Connecting the dots — a decade of building toward the whole human in education.
From inquisitive tinkerer to engineer to founder. The childhood that shaped this work, the imposter syndrome that never quite left, the decade of evidence that has proven the early hypothesis right, and the case for an anti-reductionist future of learning.
01 · The openingThe boy who was never a first-bencher
The most important thing to know about me is that I did not grow up loving the classroom. I grew up loving learning — which I have come to believe is a very different thing.
In one of the rare interviews where I have talked about my childhood, I put it this way:
"Growing up, I wasn't the typical 'first-bencher' in school. I was the inquisitive tinkerer, crafting handmade gifts for my sister. Despite not conforming to traditional learning norms, I fell in love with learning's adventurous and curious nature. This passion propelled me to excel at institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, it was the joy of learning that truly steered me toward creating Yellowdig — an endeavor to make inquiry-driven learning accessible at scale, rekindling the spark in learners regardless of age or background." EdTech Digest, September 2023
Read carefully, that paragraph contains the entire thesis of my company in miniature. There is the early sense that the official rituals of school rewarded a particular type of student — the front-bencher, the rule-follower — while leaving the world's tinkerers and makers and quiet curious minds to find their own way to a feeling of belonging, if they were lucky. There is the long fall in love with learning itself, which carried me through some of the most demanding institutions in the world. And there is the founder's resolution: to build something that makes that adventurous, curious form of learning accessible to everyone, not only the students whose temperaments happen to match the design of the room.
Everything else on this page is, in some sense, a footnote to that paragraph.
02 · The fearThe fear at the back of the room
What is less often told is that my success at IIT Bombay and at MIT did not, on its own, dissolve the quiet outsider's instinct I carried with me. In one of my most candid recent essays — Balancing Academic Control and Student Autonomy in Education, published in my Education 3.0 newsletter on LinkedIn in late 2024 — I wrote about it directly:
"Growing up in India, I had a complex relationship with education. Given the country's population of 1.4 billion and hundreds of millions of school-aged students, securing a quality education felt like winning the lottery, and I took it seriously. I loved learning but didn't particularly enjoy sitting in a classroom. One of my greatest fears was being called on in class — I worried I'd say something wrong and face ridicule. Although school provided great friendships and fun experiences, it couldn't shield me from the anxiety of being singled out or the pressure of failing a test." Education 3.0 (LinkedIn), November 2024
I share that not because I think I am unusual. I share it because I am not. The fear was not about preparation. It was about the architecture of the room itself. The traditional classroom asks every student to perform thinking aloud, on demand, in front of peers, while the consequences for getting it wrong are public and durable. For some students that is exhilarating. For many more — including, by my own admission, the student who would go on to graduate from two of the most rigorous engineering programs in the world — it is paralyzing.
My diagnosis is that this fear is not a personal weakness to be conquered. It is a design choice baked into how most classrooms are built. We have constructed environments in which the act of being seen thinking is high-stakes, and then we are surprised when students go quiet. I have been thinking about this since I was the boy in the back row, and the asynchronous, conversational design of Yellowdig is, in part, a quiet answer to it.
03 · The deferred decadeA decade deferred — and the moment the door opened
My path to founding Yellowdig is a useful lesson in the gap between when a founder knows what they want to build and when they are actually free to build it.
I grew up in India and arrived in the United States on a student visa. To remain in the country after graduate school, I needed corporate sponsorship — which meant joining a consulting firm or a large enterprise rather than starting the company I had already begun imagining. I chose the conventional path because the conventional path was the only one available to me. I spent ten years inside it: at Booz & Company, at KPMG, and finally as a director of strategy at FMC Corporation, where I led business development and the creation of an entirely new business division at a $5 billion publicly traded company.
When I finally received the green card that gave me the freedom to leave, I did. Within months I had moved into a coworking space in Philadelphia, recruited a technical co-founder, and started piloting what would become Yellowdig in three MBA classes at Wharton and an engineering class at MIT in the spring of 2014. I formally launched the company in 2015.
The product's earliest framing in the trade press was "Reddit for the classroom." It is a useful reminder of how far the company has traveled. What began as a single-course discussion experience is now an end-to-end engagement platform spanning the full learner lifecycle, from pre-enrollment to alumni.
04 · The insightThe insight that became Yellowdig
The discussion forum had already been tried — and had failed. The question was why.
By the time I founded Yellowdig, every major learning management system on the market shipped with a discussion-board feature. None of them worked, in the sense that none of them produced the kind of student-to-student exchange that educators kept hoping for. My diagnosis was not that the discussion-board feature was poorly designed. It was that the discussion board belonged to the wrong category entirely.
