E-signatures are critical to our education system. Explore a recent study from IDC and Adobe Document Cloud covering Digital Transformation for K-12 and Higher Ed.

The U.S. education system has undergone massive transformation over the past year. The disruption of COVID-19 has compelled half of all American schools to go fully remote, while another 20 percent have adopted hybrid models. Many educators believe this shift has permanently altered the landscape of student-teacher engagement, which will remain primarily digital even in a post-pandemic world.

Now that many students, teachers and administrators work remotely, paper-centric processes have become more unsustainable than ever. For example, wet signatures can only be authenticated if signed in person - a process that often takes days, which can turn into weeks when a document has to travel to multiple remote locations. Paper forms are also highly vulnerable to error and can even pose risks to regulatory compliance.

In response, a growing number of schools are implementing paperless signing processes - not only for student-facing forms like individualized education programs (IEPs) in K-12, but also for higher-ed student-facing forms like course add/drops, and even operational forms like onboarding packets and vendor contracts. As a result, these organizations are realizing significant time savings in the immediate term, while preparing their institutions for a future in which more education takes place virtually.

Let's take a closer look at how these schools are implementing e-signatures - and what has changed for them as a result.