Helping students with lower bandwidth internet have an optimal experience in myON

Accelerating learning for all children of all ability levels and ethnic and social backgrounds worldwide is the core of our mission at Renaissance Learning. Equity is critical to our values, and equitable access to learning materials is at the core of what we aim to do. With the goal of boosting equity in mind, myON has recently added the capacity to automatically address lower bandwidths to optimize the reading experience for every student. This new feature allows titles to load up to four times faster than before.  

This exciting new feature was born of a need identified in a school district in The Seychelles. Many school buildings there have internet capacity in the range of 75% lower than typical US broadband internet. In addition, school administrators need to reserve most of the available bandwidth, leaving students with very limited access.  

The myON team set to work to create a far more equitable reading solution with myON for these students.  Now when a student logs in, a small undetectable test goes out to acquire the bandwidth capacity of their internet connection behind the scenes. myON adjusts based on the results of this test, creating a seamless experience for students. myON has many component parts – from images, audio files, and thumbnails, to the text on each page. Compressing these files helps create a very similar experience across the board. The lower bandwidth version of each title is an undetectable difference to the reader. 

All of the myON Core Collection has been adjusted to offer this new, lower bandwidth option with an additional 80-90% of all available titles completed. myON will continually feature updated titles and include this option as we add new publishers and books to its offerings. Renaissance aims to continually better serve our students with internet access issues, addressing equity and bringing a greater service to all students equally across devices and across the world.