Inspire Love of Learning through Engineering

At Outschool, we believe education is not only about mastery of content, but more importantly, love of learning. We believe education should be engaging, tailored, and accessible to everyone. This mission has led to our focus to serve alternative education (“AltEd”) families. Yet, the desire to give every learner choices to learn the best they can is universal, and increasingly we are seeing AltEd becoming AllEd, and our mission becoming even more relevant.

To truly inspire love of learning, we need to empower all stakeholders — parents, learners, and educators — to engage in a healthy learning growth loop. Helping our users to solve their unique set of challenges through innovative technical solutions is at the core of Outschool engineering. Here are some examples of how engineering is bringing our mission to life.

Parents: from finding classes to building a plan

Deciding which classes to pick in the vast space of AltEd is daunting, even for experienced homeschooling parents. With hundreds of thousands of classes, finding the right class is a classic search and recommendation problem — and because every learner is different, personalization is at the core of it, not a nice-to-have.

But why stop there? With generative retrieval, conversational interface, and deep content understanding, we can help parents not only find classes, but also build full end-to-end learning plans that incorporate every available resource and are tailored to their specific needs and goals. And by integrating with content partners and payment systems, we can help parents take action on those learning plans in a seamless, frictionless way.

Parents: catching the aha moments

Enrolling in classes is only a start. Parents also need to know whether those classes are working, and for AltEd parents, that often means far more than assessment and grades. It means seeing engagement, seeing excitement, seeing joy. It means those aha moments when their kids’ eyes light up from the love of learning.

Identifying those moments is an engineering problem! Through engagement analysis and sentiment understanding, we can highlight those moments to parents, as well as provide insights that help them gain confidence that the education they designed is indeed working for their kids.

Educators: the right content, for every learner

Creative teaching is the hallmark of Outschool educators, but creativity still needs raw material: the right content, organization, and structure. Producing that from scratch for every class is substantial overhead. Automated / assisted content generation takes a real bite out of that work, and it can go even further — helping educators scale customized content for each learner, so one class can genuinely serve the visual learner and the debater in the same virtual room.

Educators: data as a trusted partner

Educators are learners too and they are always looking for ways to do better. By giving them data, insights, and analysis tools, both on their own classes and on market trends, we can empower educators to identify where they are doing well and where there are opportunities to do more. And when educators do better, everyone downstream benefits.

Learners: learning by building

Kids are curious, and they don’t all learn the same way. Some learn best in a live class; others by making something — a game, a story, a robot with strong opinions. AI-powered projects and activities let kids learn through building, inside a safe and trusted environment designed for kids from the ground up.

Engineers: the harness for AI-native development

None of the above can happen quickly if the people building them, the engineers, are not themselves empowered with the latest in developer tech, especially AI. Today, 95% of code at Outschool is AI-generated, but there’s always room to leverage AI agents even more. Unleashing the full power of AI-native development means building the right infrastructure and harnesses around those agents: access control, robust CI/CD, comprehensive testing, disaster recovery, and more. These are equally important engineering problems that ultimately help us to solve for love of learning.

And the part that really matters

There’s no shortage of interesting technical problems here, and Outschoolers are delivering against them every day. But the most rewarding part isn’t the PR count, the latest LLMs, or elegant agent infrastructure. All exciting, no doubt. The real reward is when things click for our users — when engineering makes a tangible difference for millions of families and brings home our mission to inspire love of learning.

If that sounds like your kind of problem, come join us.