Digital technologies can help personalise learning for students, widen access to education and foster digital literacy from an early age. This explains why many countries and organisations actively promote the integration of digital learning technologies in the classroom.
The flipside of this enthusiasm is that new digital learning products are often embraced because they are user-friendly and scalable, despite a lack of evidence for their positive impact on learning outcomes. Also, edtech companies are developing and launching a huge array of new digital learning tools, making it difficult for teachers and administrators to sift through the sea of new tools, let alone understand which ones are of high quality.
The OECD is exploring the question of how digital learning platforms can be envisioned not only to improve student learning, but also to aid assessment, foster cross-country collaboration, and reduce overhead costs for school systems and teachers. The Platform for Innovative Learning Assessments (PILA) was developed to support this exploration.
PILA is a free, open-source platform that offers teachers and students engaging, interactive learning applications with built-in formative assessments. Since its inception in 2020, the PILA team has collaborated closely with teachers and researchers through pilot studies and iterative testing to refine content, pedagogical resources, and interface design. These interactions revealed some important insights on what factors make a digital learning tool worth the investment – be it time, money or of other resources.