"Learning management systems are primarily used for managing course content. LMSes do offer discussion boards, but it is primarily used for discussion assignments as opposed to building true learning communities." Inside Higher Ed, February 2021
A content-management system, asked to host a community, will produce something that looks like a community and behaves like an assignment. What I proposed instead was a system designed from the ground up around the mechanics of social interaction — one that borrowed from what social platforms had learned about feed design, gameful participation, recognition, and reciprocity, and applied those mechanics in service of academic outcomes rather than attention capture.
This is also where I am most careful with my language. Yellowdig is not gamified; it is gameful. Gamification, in my view, is what you do when you bolt extrinsic rewards onto an experience to compensate for the fact that the underlying experience is not motivating. Gameful design is what you do when you treat motivation as a serious design problem — when you build conditions under which agency, mastery, and connectedness can become self-reinforcing, and when you let the explicit game mechanics fade as intrinsic motivation takes over.
05 · The frameworkA pedagogy in three words: agency, mastery, connectedness
Across every interview I have given over the past several years, one framework appears in nearly every conversation. It is my shorthand for the design principles that make learning come alive in any modality.
Agency
The learner has meaningful choice over what to engage with, how to engage, and where to go next. Without agency, participation collapses into compliance — and compliance is not learning.
Mastery
The learner can see themselves getting better at something they care about. Mastery requires feedback, visibility of progress, and a path from novice toward something more.
Connectedness
The learner is seen, known, and accountable to other humans engaged in the same intellectual journey. Connectedness is not a luxury — it is the load-bearing element of persistence.
"We often advise our clients to carefully consider student agency, mastery and connectedness when designing their online experiences. These aspects are deeply rooted in the learner's motivational factors, making learning both joyful and productive." Inside Higher Ed, June 2024
The framework draws on Self-Determination Theory, the body of work developed over decades by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, though I am more interested in operationalizing it than in citing it. What I have been arguing — consistently, across podcasts, conference stages, and the Education 3.0 newsletter — is that these three principles are knowable, designable, and measurable. They are not vibes. They are not a matter of charisma or luck. They are the load-bearing engineering of any learning experience worth its tuition.
06 · The reframeDesign, not delivery: the wrong debate in higher ed
For most of the last decade, higher education has been arguing with itself about modality. Online versus in-person. Synchronous versus asynchronous. Hybrid versus residential. The pandemic made the argument more urgent without making it any more productive. Many of the academic leaders I speak with are visibly exhausted by it — not because the question of modality is unimportant, but because the way it has been framed has not given them anything actionable to take back to their faculty and their students. I have used nearly every public platform I occupy to try to reframe the question in a way that gives them somewhere to go.
"The mode of course delivery — whether online, offline, or hybrid — has less to do with its impact on the learner's mental health than the design of the learning experience. Sitting in a lecture hall does not inherently lead to more human connections and a sense of belonging, just as an online course is not inherently devoid of connections." Inside Higher Ed, June 2024
The variable that matters is not where the learning happens. It is how it has been designed. A poorly designed in-person course can be one of the loneliest experiences a young adult ever has. A well-designed online course can be one of the most connected. The empirical record, examined honestly, is unambiguous on this point.
"This approach makes instructional design and delivery more akin to engineering than merely creating a pretty classroom or website." Inside Higher Ed, June 2024
In a study of Yellowdig data conducted with the Australian provider OES, pass rates increased by an average of 9 percent and 7 percent more students progressed to their next study period in programs that intentionally designed for community. The mechanism was not new content. It was new connection.
07 · The evidenceA decade of validation — from students, educators, administrators, and data
A founding insight is a hypothesis. Ten years and tens of thousands of courses later, it is something more.
What distinguishes me from most people writing about education technology is that I have spent a decade testing my ideas against the only audiences that ultimately matter: real students, real educators, real administrators, and the messy quantitative reality of how learning actually behaves at scale. I have not stayed in the realm of the theoretical. I have shipped, watched, learned, and revised.
The most concentrated articulation of what that decade has revealed is the book chapter I co-authored with Dr. Brian N. Verdine of the University of Delaware's School of Education, Hybrid Learning Across Time and Space. The chapter draws explicitly on what my team and I have observed across "tens of thousands of courses and programs" using gameful, community-driven learning design. It argues, with empirical care, that authentic human connections are not a soft accessory to learning but the load-bearing structure of it — that they keep students and instructors motivated, improve course progression, and increase real contact time with the material.
