Small Grants Can Spur Innovation

The AOL Foundation’s Interactive Education Initiative

AOL engaged TPI to design the AOL Foundation in the late ‘90s, and to help conceptualize and implement its first grants initiative, the Interactive Education Initiative (IEI).  IEI’s goal was to spur the development of new models for using interactive technology to advance student learning. 

At the time, tremendous resources were being spent to help schools and community-based organizations gain access to online and technological resources, but knowledge about how to use interactive technology effectively in K-12 learning environments had been slower to develop.  The AOL Foundation wanted to promote innovation by offering grants and other support to grassroots teams of teachers, parents and others with highly creative ideas but limited resources for experimentation.  By seeding local testbeds of educational innovation, the AOL Foundation hoped to lay the groundwork for increasing the impact of interactive technology through:

•  Development of new models for creative and effective use of interactive technology to advance teaching and learning

•  Identification of best practices that could be emulated by other schools and communities

From 1998 to 2001, IEI awarded three rounds of seed grants ranging from $1,500 to $7,500 to 134 teams of educators, parents, and community leaders from K-12 schools and community organizations nationwide.  In addition to grants and free AOL accounts, grantees received support from AOL employee volunteers and participated in an IEI Innovators Online Network.  The AOL Foundation commissioned the Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology (CCT) to evaluate the program's first two years. 

According to CCT, IEI provided modest but critical resources to educators at the grassroots level, enabling them to put their creative ideas into action.  The evaluators found that:

"Because the AOL IEI program provided relatively small amounts of money to each site, in many cases the grant bypassed central offices and went directly to classrooms, thereby avoiding internal politics and allowing individual educators to fulfill their vision of technology integration… In some cases, however, these AOL projects had a major impact on their schools and organizations as well as on technology efforts at the district level." 

As CCT stated, the IEI experience demonstrates that "well-focused seed money can make a difference."