UC San Diego Alumnus Leverages Technology to Bring Educational Resources to Those Who Need It Most

Back at UC San Diego, Alexandre and a group of other students continued building out the concept using Khan Academy content, eventually developing an app called “KA Lite.” The program was announced online in December 2012.

“It just exploded,” recalled Alexandre. “People around the world started using it. Within a few months it was in 60 countries. We had a map on the wall with pins all over it, as stories and questions were coming in from around the world.”

As Alexandre said in a 2013 UC San Diego Today article, “We went from coding 24/7 to answering emails 24/7.”

Finding a Home at QI

Alexandre and the team realized that this success could be the launchpad for an even bigger story. Their vision was to keep evolving the platform to support a more equitable education technology ecosystem, with online and offline communities participating, benefiting and contributing. 

For that, they realized they needed to start a nonprofit. They called it Learning Equality.

It just so happened that the Qualcomm Institute (QI) was then in the process of launching a startup incubator, the QI Innovation Space. Alexandre connected with Ramesh Rao, the director of QI, and found many points of commonality, including a commitment to interdisciplinary work, practical applications and global impact. Learning Equality became one of the first tenants in the QI Innovation Space.

Not only did the QI Innovation Space provide room for the dozen or so volunteers who had been overflowing from the project’s previous graduate student office, the location at the heart of the UC San Diego campus also facilitated student internships.

“[The QI Innovation Space] allowed us to expand the intern pool,” Alexandre said. “One of the most amazing things about being in that space was that students were able to run in between classes, work for a few hours, and head back to class. They got both an office-type experience and global connections. During some quarters, we had 17 interns working with our small team, doing dozens of different projects.”

The total number of UC San Diego interns that Learning Equality has engaged now surpasses 120.

Alexandre also commended the support Learning Equality has received from QI, including from Rao himself. “Ramesh has always been an amazing thought partner,” Alexandre said. “He has made recommendations and introductions that have been impactful.” 

Stepping Up

After about a year, Learning Equality brought in grant funding, allowing it to expand. Early sponsors included Qatar Foundation International (which sponsored Arabic translation) and Hewlett Foundation.

When Google.org joined the list of sponsors, the organization was able to move closer to the team’s longer-term vision. With Google.org’s funding and tech-support volunteers, the team developed and launched a new open-source educational platform, Kolibri, in 2017. 

“Anybody can download the [Kolibri] platform, put it on their own hardware, follow all the guidance materials, and load either their own curriculum or draw from our large library,” said Alexandre. “They can take it and run with it. We’ve had everything from individuals through entire governments adopt it through the do-it-yourself model without our involvement at all.”

Partnerships supplement the open-source approach, giving Learning Equality a meaningful way to engage with users, receive ongoing feedback, and bridge special needs in hosting and research.

While Kolibri was initially designed with in-person instruction in mind, the pandemic prompted a rapid shift to support hybrid learning. 

“We did a lot of work to be able to take a device home, use the activities and exercises assigned by the teacher there, bring the device back to the school, and then sync usage data to the offline server in the school,” Alexandre said. “So even without any connectivity, the teacher can see what students did at home, track their progress and assign new content.”

Post-pandemic, Learning Equality’s focus has been on supporting recovery from learning losses, especially in places that experienced extended school closures. 

Looking Ahead

Today, more than a dozen years after its launch, Learning Equality’s offline-first approach still resonates.

“Today, the connectivity gap has narrowed, but it still exists,” said Alexandre. “There are still 2.6 billion people without connectivity — almost a third of the world.”

To date, Learning Equality has helped millions of learners across 220+ countries and territories, and the organization shows no signs of slowing down. To the contrary, Alexandre is leading an initiative to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to further expand its impact.

One area in which AI has been transformative for Learning Equality is curriculum alignment. Previously, curriculum alignment required a tedious manual process of sorting through hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, organizing them to national curricular standards, and following the sequence of the textbook so teachers and students could easily discover relevant material. The integration of AI into Learning Equality’s tools has been a game changer.

“A process that previously would have taken months of painstaking work costing hundreds of thousands of dollars was reduced to a matter of days, a couple hundred dollars of API credits, and a few thousand dollars of expert review,” wrote Alexandre in a recent blog post. 

The team is also thinking about how to support offline AI education. “AI is going to transform so many of the ways that we work and the skills that are needed,” Alexandre noted. “Folks need to develop the competencies to leverage these technologies.”

For Alexandre personally, leading Learning Equality’s AI effort is somewhat of a return to his roots. With the introduction of two additional Learning Equality co-executive directors, Navya Akkinepally and Lauren Lichtman, Alexandre has been freed up to focus on the technical areas he enjoys most.

“I’m a passionate maker,” he said. “I love building stuff and making things possible that weren’t possible. Now I’m happily headed in a trajectory where I have more capacity, more space, to be hands-on with the technology.”

To learn more, visit the Learning Equality or QI Innovation Space websites.

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Artificial Intelligence