In 1993, Governor Jim Hunt launched the North Carolina Information Highway. This program, spearheaded by the Department of Commerce, the NC Research and Education Network, and local telephone companies, created the largest public switched network in the world at the time, and eventually spawned off the E-NC Authority, spearheading rural broadband. The E-NC authority operated until 2011, when it was folded back into state government as the rural broadband office in the Department of Information Technology. While the dream of connecting every public institution was never fully realized through this program, numerous video links were established and NC Universities and Community Colleges were able to offer video classes between campuses and between universities. Rural schools were able to offer students synchronous video classes through the NC School of Science and Math. The NCIH video conferencing backbone still operates and is actively used today across many schools in North Carolina.

In the mid-2000s, the NC Department of Public Instruction released the IMPACT model, defining school media and technology programs - everything from roles and responsibilities to device management to library collections to program evaluation. IMPACT became a national model in school library and technology program setup and informs much of the work that has come since, especially in North Carolina. Using federal funds, the state provided several districts with large IMPACT grants, to enable them to move to 1:1 computing programs and develop their schools according to the IMPACT model. A comprehensive evaluation yielded much of the same results as the original ACOT program, but also noted how critical community buy-in was to the success of the program, and noted significant changes in how teachers work in technology-enabled learning environments.

In 2005, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation opened. Part of the College of Education at NC State University, the Friday Institute aimed to be service and research agency focused on supporting North Carolina in bridging research, policy. The Friday Institute has a significant digital-age learning focus, and works with districts, states, and organizations to design solutions to support digital-age learning and to provide professional learning and program evaluation support. Through work with the Golden LEAF Foundation, Race to the Top, and the Digital Learning Plan, the Friday Institute has provided digital learning program support to all North Carolina LEAs while conducting professional learning across nearly 70 LEAs.

In 2006, the NC General Assembly allocated money to the North Carolina School Connectivity Initiative. This effort funded the cost of providing a high speed Internet connection to every school district in North Carolina. Over the next six years, an Internet connection from the NC Research and Education Network (run out of the non-profit Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, now just called MCNC) would be provided free of charge to every school district. This connection is scalable - districts are automatically upgraded to the next bandwidth tier when they consistently utilize 60% of their current bandwidth. These upgrades are transparent and are paid for by the state. The state also pays the cost of the site links between schools, though LEAs are responsible for the procurement of these links and management of E-Rate paperwork (which will be discussed in Unit 6). In 2017, the cost of wireless access points within school buildings was also picked up by the state, making North Carolina the first state with Internet connectivity at all schools and the only state where the costs of connectivity are paid for by the state. This was one of the first statewide efforts in the country to connect all schools and one of the first efforts to leverage the E-Rate program in a coordinated way (approximately $20 million of state funding each year is matched by nearly $100 million in Federal funding).

In 2007, a settlement from a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft resulted in a large infusion of funding for digital learning in North Carolina schools. For some districts, this resulted in several million dollars of new funding. Because a local match was required, many districts were able to jump-start digital learning programs. The state also provides a small amount of ongoing funding for digital learning, which will be discussed in Unit 6.

As a part of the Race to the Top grant in 2010, a suite of services was proposed to be included as a part of the School Connectivity Initiative. While many services were planned including device inventory and statewide managed telephone services, only a handful of these services were ever released. These include the Client Engineering Team at MCNC - a team of network engineers that can provide advanced technical assistance for configuration and optimization of school networks; the NC Education Cloud Identity and Access Management Service (IAM); an Internet content filtering solution (currently provided by Z-Scaler); and a service where MCNC will host and manage district firewalls. Aside from the IAM service, districts and charter schools can opt-in to these services free of charge if they choose to.

In 2013, Session Law 2013-12 signaled the intention of the General Assembly to transition funding from textbooks to digital resources by 2017. As a result of that law, the Friday Institute at NC State was directed to create the statewide Digital Learning Plan to provide the state with recommendations to move towards this goal. This also led to the continuing work in the North Carolina Digital Learning Initiative, a partnership between the Friday Institute and the Department of Public Instruction to implement the recommendations of the Digital Learning Plan. A companion law, SL 2013-11 required the development of digital learning standards for teachers and administrators. These were eventually released as the Digital Learning Competencies.

The Digital Learning Plan was revised in 2022. While the original plan was created with a statewide lens to create enabling conditions for digital-age learning, the new plan has goals for the state Department of Public Instruction, school districts, schools, teachers, and students. The design is to build upon the existing work and begin to move further down the stack.

These statewide initiatives provided enabling conditions for many districts started moving towards 1:1 initiatives as well. Greene County Schools was one of the first to move to 1:1 in partnership with the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow program. Mooresville City Schools has one of the longest-running 1:1 programs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools now boasts the largest organizational deployment of Chromebooks in the world. Additionally, long-term support from the Golden LEAF Foundation and the low-costs of Chromebooks have also proven noteworthy enablers of digital learning programs in North Carolina. Digital Learning Initiative grants that were recommended as a part of the original Digital Learning Plan have provided dozens of districts with opportunities to jump-start digital-age learning programs and to showcase these initiatives for teachers across the state. In 2022, North Carolina became the first state to form a statewide partnership with the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the leading Ed-Tech group in the world, to provide each educator in the state with an ISTE membership.

While this groundwork has supported the transition to digital learning during COVID-19, North Carolina had to move quickly to adapt. Entering COVID, we knew that approximately 20% of North Carolina students do not have access to the Internet at home (5% of all students don’t have Internet because of geographic conditions where they live, the remaining 15% are due to economic barriers or familial choice). The North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office maintains a dashboard highlighting Internet availability in the state. The state became among the first to launch a large scale survey of home Internet access and quality, and was the first to allow options for participation besides use of a website (respondents can call or text responses as well). This survey provides more updated data on the state of digital equity in North Carolina.

Through COVID-19 relief funds, schools were able to purchase mobile hotspots for students, put wi-fi on buses, All of these approaches will be discussed later in this course. According to a presentation to the Government Operations and Oversight Committee of the General Assembly, as a result of COVID funding, the state was able to put wifi on 621 buses, purchase nearly 200,000 laptops, 62,695 hotspots, and added 2,090 hotspots. In addition because of several high-profile cyberattacks shutting down several school districts in NC, community colleges, and universities, the state provisioned 190,000 licenses for cybersecurity awareness training for staff, along with student email safety software (Gaggle) and a Learning Management System (Canvas). The funds also provided funding to train over 75,000 teachers on digital learning and ed-tech tools, and set up a partnership with PBS North Carolina to create the At-Home Learning Initiative with video-based lessons that aired on PBS NC for students without Internet access at home.

In June of 2019, 16 of 115 North Carolina School Districts had a 1:1 computing initiative K-12 (meaning that all students in Kindergarten through graduation had a laptop). By February of 2022, 106 of 115 had 1:1 initiatives. The need to sustain this rapid growth remains a challenge for North Carolina districts and with Federal COVID funding running out, most districts and charters say they will be unable to maintain their 1:1 intiatives.