Following Superintendent Chris Ragsdale's direction, since COVID-19, the Cobb County School District’s team of 18,000 staff have worked together tirelessly to give students the opportunity to return to face-to-face learning in schools while maintaining the District’s number one priority—student and staff safety.  

Before the students could begin a phased return to face-to-face classrooms, the District needed a solution to help ALL students connect remotely with their teachers and classmates. Like school districts around the state and nation, Cobb students were forced to begin the 2020-21 school year with all students learning remotely before being able to offer parents the choice between face-to-face or a remote classroom.  

Thankfully, for the last five years, the District has been building a one-stop digital learning platform called the Cobb Teaching and Learning System (CTLS). As student needs have changed over the last decade, Cobb leaders knew teachers and students need an integrated platform and, once COVID-19 impacted the county, that it needed new applications and updates in order to provide a robust digital learning environment for students in the second-largest school district in Georgia. Between mid-march of 2020 and August 1st, Cobb’s team went into over-drive, updated the platform with a variety of needed improvements, and performed a District-wide roll-out in a few short months. 

"My background is technology," said Superintendent Ragsdale, "and there is no other project of this scale that I have implemented in this short of a window. Normally there would be years of planning and testing, but we have an awesome team at Cobb Schools, and they made it happen." 

As a result of an investment of thousands of hours by hundreds of Cobb Team members, the platform was updated; according to the Superintendent, some bugs had to be solved “on the fly” because the system did not get its first real load test until the first week of school. After the initial learning curve, Cobb teachers (who took three weeks of a “crash-course” training) have implemented the platform incredibly well and have again demonstrated why Cobb is the best place to teach, lead, and learn…from anywhere.  

Thus far, Cobb educators have created over 510,613 digital sessions in CTLS across more than 73,271 digital classrooms district-wide. Overall, Cobb teachers have created more than 8.4 million assignments through CTLS.  

Teachers use Zoom within CTLS to teach live, face-to-face lessons. Since school began in August, students and teachers have participated in 1,462,967 Zoom sessions. That is a lot of opportunities to learn. 

Even now that about half of Cobb students have returned to face-to-face learning, CTLS is still helping teachers connect their remote students with those students at school. The learning platform gives teachers the ability to ensure educational success for each and every student. In fact, for some assignments and activities, CTLS is still the primary platform teachers use for both groups of students.  

Thanks to the remote learning capabilities provided by CTLS, students can learn from anywhere. While the vast majority of CTLS logins are local, they have also taken place from nearly every state in the country and almost every county in Georgia.

Before students logged on to CTLS in August, teachers completed extensive training on the new platform. In fact, 1,098 training sessions took place, accounting for more than 42,000 hours of general and specialized instruction. Sessions included all the major school subjects, in addition to personalized learning, assessment, professional and advanced learning, and many others. 

The resources are there. Teachers are actively using them, but are students signing on to CTLS? The answer? Absolutely. In 2019, 97% of enrolled students attended classes during the second week of school. This year, 96.1% of students attended online classes through CTLS during the second week. The number is holding steady and has increased since the beginning. More than 97% of active students are logging on to access a CTLS classroom.  

When CTLS first rolled out in August, Cobb leaders knew that more updates to the platform would be needed. Actually, they wanted to hear from Cobb teachers, students, and parents on what they needed to make the platform even better. Cobb recently launched an update to CTLS based on feedback from the school community. The update introduces new capabilities and features for both students and teachers.  

More suggestions are always welcome, and the CTLS help desk is just an email or phone call away. 

Despite the advantages the CTLS provides, remote learning is a tough environment for everyone involved. Medical, psychological, and pedagogical experts agree that students learn best when face-to-face. That is why Superintendent Ragsdale and Cobb leaders prioritized giving families the option to choose whether their students returned to face-to-face or stayed full remote. Now that about half of Cobb students at all school levels—elementary, middle, and high—have successfully returned to in-person learning, parents once again can choose the learning environment that best supports their family's needs. The second-semester choice window closed on November 29, but parents will have an additional opportunity to choose during the second semester. 

No matter the learning environment parents choose, parents can rest assured that teachers are teaching and ALL students are being given opportunities to learn.