How does the Digital Divide impact your students, faculty, staff, and surrounding communities?
Understanding the impact of the digital divide on students, faculty, staff, and community members is crucial for higher education institutions aiming to foster inclusive environments and equitable access to digital resources. Comprehensive research and needs assessments provide data-driven insights that are essential for identifying disparities, informing targeted interventions, and promoting digital opportunity across campus and the surrounding communities. By engaging in thorough research, institutions can use this data to:
- Gain insights into the specific ways in which the digital divide affects students, faculty, staff, and community members.
- Establish a baseline understanding of how the digital divide impacts students, faculty, staff, and the surrounding communities.
- Identify disparities, challenges, and barriers related to digital access, skills, and resources that may impede equitable participation and engagement.
- Inform evidence-based strategies, policies, and programs to address digital inequities and foster inclusive learning and working environments on campus.
- Locate gaps in existing data to inform future research endeavors.
- Facilitate grant applications, program evaluation, benchmarking, and reporting processes.
- Aid in establishing the specific digital opportunity issues that your institution/system will address and identifying the primary stakeholder groups for targeted initiatives.
- Enable ongoing monitoring and evaluation of digital opportunity initiatives to track progress, measure impact, and adapt interventions to meet evolving needs and priorities.
- By employing a combination of research methods, institutions can capture both quantitative data metrics and nuanced qualitative insights into the experiences of stakeholders. This approach will help translate research findings into actionable recommendations and evidence-based strategies, fostering the development, implementation, and evaluation of digital opportunity programs and initiatives within the institution and across its surrounding communities.
Research Tools
The research tools outlined in this section are useful in gathering and analyzing data at the state, parish, or community level (census tract). Key tools include:
Digital Equity Act Population Viewer, U.S. Census Bureau and NTIA
- View the % of the population in the 8 covered population categories.
- Zoom to view counties/parishes & census tracts.
- Use additional layers such as population lacking fixed broadband, computer or broadband, not using the internet, and not using a device.
- Learn more about the data.
The Digital Divide Index, Purdue Center for Regional Development
- Measures broadband infrastructure, adoption, and socioeconomic characteristics that may limit motivation, skills, and usage.
- If a parish/county or census tract has a higher Socioeconomic (SE) score versus an Infrastructure/Adoption (INFA) score, efforts should be made to increase digital literacy and exposure to the technology’s benefits.
Digital Equity Tool, Microsoft
- Helps organizations identify areas with digital equity gaps, which may be indicated by low rates of broadband adoption, low rates of education attainment, low rates of computer ownership, high rates of disability, high rates of poverty, and other indicators.
- Note: As of June 2024, this tool analyzes data from the 2019 American Community Survey. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not yet updated the tool with more recent ACS data.
