GoodWork Labs × EkStep: Building an EdTech Platform for 180M+ Learners Across India

How GoodWork Labs engineered the open-source infrastructure behind India’s national school education platform  and what every B2B EdTech company can learn from doing it at national scale.

When a Platform Becomes a Public Good

India has 248 million school students. Reaching every one of them across 36 languages, 36 states and union territories, and wildly different levels of connectivity requires more than a good app. It requires national-scale infrastructure. That is exactly what GoodWork Labs helped build.

In 2015, the EkStep Foundation co-founded by Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani set out to solve one of the most complex problems in public education: how do you build a digital learning platform that works for everyone, is open-source, and can be adopted and customised by every state government independently? The answer was Sunbird, a modular, open-source platform designed to be the backbone of India’s digital education system.

GoodWork Labs was brought in to engineer critical components of this infrastructure. The result: a platform that today powers DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) India’s official national EdTech platform, serving over 180 million enrolled learners with 290,000+ e-contents in 36 languages, and enabling more than 4.95+ billion learning sessions to date. As a leading provider of custom software development services and AI engineering, GoodWork Labs brought the depth of technical expertise this mission demanded.

The Problem: India’s EdTech Gap at National Scale

India’s education system is simultaneously one of the world’s largest and most diverse. State curricula differ. Languages differ. Device availability, bandwidth, and digital literacy all differ dramatically between a school in South Delhi and a village school in rural Odisha. Any e-learning platform development project that tried to solve this with a single monolithic app was going to fail and many did.

The EkStep Foundation took a fundamentally different architectural approach. Rather than build a single app, they designed a set of reusable digital building blocks content authoring tools, learning management infrastructure, assessment engines, and analytics pipelines that any government, NGO, or private organisation could assemble into their own solution. Think of it less like a product and more like an operating system for education.

For this architecture to work at national scale, it needed world-class engineering. EdTech platform India deployments at this level require expertise in distributed systems, multilingual content delivery, offline-first mobile architecture, and AI-powered personalisation all at the same time. GoodWork Labs was equipped to deliver exactly that.

What GoodWork Labs Built: The Engineering Story

GoodWork Labs’ engagement with EkStep Foundation covered two major initiatives: the Sunbird platform infrastructure and the EkStep ALL (Adaptive Language Learning) 2.0 system an AI and Automatic Speech Recognition powered tool designed to teach foundational literacy to children in their mother tongue.

Sunbird: the open-source backbone of India’s EdTech

Sunbird is built on a microservices architecture, with each capability content management, user authentication, learning paths, analytics, and notifications as an independently deployable service. GoodWork Labs contributed to the engineering of these microservices in Node.js, the front-end infrastructure in React.js, and the API layer that ties the platform’s components together. The entire codebase is open-source, meaning any organisation globally can adapt it for their own learning mission.

Delivering custom software development services at this scale required a team that could operate both at the level of system architecture and at the granularity of optimising content delivery for users on 2G connections in remote districts. GoodWork Labs engineers did both.

EkStep ALL 2.0: voice AI meets foundational literacy

The ALL (Adaptive Language Learning) 2.0 platform is where the most ambitious AI engineering happened. Using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the platform listens to a child reading aloud and provides real-time feedback on pronunciation, fluency, and comprehension adapting the difficulty of the next content piece based on performance. This is a true adaptive learning platform in the most literal sense: the system learns the learner.

Our AI development services team built and integrated the ASR pipeline, the adaptive content engine, and the React.js front-end that makes it accessible on low cost devices. The platform was deployed across government schools in multiple Indian states and later informed the Mozhigal 2.0 language learning initiative for Tamil Nadu government schools.

Mobile-First Engineering for a Mobile-First Nation

India is a mobile-first country. Most students and teachers access DIKSHA via Android smartphones, not desktops. This made the quality of mobile app development services and Android app development services mission-critical, not supplementary.

GoodWork Labs’ mobile engineering team built and optimised the Android client for EkStep’s platform with offline-first architecture allowing learners to download content, complete assessments, and track progress without a live internet connection, then sync when connectivity returned. This feature alone dramatically expanded the platform’s reach into rural India where reliable internet remains inconsistent.

The iOS companion was built in Swift for tablet-equipped teachers and teacher training programmes, while the Android build in Kotlin was optimised for the widest possible range of Android devices from budget handsets at ₹4,000 to mid-range smartphones to ensure genuine inclusivity in a country where device fragmentation is extreme.

