2026 Annual Report

The readable yearly snapshot — eight and a half years, 131,000+ scans, what students are really bringing to class.

This fall marks eight and a half years of TechReady.io. Across more than 131,000 device scans from 19 partner institutions since October 2017, we've built the longest continuous picture of online-student readiness we know of in higher education. Every institution's results differ, but the view from all of that data offers a useful benchmark to compare your own TechReady results against. We hope you find it helpful for understanding this technology landscape.

Today's Technology Landscape

Most students still arrive on Windows, but it's no longer the whole story. macOS has nearly doubled its share since our first report — now almost a third of devices — and the mix of systems students bring keeps complicating one-size-fits-all support. Among browsers, Chrome is still king, but Microsoft Edge has surged past Safari into second place, while Internet Explorer — 8% of users in our first report — has all but vanished.

Bandwidth: A Problem That's Mostly Solved

One of the most encouraging shifts is connectivity. In our first report, nearly 15% of students were stuck below 5 Mbps — fine for reading notes, a struggle for live video. Today that's down to about 3%. Broadband has largely caught up, and bandwidth is no longer the barrier it once was — though the small share still under-connected tend to be exactly the evening, working-adult learners most at risk of falling behind.

The Readiness Gap

Here's the number that matters most. 35% of students arrive with an out-of-date operating system, 36% with an out-of-date browser, and 6% with no working webcam.

58%

nearly six in ten students arrive for their first course with at least one fixable device issue

None of it is the student's fault, and almost all of it can be resolved in minutes — but only if it's caught before the first class.

Eight and a Half Years: What Changed

The long view shows a moving target. Since 2018, Macs have surged, mobile-first use has receded as students came back to laptops for coursework, Internet Explorer has died off in favor of Edge, and low bandwidth has gone from common to rare. The specific problems shift year to year — which is exactly why a one-time audit isn't enough, and why scanning every incoming cohort, every term, is what keeps readiness current.

From Flagged to Fixed

Detecting a problem is only half the job. Every TechReady result comes with clickable, plain-language fixes, and students routinely resolve issues themselves and rescan higher — without a help-desk ticket or a knowledge-base search. We call it tier-zero support: the problem solved before it ever becomes a call, or a reason to give up.

Putting It to Work

Institutions get the most from TechReady by treating it as both preemptive and responsive. Preemptively, a scan built into orientation or onboarding — now a one-click LTI activity — reaches close to 100% of an incoming cohort before the first class. Responsively, scan IDs dropped into the help-request flow give staff the technical picture up front and cut call time. Either way, the payoff is the one we set out to deliver: students who can actually start, and stay.

Thank you for partnering with us through these eight and a half years. Here's to keeping students ready for the years ahead.

Warm regards, The TechReady Team

Methodology: figures from TechReady.io scan data — 131,000+ scans across 19 partner institutions, October 2017–2026; technology distributions reflect 2025–26 scans. The 6-in-10 (58%) readiness figure is the share of 2025–26 students whose scan flagged at least one fixable device issue — an out-of-date operating system or browser, or a missing webcam; counting sub-threshold bandwidth as well raises it to 66%. A broader definition that also flags WebRTC, cookie, and websocket settings across the full 8.5-year dataset yields a higher at-least-one-issue rate (see the TechReady _Evidence Brief); the 58% cited here is the narrower device-only, current-year cut. No personal information is collected — only technical details.