Unity for Educators
A Beginner's Guide
Unity for Educators is an entryway to the Unity technology platform and the Unity educator community. This free course is created by teachers for teachers. It's inspired by the experiences of passionate and innovative Unity educators around the globe.
This course is for any teacher, in any educational setting, who wants to equip their students with the skills and experience that will enable them to be the creators of tomorrow and prepare them for high-demand technology careers. The Unity for Educators course provides training, support, community, and resources for all educators so that they may successfully teach Unity, the industry-leading tool for interactive design and development that spans across disciplines, like game development, AR, VR, media & entertainment, architecture, engineering, construction, design, training simulations, and more.
MITx Course
Business and Impact Planning for Social Enterprises
Solve is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a mission to solve world challenges. Solve is a marketplace for social impact innovation. Through open innovation Challenges, Solve finds incredible tech-based social entrepreneurs all around the world. Solve then brings together MIT’s innovation ecosystem and a community of Members to fund and support these entrepreneurs to help them drive lasting transformational impact.
This five-week course helps early-stage social impact startups define three key aspects of their business: Impact Opportunity, Theory of Change, Planning for Scale. We utilized case studies from Solve entrepreneurs and both nonprofit and for-profit social enterprises around the world to bring these concepts to life and to enable learners to design their own social business models and impact plans.
I was responsible for all facets of course development: collaborating with subject matter experts (SMEs), developing a course outline, research, writing content and scripts, facilitating film production and designing interactive activities and assessments. One of my primary areas for research was around interventions for building belonging, relevance and minimizing social identity threat to ensure enrollment and completion of global learners from diverse backgrounds.
Innovate For Africa
A Program for Training and Placing Entrepreneurial Students
Nearly 500,000 students will graduate from universities in Nigeria this year; only 1 out of 2 will be able to find a job. This grim reality represents the youth unemployment problem, in which approximately 63% of the 25 million youth are unemployed.
Innovate for Africa (IFA) is a nonprofit organization that provides graduating STEM students one-month training on entrepreneurial and labor-demanded skills as well as support throughout a subsequent eleven-month placement at an innovation-driven enterprise.
IFA has been named as a semi-finalist in the Social Enterprise Track of the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition. As part of this team, I was able to contribute by conducting research, prototyping, developing the curriculum, and web design.
VerbJam
A Problem-Based Learning Website
By 2050 the world’s population will have climbed to 10 billion. This will put pressure on resources as the increased population will require educating, energy, cures for intractable diseases, feeding, and employment. The problems are big and time is short. We often neglect and overlook the power of young problem-solvers even though they are the ones with the most at stake. We fail the next generation by not providing them with the type of learning experiences that empower them to create and deliver solutions in their communities and globally. I believe that problem-based experiences that utilize design thinking principles are the pedagogical solution to this challenge.
VerbJam challenges are designed to get students solving real-world problems by collaborating with their peers. The challenges are all purpose-led, encouraging students to engage with one another on global issues and develop skills essential for their success in the future. Most importantly, the challenges are fun and they celebrate the importance of diversity in teams.
How People Learn
An Online Course for Harvard Students
As part of the Teaching and Learning Lab Practicum at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I produced, filmed and edited video content for this online learning experience.
My work builds on a 2017 Stanford and MIT study which showed that brief interventions, or “nudges,” had a significant effect in closing the achievement gap caused by social identity threat, especially when timed to accompany key moments in a class. These interventions aim to build a greater sense of belonging in the course by having past learners discuss challenges and strategies they used to overcome them.