The chapter has been endorsed by three figures who carry significant weight in higher-education leadership:
The supporting numbers from outside Yellowdig are blunt. Gallup surveys cited in my own essays put high-school student engagement at around 60 percent; engagement among college students sits below 50 percent and often slides further. The hypothesis that this is a content problem has been tried for decades. The hypothesis that it is a community-and-design problem is, by contrast, only beginning to be taken seriously at the level of institutional strategy — and it is the one the evidence keeps endorsing.
In one of my 2024 essays, I shared a finding from a Yellowdig customer that has stayed with me: "the strongest predictor of students recommending their programs was their sense of belonging with other students, instructors, and administrators." Not the academic rigor. Not the brand. Not the modality. Belonging.
08 · The whole humanThe whole human: an anti-reductionist case for education
Education cannot be a content-delivery pipeline. It has never been one, and pretending otherwise is becoming actively dangerous in an AI-saturated economy.
This is the argument I have been making most pointedly in my Education 3.0 newsletter — particularly in the March 2024 essay Whole Human: An Anti-Reductionist Approach to Education and Student Success.
I open that essay with a statistic that is hard to walk away from. A 2024 study by the Strada Education Foundation and the Burning Glass Institute found that 52 percent of college-educated graduates remain underemployed one year after graduation, working in jobs that do not require a college degree. Of that population, only about 10 percent find college-worthy jobs within ten years. The half-life of a specific technical skill has fallen below five years in most fields and to roughly two and a half years in the most rapidly evolving parts of technology. The system we have built — one that treats education primarily as the transfer of a finite set of marketable skills — is failing the majority of the students it serves, and AI is accelerating the failure.
I am, in this essay, careful not to assign blame to faculty or to institutions. The work of teaching has become heroic. The rising expectations on educators have been unfair. Much of what does go right inside classrooms today is the result of instructors quietly absorbing pressures that no individual should be asked to absorb. The argument I make instead is that we have misunderstood what education is for:
"Education cannot merely function as a machine for transferring knowledge and skills — AI bots and robots will soon fill that role. Instead, it should transform learners into better versions of themselves. Transformation cannot be forced or controlled; it must stem from the students themselves." Education 3.0 (LinkedIn), November 2024
The alternative I propose is what I call whole human development:
"Whole human development advocates for a learner-centric approach, treating learners as whole humans with empathy, giving them a voice, and encouraging them to bring their full selves into the learning environment. This approach goes beyond merely transferring a set of skills; it engages learners in an authentic manner." Education 3.0 (LinkedIn), March 2024
To make the point concrete, I frequently return to a question from David Daniels, one of Yellowdig's board members. Do you remember your favorite teacher? Most of us do. And what we remember is almost never the content they delivered. It is the way they made us feel seen. It is that they cared for us in a way that went beyond the academic. That is the bar.
The Swiss watch and the secret of relatedness
The other illustration I return to is one I have drawn from my own engineering education. Imagine you are teaching the science of watchmaking. One group of students learns the scientific facts behind making a watch. Another group learns how a Swiss watch is made — the design, the intention, the artistry, the engineering marvel, the cultural prestige, the human story behind a tradition that has been carried for centuries. The two groups are studying the same underlying science. But only the second group is studying it in a way that engages their imagination, their identity, and their motivation to keep going. The science is the same. The relatedness — the sense that this material is part of a larger human story that the learner is being invited into — is what makes one version of the course transformative and the other version forgettable.
Durable skills, not disposable ones
"Employers are increasingly valuing durable skills: communication, critical and creative thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, and the capacity for lifelong learning. Specific skills are important, but they won't single-handedly defend against the onslaught of AI." Education 3.0 (LinkedIn), March 2024
Durable skills are, by their nature, skills that grow in human community. They cannot be transmitted in a video. They cannot be delivered by a chatbot. They are the thing AI cannot do for you — and they are precisely what an anti-reductionist, community-centered education is designed to develop.
09 · The frontierEducation 3.0: what AI changes, and what it cannot
The arrival of generative AI has reshuffled almost every assumption about how learning works at scale. Content can be generated on demand. Tutoring can be personalized and infinite. Assessment can be automated. The natural conclusion, drawn by many in the sector, has been that the role of the human educator is shrinking. That conclusion is also generating a great deal of anxiety inside institutions — among faculty unsure whether their craft is being valued, among administrators unsure whether their staffing models still make sense, and among students unsure what they are even paying for. I take that anxiety seriously. I have drawn, however, the opposite conclusion about where AI ultimately leaves us.
