👋 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) Researched x, y, and z

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:

What I learned building for 50,000 students:

  1. Lesson about people and team

  2. Lesson about working with product & tech

  3. Lesson about ops and scalability

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

Google Trainer & Ad Operations
@ Google Hyderabad

I led this and that at Google

Learning & Content Consultant @Uable

I led this and that at uable

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 (Learning, Design, and Technology)

đź“Ť Stanford, USA

MS in Learning, Design, and Technology

Focused on building and testing AI tools to improve educational

St. Andrews University (Master’s in Psychology)

đź“Ť Scotland, UK

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

Xavier’s University (BA in Mass Media)

đź“Ť Mumbai, India

Learned about mass media, advertising, and messaging – which has been key to designing content, etc…