“Computer science has been taught in schools for decades, but usually only at the high school level, and as an elective,” says Learning.com’s CEO, Keith Oelrich. But finally, that is changing rapidly, as school districts across the country adapt to digital student assessments, recognizing that their students are woefully unprepared for the rapidly changing digital world. There are two factors which explain the rapid shift in school districts’ adoption of digital technology, according to Oelrich: declining state assessment scores and a serious lag in U.S. students’ tech skills when compared to the rest of the developed world.

“As states move student assessment testing online, student scores tend to drop–sometimes dramatically–because they are not used to the online testing environment,” explains Oelrich. Additionally, results from recent international studies reveal similar insights, pointing out that the U.S. economy is losing about $1.3 trillion per year due to low productivity caused by a shortage of tech skills in the workforce.

Founded in 1999, Learning.com is uniquely positioned to help schools meet these challenges and the company has successfully met its objective by providing online programs that teach K-8 students digital skills such as keyboarding, computer fundamentals, coding, online safety, digital citizenship, and business applications like spreadsheets, word processing and, presentations.

Learning.com has use cases from thousands of school districts and the company has partnered with over 15,000 schools in all 50 states. A recent comparison performed for a customer looking at online test results showed that students who utilized Learning. com’s digital literacy curriculum achieved state test proficiency at a rate 4.3 times higher–or 430 percent–than those who did not use the curriculum.

Learning.com’s curriculum also helps to close the gap in student’s digital skills by delivering instructions on these skills that can be utilized and adopted by schools and teachers in myriad ways, whether in a lab environment, independent study, integration into core curriculum, or other variations.