With nearly a decade of experience working to close the digital divide through Verizon’s education initiative Verizon Innovative Learning, and a history of helping underserved communities thrive in today’s digital world, Verizon is scaling its resources to provide next-gen learning for all through the launch of Verizon Innovative Learning HQ. It’s part of Citizen Verizon, Verizon’s responsible business plan for economic, environmental, and social advancement.

Their brief was simple: create a scalable platform where educators anywhere can access next-gen K-12 educational resources – all for free. The goal was to create a free online education portal supports a more immersive and personalized learning experience, empowering educators with the opportunity to integrate technology into their classrooms. The site provides free access and support for the latest education materials, customizable lessons, and professional learning aligned to research-backed micro-credentials.

The larger goal is to provide digital skills training to 10million youth by 2030.

The “digital divide” is among the biggest issues of our generation. Millions of children in the United States and around the world lack access to technology and the skills required to compete in an increasingly digital economy. The sudden onset of COVID-19 amplified and shined a light on this divide, creating an even greater need for solutions.

Educators want to do right by their students, but are often resource-constrained and sometimes lack the skills to teach about technology themselves. Documentation has shown that this results in poor student performance and engagement, leading to gaps in higher education and income down the road.

The Verizon Innovative Learning HQ portal leverages Verizon’s education expertise that was previously only available to a select number of schools, and scales it up so that anyone, anywhere, can access the resources.

This new online portal from Verizon Innovative Learning provides tailored, cross-disciplinary lesson plans with a focus on technology that seamlessly integrate into any classroom, empowering educators with over 225 lessons and courses and 28 diverse subjects, from biology to music. Many lessons integrate exclusive augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) companion apps to get students excited and keep them engaged. Professional development credentials are provided for free to help teachers fulfill requirements to maintain their teaching certificates while upgrading their skills. All of these tools are fully agile, adaptable to any curriculum, and accessible in any classroom, whether onsite, at home, outside, or in any other learning environment.

While available to all, the target audience of Verizon Innovative Learning HQ is K-12 educators who are seeking inspiration, tools, and support to carry out their mission, evolve their craft, find inspiration, support students, and grow professionally.

Towards this end, a strategy was implemented in mid-2020 to assemble a team of experts and designers who would study educators’ needs. Preliminary research included teacher interviews, conversations with program staff, and competitive/comparative research in the educational technology space.

Collaborative online sketching sessions were then hosted online with educators, professional development specialists (i.e. teachers of teachers), and Verizon product owners and designers, resulting in multiple concepts which were then pared down and vetted, then refined even further and tested again before the team aligned on the platform functionality. In all, over 100 esteemed educators and partners gave feedback throughout the design process.

Verizon Innovative Learning HQ launched in Summer 2021 before the start of the school year, in order to give educators time to explore the platform for use in the upcoming school year. Discovery began the previous fall, researching educators’ needs and co-creating concepts with those "on the ground.” By January 2021, the site itself was being developed and designed in parallel. On the content side, close collaboration was happening with partners to determine the overall ecosystem of the site and build a model adaptable to different types of partner content. Throughout the process the team worked closely with accessibility experts to ensure equitable access to all.

Over the next 8 months the team designed, built, tested, refined, and imported content into the new portal. It launched in August 2021 with over 225 lessons, courses, and apps on 28 diverse subjects – and it continues growing today and into the future.

In just 6 months since launch, Verizon Innovative Learning HQ has reached 430,000 students and over 1700 teachers.

This entry advances three of the sustainable development goals. It seeks to reduce inequality (C03) by providing students on the wrong side of the digital divide with hands-on experiences and tools to compete in an increasingly digital economy. It also helps to build up students’ capabilities in many aspects of industry (C02) through STEM approaches to diverse topics. Finally, and most important of all, it advances quality education (A04) for all by providing inclusive STEM education to any student for free.