Where this project came from

This text also ships as HISTORY.md in every edtech4good repository.

edtech4good is an open-source learning platform for classrooms that have tablets but no reliable internet. It did not start as software. It started as two university students from Sydney who thought forty thousand dollars would build a school.

In 2005, Clary Castrission and Karyn Avery visited India and came home to found the 40K Foundation. Five years and ten times the money later, the Banyan School opened outside Bangalore. It worked, and it taught them that building schools does not scale. So the foundation tried after-school learning centres in villages, and found that the villages had no English teachers. In 2015 it put the English curriculum on tablets instead. That product was called 40K Plus.

The design has barely changed since. Low-cost Android tablets. A Raspberry Pi on a router in the classroom, serving lessons over a local network with no internet at all. Content carried in on a tablet and synced when a connection appears. A local facilitator whose job is to keep learners motivated, not to teach English. In 2017 MIT Solve selected 40K Plus as a Solver in its Youth, Skills, and the Workforce of the Future challenge, and it received the Atlassian Foundation and Australian DFAT prizes offered through Solve. In 2018 it came to Cambodia as a pilot in government schools, and in 2019 the foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. COVID interrupted it. In 2022 the foundation rebranded as Plus Education.

That year the Cambodian platform passed to a new steward, Glean Asia, a Phnom Penh technology venture that built learning platforms for aid programmes. The software was rebuilt from the ground up around the same idea: a cloud console for curriculum, accounts and reporting, a small classroom server for the school network, and a learner app in Khmer and English that runs on Android, iOS and the web from one codebase. Disability data was built into enrolment and every question type was given audio. In October 2025 the whole platform was published on GitHub under the MIT licence.

Glean Asia closed in 2026 and the platform is now owned and maintained by Jesse Orndorff, who led its Cambodian team. Since then the work has been what an inheritance needs: closing security gaps, making every service start from an empty database, standing up a test environment, auditing the code for public release, and keeping the dependencies current.

The reason it exists has not changed in twenty years. Some of the children who most need to learn are in places where the internet is not, in a language most software ignores, and some of them have disabilities that most software never asks about. This platform was built for those classrooms first. It is free to run, free to change, and open to anyone who wants to help.