I have been working at the cross-section of the Education, Technology and Development sector in various settings, for more than a decade. With a first hand experience of Indian and British education systems, I have been involved in design, development and integration of educational technology systems, applications and digital educational resources for school and higher education.
Creation, curation and translation of open educational resources (OER) in Indian languages is another area of keen interest and I regularly contribute to such efforts in the OER space.

I teach EdTech and Emerging Technologies for Education courses and supervise research dissertations of MA in Education, BEd-MEd and MA in Education & Technology students at CETE, TISS, Mumbai.

I also work with and project manage the technology team of Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) for design, development and field action research with EdTech solutions and OER in the school education and teacher professional development.

Professional Membership:

1. Member of EdTech Research Group at CETE, TISS Mumbai
2. Member of working group WG 3.1 on Informatics and digital technologies in School Education, under Technical Committee 3 of International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).
3. Member of thematic working group TWG-3 of EDUsummIT 2022-23
4. Member of thematic working group TWG-7 of EDUsummIT 2019
   

Research Interests:
My interests are interdisciplinary including - Learning and Teaching with Technology, Educational Technology (EdTech) solutions, ICT and Education, Open Educational Resources (OER), Design Based Research, Multilingual Resources, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Education and Development. Of late, I have been exploring complex systems and computational social sciences.

Teaching:

I teach, EdTech, ICTs & New Media in Education related courses for masters students and teachers professional development. I also supervise research dissertation of MA Education and BEdMEd students.

Regular courses I co-teach in the long term teaching programmes:

1. ET07: Emerging Technologies for Education (2 credits for MA in Education & Technology) Link

2. AS13: ICT & New Media in Education-1 ( 4 credits for MA Education)
3. AS13: ICT & New Media in Education-2 (4 credits for MA Education)
4. ES2: ICT & Education (2 credits for BEd.MEd)
5. PS18: Designing ICT Tools and Resources (2 credits for BEd.MEd)
6. OC11: ICT & Education (5 credits for MA Elementary Education)
7. CBCS Education, Technology and Society (2 credits multidisciplinary elective course for all masters programs)
8. PC2: ICT Competencies for Lifelong Learning (2 credits for MA in Education and BEd-MEd)

Programme design:

Member core-group which designed and developed the MA in Education & Technology programme.

Online courses for short term programmes:

1. Co-developed a MOOC course Active Teaching and Learning using OER as part of TISS - Open University, UK collaboration to explore Digital Badges in teacher professional development programme. April 2021.

2. Co-developed a MOOC course for Technologies for Online Learning in School Education on www.tissx.tiss.edu which was taken by more than 1200+ learners. August 2020.

Dissertation Supervision/Guidance and mentoring:

1. Dissertation guidance and supervision for students of MA Education and BEd-MEd programmes

2. Capstone supervision for MA in Education & Technology programme 

2. Under the MATPD fellowship project mentored teacher educators from South Asian region for action research on active teaching-learning with OER. April-December 2022.

Research Projects:

I have worked in collaborative projects with academics, researchers and practitioners in the national and international settings such as NCERT (New Delhi), various SCERTs, HBCSE-TIFR (Mumbai), MIT (Cambridge, USA), UNESCO and UNICEF.

UNESCO Paris, France
Principle Investigator, GEM Report 2023 background research study for South Asia Apr-Oct 2022

● Formulated and presented the project proposal and secured funding.
● Led the South Asia background research study for Global Education Monitoring report 2023 with colleagues Bindu Thirumalai and Anusha Ramanathan, gathered data through mixed methods and conducted country case-studies for India and Bangladesh.
● Synthesized four country case-studies and identified South Asia regional trends in digital textbook innovations.
● Lead author of GEM Report 2023 background paper: State initiatives and innovations in technology enabled content for school education in South Asia: examining aspects of access, equity, inclusion and quality. Link

UNESCO MGIEP (International)
Contributing Researcher, Co-author Jul 2018-Feb 2019

● Collaborated with researchers from across the globe for a global literature review on digital Educational resources
● Participated and presented India case-study at the high-level consultation at Braunschweig, Germany.
● Conceptualized 8 Affordances framework, contributed India country case-study and co-authored the report
Rethinking Pedagogy: Exploring the Potential of Digital Technology in Achieving Quality Education. Link

IFP OER Project, Govt. of Telangana 
Co-Principal Investigator,  Jun-Dec 2023

● As Lead for Curation steered the overall digital resource curation efforts with 50+ experts and research associates
across seven groups resulting in 800+ curated interactive resources.
● Co-developed a research-backed RAP rubric to guide OER curation process.
● Setup curation workflow from ideation to quality control and ensured timely deliverables.
● Advised and coordinated with state nodal agency for planning and execution of project deliverables across the
state of Telangana, India.

Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) 
Lead Technologist and Project Manager Jan 2017- May 2022

● Spearheaded design experiments to develop large scale enterprise EdTech solutions in resource constrained
contexts in collaboration with Prof. Nagarjuna’s Gnowledge Lab, HBCSE-TIFR, Mumbai and MIT Open
Learning team under the leadership of Profs. Padma Sarangapani (TISS), Eric Klopfer and M.S. Vijay Kumar
(MIT, Boston).
● Led the technology team through design, development and deployment of a next generation learning platform -
https://clixplatform.tiss.edu - in 500+ schools across India. 

● collaborated with various teams to launch the CLIx Open Educational Resources website (see
https://clixoer.tiss.edu ) in Dec 2019 which remains one of the most visited educational websites of TISS.

● Worked with CLIx technology team to devise and establish an end-to-end data workflow to capture, batch process, retrieve, and sync learning platform data from 500+ schools including those in remote areas to central server using django-python framework web apps, APIs, python and shell scripts, syncthing and docker technologies. Further, steered the team to process, automate,analyze and visualize learning platform data using R, Python and D3.js (see https://clixdashboard.tiss.edu and https://gstudio-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

● Collaborated with research teams at TISS and MIT to gather, process and analyze learning platform data from
300+ schools (stored as PostgreSQL, JSON and mongoDB databases) which contributed to project research
report: Making EdTech Work for Secondary School Students & their Teachers: A Report of Research Findings
from CLIx Phase I. Link

● CLIx won two prestigious global recognitions for the: UNESCO King Hamad Prize 2017 for the Innovative Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the field of Education and OER Collaboration Award for Excellence 2019 by Open Education Consortium.  

EDUsummIT International

EDUsummIT 2022-23
● As a member of thematic working group TWG-3 of EDUsummIT 2022-23 collaborated with an international
group of researchers led by Profs. Don Passey and Jean Gabin Ntebutse, and contributed to research on the theme:
Inclusion of excluded populations: access and learning optimization via IT in the post-pandemic era. Presented
the paper in EDUsummIT 2022-23 held at Kyoto University, Japan on June 1-3, 2023. Link

EDUsummIT 2019
● As a member of the thematic working group TWG-7 of EDUsummIT 2019 worked with an international group of
researchers led by Profs. Éric Bruillard, Sarah Prestridge and Fredric Litto, and contributed to research on the
theme: Connected learning: online human interaction and interaction with digital resources. Link

Publications:

