Product Updates

Designing AcademiaPlus Around How Rwandan Schools Actually Work

A platform built for schools has to fit the school, not the other way around. Here is how that constraint has shaped our design decisions so far.

Elyssa Irankunda

May 20, 2026

AcademiaPlus is still in development. This is a look at our design process, not a feature announcement or results report.

It is easy to design a grading platform for the school you imagine. It is much harder to design one for the range of schools that actually exist — different resource levels, different connectivity, different class sizes, all teaching the same national curriculum. We would rather get that right slowly than ship something that only works for the best-resourced schools.

A few decisions we've made so far

Design for intermittent connectivity first, and treat a constant connection as the bonus case, not the assumption

Keep teacher judgment in the loop rather than fully automating grading decisions

Build around the curriculum structure that already exists rather than inventing a new one

Abstract illustration of one central shape connecting to several differently sized outline shapes. — One system, meant to actually fit very different schools rather than assuming they all look the same.

Why we're taking this slowly

A grading system that gets things wrong at scale is worse than no grading system at all. We're treating this as something to get right in stages, testing assumptions in small settings before extending them further, rather than building the whole thing at once and hoping it holds up.