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 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.