1. Charania, A., Mulla, S., & Sen, S. (forthcoming in 2025). Constructive Teaching and Learning: Technology for School Education. In Routledge Book Series for Teachers and Teaching. London, New Delhi: Routledge.
2. Shende, S., & Mulla, S. (2024). Teachers as Troubleshooters: Making ICT Lab in School an Active Space for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Proceedings of International Conference on Technology 4 Education 2023 (T4E2023), Mumbai, India. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13973682 
3. Passey, D., Ntebutse, J. G., Mulla, S., Ahmad, M. Y. A., Cochrane, J., Collin, S., … Somasi, S. (2024). Populations Digitally Excluded from Education: Issues, Factors, Contributions and Actions for Policy, Practice and Research in a Post-Pandemic Era. Technology, Knowledge and Learning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-024-09767-w 
4. Mulla, S., Thirumalai, B., & Ramanathan, A. (2023). State initiatives and innovations in technology enabled content for school education in South Asia: examining aspects of access, equity, inclusion and quality. In Background paper prepared for the Global Education Monitoring Report 2023. Retrieved from UNESCO website: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386084.locale=en 
5. CETE. (2023). Curating and Creating OER to Enable Active Learning and Professional Development in Teacher Education Institutions: A Policy and Practice Paper. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/cete-ppp
6. CETE. (2023). RAP Curation Rubric to Assess the Pedagogical Potential of Open Educational Resources for use on Interactive Flat Panel Devices in Schools. Version 1. Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Dt. 15 Jan 2023. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/cete-ppp 
7. Mulla, S., & Nagarjuna, G. (2022). EdTech as an empowering tool: Designing Digital Learning Environments to extend the Action Space for Learning and foster Digital Agency. Paper presented in World Conference on Computers in Education held during 20-24 August 2022. Hiroshima: Japan.
8. Prestridge, S., Jacobsen, M., Mulla, S., Paredes, S. G., & Charania, A. (2021). New Alignments for the Digital Age: Insights into Connected Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-09968-5
9. Mulla, S., & Nagarjuna, G. (2021). Cultivating learner’s digital agency and extending action space of learning through manipulable microworld environments: lessons from India. Paper presented in Education, Engineering Education and Instruction Technology Conference (EEEITCT’21) held during 22-23 February 2021. Doha: Qatar University.
10. Co-authored report UNESCO-MGIEP. (2019) Rethinking Pedagogy - Exploring the Potential of Digital Technology in Achieving Quality Education. New Delhi: UNESCO-MGIEP. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000372786
    3a. Mulla, S. (2019). Country Case Study - CLIx India. In Y. Mochizuki & É. Bruillard (Eds.), Rethinking Pedagogy: Exploring the Potential of Digital Technology in Achieving Quality Education (pp. 84–85). New Delhi: UNESCO-MGIEP.
    3b. Mulla, S., Denks, L., & Kalantzis, M. (2019). The 8-Affordances Framework for exploring pedagogical possibilities of digital educational resources. In Y. Mochizuki & É. Bruillard (Eds.), Rethinking Pedagogy: Exploring the Potential of Digital Technology in Achieving Quality Education (pp. 76–83). New Delhi: UNESCO-MGIEP.
11. Mulla, S., Shende, S., Nagarjuna, G. (2019). Including the excluded, connecting the disconnected: lessons from a large scale experiment in India of designing open educational technologies that work for all. Paper presented in OE Global conference held during 20-14 November 2019. Milan: Italy.
12. Bruillard, É., Sarah Prestridge, Litto, F., Clare Brett, Jacobsen, M., Smith, D. M., … Mulla, S. (2019). Thematic Working Group 7 - Connected Learning: Online Human Interaction and Interaction With Digital Resources. In P. Fisser & M. Phillips (Eds.), EDUSummit2019 - Learners and learning contexts: New alignments for the digital age (pp. 54–61). Retrieved from https://edusummit2019.fse.ulaval.ca/files/edusummit2019_ebook.pdf
13. Mulla, S. (2019). Digital Education - myths and promises workshop under NITI Ayog's aspirational district scheme at Chatra District Administration, Chatra, Jharkhand.
14. Mulla, S., Shende, S. and Nagarjuna, G. (2018). Connected learning in disconnected spaces: the CLIx’ experience of designing learning technologies that work for all in TECH2018, Visakhapatnam, India.
15. Mulla, S. (2018). LMX - Harnessing EdTech to provide Quality Education at Scale (working paper presented at TECHBOOK project consultation, Braunschweig, Germany.
16. Mulla, S., Aitawdekar, K., KRD, K., & Nagarjuna, G. (2018). Not a walled garden but a Lego board! Experiments, innovations and experiences of CLIxPlatform. In Connected Learning at scale: An International Symposium. Mumbai, India.
17. Nagarjuna, G., & Mulla, S. (2018). Designing Educational Technologies for Collaborative and Connected Learning at Scale. In Connected Learning at scale: An International Symposium. Mumbai, India.
18. Mulla, S., Aitawdekar, K., Katkam, R., KRD, K., Bhatia, P., & Nagarjuna, G. (2018). Retrofitting EdTech: driver for innovation or dampener for learning? In CLIx Working Papers. Mumbai, India: CLIx, TISS.
19. Nagarjuna, G., Mulla, S., Aitawdekar, K., Katkam, R., Bhatia, P., KRD, K., & Bharaswadkar, S. (2018). Using DBR For Design and Development Of Next Generation Digital Learning Platform. In CLIx Working Papers. Mumbai, India: CLIx, TISS.
20. Nagarjuna, G., & Mulla, S. (2018). Taking NROER forward – from an OER repository to collaborative workspace and course maker, a workshop at Central Institute of Education Technology, National Council for Educational Research and Training, New Delhi, India.
21. Nagarjuna, G., & Mulla, S. (2018). OER capacity building workshop. State Council for Educational Research and Training. Raipur, India.
22. Mulla, S. (2016). Education, Inequality and Community: Understanding ‘voluntary tutoring’ – a case study in London. MA dissertation thesis. University College London.
23. Mulla, S. (2015). Do languages still matter? The Companion. Retrieved from http://thecompanion.in/do-languages-still-matter/