"As AI increasingly handles content delivery, the uniquely human work of education shifts toward community architecture. The future instructor is less a broadcaster of knowledge and more a designer of learning ecosystems." Yellowdig blog, December 2025
The great gift of AI is that it finally frees the human educator from the tasks that machines have always been better at, and forces a long-overdue clarification of what only humans can do. AI can deliver information. It cannot make meaning. AI can answer questions. It cannot help a nineteen-year-old discover, in the company of peers and a mentor, who they are becoming.
"Education 3.0 isn't about replacing humans with machines. It's about creating spaces where humans can do what machines cannot: make meaning together." Yellowdig blog, December 2025
10 · The platformFrom classroom tool to lifecycle platform
For its first several years, Yellowdig was understood — reasonably — as a classroom community product. Faculty installed it in their courses, students participated for credit, and conversation moved out of the LMS discussion board and into something that actually behaved like a community. The product worked. It scaled. But I was already convinced that the unit of analysis was wrong.
A student does not belong to a course; they belong to a program, a cohort, an institution, a moment in their life. The relationships that determine whether they persist and graduate begin forming long before the first day of class. And those relationships continue to matter long after a single course ends. Over the past two years, Yellowdig has expanded into a three-pillar platform that follows the learner across the entire journey:
Connect
Pre-enrollment, orientation, and the earliest moments of the learner journey — the work of welcoming new students into a community before they ever step into a classroom. Anchored by the 2025 acquisition of GetSet Learning.
Engage
The classroom community product that Yellowdig is best known for — gameful, asynchronous, designed for student-to-student exchange that an LMS discussion board has never been able to produce.
Succeed
Persistence, retention, and the lifecycle work of helping students reach graduation. In 2026, Yellowdig became the first company in its category to attach a guarantee to a retention outcome — a public commitment that the platform will increase customer retention by at least one percentage point.
11 · The thesisConnecting the dots
If there is a single sentence that captures what I now believe education is for, it is this: learning is the long, slow act of connecting the dots.
The dots are personal experiences and professional ones. Old interests and new passions. Hard-won failures and small recognitions. Ideas from one field that suddenly explain something in another. Mentors. Friends. Strangers whose questions reshape your own. A college course you took at twenty that comes back to you at forty-five and finally makes sense. A childhood instinct — tinkering, making, asking why — that turns out, decades later, to have been the whole point.
The skills that matter most over a working lifetime are not the rote ones. AI is already faster, cheaper, more accurate, and more patient at rote tasks than humans will ever be. The durable skills — the ones that hold up over forty years of work and life — are the connective ones. They are the skills I have named explicitly in my recent writing: communication, critical and creative thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, and the capacity for lifelong learning. They grow out of human community, not out of content delivery.
This is also where my case for technology resolves. Used carelessly, technology is a reduction engine — it flattens, it standardizes, it optimizes for the metric closest to hand. Used intentionally, technology is the most powerful infrastructure we have ever had for building human community at scale. Yellowdig is built to be the second kind.
12 · The personal noteWhat I tell my daughters
I do not talk publicly about my family very often. But I am the father of two daughters, and the conversations I have with them at our kitchen table are, in many ways, the truest test of everything else I have written on this page.
"What I tell my daughters — and what I believe every learner deserves to be told — is that the point of their education is not only to succeed. Success is part of it. So is their mental health. So is fulfillment. So is the courage to know themselves well enough to choose work that means something to them, and to refuse work that does not. So is the willingness to live a full life, not only a productive one.
Achievement matters. But achievement without belonging, without meaning, without the people who hold us through the hard parts — that is a thin thing. My daughters deserve more than that. The students whose names I will never know deserve more than that. The educators who have given their professional lives to those students deserve to be supported in building more than that. That is what Yellowdig was built for."
The mission is not abstract. It is specific. It is the conviction that every learner — my daughters included, and every learner like them — should arrive at a classroom or a course or a community and be met by a design that treats their nervousness with seriousness, that gives them agency over their own learning, that helps them find the people who will become their teachers and their friends, and that sends them into the world ready not only for a career but for a life.
13 · The invitationIf this resonates
If you have read this far, you almost certainly recognize the questions on this page as the questions on your own campus. About completion. About mental health. About the role of online learning. About what an AI-saturated educational future asks of human educators. About what your institution is actually for.
I know how hard this work is right now. Many of you are holding institutions together through a period of enrollment pressure, financial pressure, mental-health pressure, and an AI conversation that changes shape every quarter. I do not take it lightly that you have given any of your time to a page about me. Whatever you take away from it, I hope you leave with this: the work you are doing matters, and it is not yours to do alone.
If there is anything here that connects to the questions on your campus, my team and I would be glad to think it through with you. Get in touch ↓