Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Since being published, school districts across the state have increasingly utilized the Wisconsin Digital Learning Plan to implement strategies to make learning more cost-effective, meaningful, and accessible for all students.
Updated in 2016 by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to serve as a roadmap for schools and their partners, the plan has a special focus on equitable, personalized, applied, and engaged learning environments. It has helped guide districts as they make changes to better utilize emerging technology in classrooms throughout Wisconsin.
To gauge results districts have experienced by utilizing the plan, the DPI recently published data from the 2019 Digital Learning Survey, which asked respondents from 405 Wisconsin districts (90% of all districts) 53 questions covering all five gears of the plan. The goal of the survey is to create a collection of longitudinal, digital data to inform key stakeholders (districts, Cooperative Education Service Agencies, education organizations, lawmakers, and Wisconsinites) of the progress the state has collectively made in implementing digital learning.
Key takeaways from the survey include:
- District use of the Wisconsin Digital Learning Plan has increased each of the three years of the Digital Learning Survey.
- Currently, 66 districts in Wisconsin have implemented some form of Virtual Learning Time, and more than 60 additional districts are currently working on a plan.
- Over 80% of districts statewide are using, or have already used the Wisconsin Standards for Information and Technology Literacy to support the planning goals of student learning that are equitable, personalized, applied, and engaged.
- More than 60% of districts report students in sixth through 12th grades have a device assigned to each student.
- Nearly 85% of districts report having a wireless network ready to support mobile learning in all buildings — a continued increase over the previous two years.
Survey data has been broken down in three ways for comparison — state-level results, results by district size, and results by CESA (this information was sent to individual CESAs). Each section includes graphs for the given data, and a brief interpretation of each.
The 2019-2020 school year is the third year of the survey, and is the first year the DPI can begin identifying trends from survey data. These trends are highlighted in the charts on the state-level survey data page. A PDF copy of the entire data set for each category can be found at the bottom of each web page. You can also access data from previous years in the menu on the left of the page.
For more information, and to view the full results, visit the DPI 2019-2020 Digital Learning Survey webpage.