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What This Means for B2B EdTech Leaders

If you are a B2B business owner building an EdTech product, a corporate learning platform, or a skills intelligence tool the GoodWork Labs × EkStep story is directly relevant to your roadmap. Here are five engineering principles from the DIKSHA project that every EdTech platform should be built on.

1. Architecture for scale from day one — not day 100

Sunbird’s microservices design means individual modules can scale independently. When DIKSHA’s usage spiked 10x during COVID-19 school closures, the platform held. Building a monolith and hoping to refactor later is a path most EdTech platforms don’t survive. Our custom software development services team designs for scale from the initial architecture review.

2. AI personalisation is the product, not a feature

The EkStep ALL 2.0 ASR engine and NetSkill’s adaptive curriculum engine both prove the same point: when AI adapts the content to the learner rather than forcing the learner to adapt to fixed content, completion rates and outcomes improve measurably. Our AI development services team builds this intelligence into the platform core not as a bolt-on module.

3. Multilingual and accessibility support is a market expander, not a cost

DIKSHA’s 36-language support opened India’s entire public school system. For any EdTech platform India launch, multilingual support especially Indic languages is the difference between a metro product and a national one. GoodWork Labs has built the engineering toolkit to make this achievable without rebuilding your platform from scratch.

4. The mobile experience must be the primary experience

Our Android app development services and mobile app development services for EkStep were not a port of a desktop product. They were designed mobile-first, with offline capability built in. For platforms targeting India, this is non-negotiable.

5. Use staff augmentation to move at platform speed

EkStep’s Sunbird is an open-source ecosystem with dozens of contributing teams. Coordinating rapid delivery across this ecosystem required GoodWork Labs to operate as a deeply embedded engineering partner not just a vendor. Our staff augmentation services model allows EdTech companies to embed GoodWork Labs engineers directly into their team, with full context, no ramp-up lag, and zero administrative overhead.

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GoodWork Labs’ Full-Stack EdTech Engineering Capabilities

The EkStep engagement represents GoodWork Labs’ capabilities at their most comprehensive. But it is one of many EdTech and education-adjacent projects in our portfolio alongside Sesame Street’s educational gaming apps, the Mozhigal 2.0 AI language learning platform for Tamil Nadu government schools, and the enterprise NetSkill platform.

• AI & Adaptive Learning Systems : ASR pipelines, ML-powered personalisation engines, and real-time recommendation systems built for production-scale e-learning environments.
• Mobile App Development : Native Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) apps with offline-first architecture, multilingual support, and optimisation for budget device segments.
• Custom Platform Engineering : Microservices-based LMS/LXP platforms, content management systems, and assessment engines built on open-source or proprietary stacks.
• Cloud & DevOps : AWS-hosted, Kubernetes-orchestrated deployments that autoscale for traffic spikes the kind DIKSHA faced during COVID-19 school closures.
• Staff Augmentation : Embed senior GoodWork Labs engineers into your EdTech team with zero ramp-up time. Ideal for open-source platform projects, rapid feature delivery, and specialist AI/ML roles.
• Learning Analytics & Big Data : Data pipelines, ELK stack integrations, and learning analytics dashboards that turn raw engagement data into actionable L&D intelligence.

For companies that need to move fast without compromising on quality, our staff augmentation services model has been the preferred engagement model for EdTech scaleups and enterprise L&D teams alike. Whether you need two senior engineers embedded in your team for a sprint cycle, or a full dedicated team for a greenfield e-learning platform development project, GoodWork Labs can flex to match your delivery model.

Building for Impact, Not Just Metrics

The DIKSHA/EkStep project is more than a case study in technical scale. It is proof that well-engineered custom software development services, applied to a mission-critical public problem, can deliver transformative impact. With over 180 million enrolled learners, more than 529 crore learning sessions, support for 36 languages, and adoption across every state and union territory in India, the platform stands as one of the world’s largest open-source digital learning infrastructures that any organisation can build upon and customise.

For B2B EdTech companies and enterprise learning platforms, the lesson is clear: the difference between a product that serves thousands and a platform that serves hundreds of millions is not just vision it is engineering discipline, AI depth, and the right development partner. Whether you are at the ideation stage of your EdTech platform India launch, scaling an existing platform, or looking to embed AI-powered personalisation into your corporate training ecosystem, GoodWork Labs brings the exact expertise that this domain demands.

And if you’re looking for a ready-made enterprise adaptive learning platform NetSkill is live, battle-tested, and ready to upskill your team from day one.

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GoodWork Labs delivers AI development services, mobile app development services, and custom software development services with the credibility of India’s most impactful EdTech project behind us. Talk to us no obligation, just a conversation about your product.

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