👋 I’m Madhura Padwal, an experienced ed-tech builder.
My super power is building learning experiences that scale.

(1) 10+ years of experience in big-tech, nonprofits, and startups

(2) Designed learning experiences supporting 100,000+ learners in K-12 and early career learners

(3) Researcher in psychology, education and AI, and entrepreneurship education outcomes

I worked as Head of Learning & Content at Extern where we pioneered the “externship”

Solving the problem of a lack of early work experiences for college students, we built Externships – a flexible, remote project with a company that combines real experience with structured training to help students build confidence and career-ready skills.

As employee #5, I lead Learning & Content where we designed 3-8 week Externships where students would get real-world experience with lead.

When it comes to learning pedagogy and frameworks, we implemented x, y, and z

I collaborated work our host companies, who were Fortune 100 clients like:

I led product at Firki, India’s first teacher training platform – now used by 300,000 teachers

Empowered classrooms at scale: Indirectly impacted millions of students, by equipping teachers in low-income schools with high-quality pedagogy and leadership training.

  • Blended learning innovation: Developed a suite of self-paced courses, live webinars, peer-learning circles, and observation/feedback tools to make teacher development accessible anywhere.

  • Strengthened the Teach For India Fellowship: Supported ~900 Fellows teaching ~32,000 students, while also extending Firki to educators outside TFI.

Other work

Ad Operations Automation and Trainer
@ Google Hyderabad

Product specialist for ad review automation for 10 billion ads. GTrainer for Ad review automation and Unconscious Bias.

Learning & Content Product Consultant @ Uable (now Power Club)

Community building for parents of students learning with an alternate education app

Research Associate @ iVenture Accelerator at University of Illinois

Studied the educational outcomes of students participating in an educational accelerator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, heavily leveraging my quantitive research skills in R and Python.

This research was done under the guidance of Dr. Noah Isserman.

🎓 Education

Stanford Graduate School of Education (MS Learning, Design, and Technology)

đź“Ť Stanford, USA

Studying and building AI tooling for education

St. Andrews University (M.Sc. in Psychology)

đź“Ť Scotland, UK

Learned about Psych and conducted quant and qual research which informs my user research and product perspective.

St. Xavier’s College(Bachelor’s in Mass Media)

đź“Ť Mumbai, India

Learned about mass media, advertising, and messaging.