Learning Equality (LE) is a non-profit organization based in the United States that creates and supports tools to enable equitable access to high-quality educational opportunities, with an emphasis on supporting effective education technology interventions in low-connectivity contexts. Learning Equality’s work emerged out of the recognition that the same global populations that have the least access to quality education also have the least access to the growing wealth of available online learning resources.Learning Equality’s first generation platform, KA Lite — which brought Khan Academy content offline — served as a proof of concept for hosting and disseminating carefully curated and relevant online content offline. Over the past six years, KA Lite has reached more than 6 million users in over 200 countries and territories, in contexts as varied as low-income schools in India, orphanages in Cameroon, prisons across the United States, refugee programs in Lebanon, and First Nations community centers in northern Canada.Through these efforts, Learning Equality identified a strong need for curating and aligning open educational resources to local standards, including a wider selection of content sources to fill curricular gaps, being able to support locally created and localized content, and increasing pedagogical scaffolding for educators. Building on these needs, Learning Equality developed a new open-source educational platform, Kolibri, specially designed to provide offline access to a curatable and openly licensed educational content library with tools for pedagogical support, targeting use in low-resource and low-connectivity contexts.

We are experiencing unprecedented global flow of knowledge and ideas, and seeing opportunities emerge for ad hoc educational experiences that are mediated by computer technologies and the Internet. Educators and learners are experimenting with new pedagogical approaches and modes of content delivery, both inside and outside of the classroom, in what has been described as an “online learning revolution”.In my dissertation, I took a step back to examine the factors that are enabling this transformation, and demonstrate how not everyone has been benefiting equally -- in particular, recent developments have been failing to include many communities that are already among the most economically and socially disadvantaged. I presented the work we have done to help bridge this gap, through designing, building, and deploying tools to allow learners in offline and bandwidth-constrained contexts to access the same types of novel educational opportunities as their more connected counterparts.Two quite distinct lines of research and development were discussed in my dissertation: an adaptive second language learning website, “ESL Genie”, and an offline deployment platform for Khan Academy’s educational curriculum, “KA Lite”. I endeavored to demonstrate that these initiatives are more closely related than they might at first seem, with a common emphasis on leveling the educational playing field by using technology to reduce economic barriers to effective learning experiences. In addition to describing the design, implementation, and impact of these systems, and the lessons learned in the process, I presented our design considerations and plans for a third platform that builds off of our experience with ESL Genie and KA Lite to democratize the creation and distribution of open educational resources, furthering the goal of fostering an inclusive and effective global learning community.

I oversaw the process of soliciting and facilitating peer review for the Technical Report the Center for Research in Language publishes on a quarterly basis, featuring early stage research from the worldwide CRL community. I also coordinated and hosted the weekly CRL seminar series, with local and visiting scholars.

In 2010, I redid the backend of the UCSD Cognitive Science Department website using Django and Django CMS, allowing faculty, staff, and students to add, update, and find content more efficiently.

We designed thisCourse to be the fastest and easiest place to build course websites that both instructors and students love to use, and to promote the open distribution of educational content.

Refactored the code that manages the various video players (along with associated functionality such as subtitles and "energy point" tracking) using Backbone.js. Created an embeddable Khan Academy video widget, allowing the full Khan Academy video player to be embedded on other websites. Other official projects I was involved with included helping create "new content" announcement emails to send to subscribers (to increase retention), contributing to a reorganization of the video and exercise navigation into a "tutorial" experience, and extending the in-house package management system to do dependency tracing for dynamic package loading.

Built mechanical models of ship steering systems (controls, hydraulics, rudder gear) and produced interactive 3D simulations controllable both by a physical console and a wireless touchscreen tablet. In charge of all aspects of the project (3D modeling, mechanical simulation, graphics, coding, electronics).