I was honored to deliver the closing keynote at UNESCO’s International Day for Digital Learning 2025 this past week. The event, focusing on “Digital learning realities in low-resource contexts,” brought together educators, policymakers, and innovators from around the world to discuss strategies for improving equitable quality learning outcomes in challenging educational environments. (The video of my comments can be found at the end of this post).

What made this opportunity particularly meaningful was its timing – coinciding with the 5th anniversary of Silver Lining for Learning (SLL), a project I’ve been fortunate to co-host alongside Chris Dede (Harvard), Curt Bonk (Indiana University), Lydia Cao (University of Toronto), and Yong Zhao (University of Kansas and University of Melbourne).

When we launched SLL in March 2020 as the pandemic shuttered schools worldwide, we never imagined our “temporary” Saturday conversations would evolve into a five-year journey documenting over 225 episodes of educational innovation. What began as an effort to highlight quality online learning during crisis has transformed into a global archive of educational creativity, resilience, and human ingenuity.

Our episodes have taken viewers from Nepal, where teenagers embraced MOOCs to transform their educational futures, to Afghanistan, where virtual classrooms transcend political barriers, to innovative learning spaces across India, Rwanda, and Chile and so much more. These stories share a common thread – they showcase how educators and learners often in resource-constrained environments are developing creative, contextual solutions that often fly below the radar of mainstream educational discourse.

None of this would have been possible without our remarkable guests who generously shared their time and insights, or our viewers and listeners who have joined us on this journey. Their engagement has transformed SLL from a pandemic response into a living educational resource freely and openly available to all. You can find us at silverliningforlearning.org and on your favorite podcasting platforms.

We had two episodes of SLL devoted to our anniversary, you can find them here and here.

It seemed particularly opportune to bring together UNESCO’s focus on digital learning in low-resource contexts with our own 5-year SLL celebration. My keynote was actually sandwiched between two special SLL episodes marking our anniversary (see links above), creating a beautiful synergy between these global conversations about educational innovation. Both UNESCO’s mission and our own work emphasize that transformative education rarely comes from grand technological solutions alone, but rather through human creativity, connection, and “incremental yet meaningful methods” that work within real-world constraints.

In many ways, SLL itself exemplifies the very innovation model we celebrate in our episodes. Operating with zero external funding, it’s what I’ve come to call a “passion and curiosity” project – a labor of love at the edges of our primary professional responsibilities. Each of us plays different roles: I maintain the website, edit and publish the videos and podcasts, and design the graphics (creative work I genuinely enjoy), while my co-hosts primarily focus on identifying and connecting with our diverse array of guests. We operate without institutional backing or corporate sponsorship, pooling our personal resources to sustain the project. This has given us editorial freedom to follow our intellectual curiosity and spotlight educational innovations that truly inspire us. SLL demonstrates that meaningful contributions to global education conversations don’t necessarily require substantial funding or formal organizational structures—sometimes they simply require commitment, relationships, and a willingness to amplify voices that might otherwise go unheard.

I invite you to watch the keynote below and to explore our archive at silverliningforlearning.org. Here’s to five years of learning together, and to many more conversations about educational innovation worldwide.

You can watch my segment of the closing keynote below or the entire event here. You can also read the text I wrote in preparation of this talk. (Note: The prose in the document may not accurately match what I said in the talk – but it is a good approximation).