become a “designer toolkit” that lays out criteria for equitable edtech product design and then provides multiple strategies for reaching each criteria based on a company’s size, resources, and experience. Case studies and examples would show how companies have used these strategies and illustrate positive outcomes.
A toolkit isn’t enough, however. Through our research and from folks at the design sprint, we know that if companies are going to change, school district edtech procurement practices have to change. ******Right now, procurement teams don’t have the tools to know which products are equitably designed. Additionally, they have lots of other criteria to consider, including interoperability, cost, data privacy, and more. One idea in particular arose during the design sprint — product and company certifications that could signal to buyers which products were designed equitably (using the designer toolkit described above, for example). Over time, this idea has grown to include diagnostics, which could track a company or product’s progress over time, such that even if a product wasn’t perfectly equitable at the time of purchase, districts could watch for improvement over time. Digital Promise is interested in creating equity product certifications, and Goldstar Education is working on diagnostics.
We are committed to creating and piloting the designer toolkit over the next couple of years. We hope members of the community of practice will take on equity certifications to help the toolkit have maximum impact.
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