Building a global education policy academy

Client: Education Global Practice, World Bank Group
Location: Global
Year: 2022-2025
Focus: Platform development, professional learning, policy capacity building

Building a modular, gamified platform for education policy learning and collaboration

The Education Policy Academy is a World Bank initiative designed to support policymakers and development partners in strengthening their understanding of how to use educational technology to improve teaching and learning outcomes. In 2022, Dr. John Moravec was engaged to lead the design and development of a digital platform to support this mission. Built on Moodle, the platform integrated custom features, gamification elements, and a modular course architecture designed to scale across regions and country teams.

Approach

The project extended and adapted the World Bank’s existing “Evoke Core” platform to create a more interactive, context-aware learning environment for policy audiences. The platform’s design focused on flexibility and extensibility—allowing teams to create courses, deploy custom modules, and track engagement through secure data collection. The consultant led the technical development roadmap and collaborated with the Bank’s EdTech team to support the onboarding of regional teams and external partners.

Key innovations included the integration of custom gamification elements to encourage exploration and peer-to-peer learning, a streamlined UI/UX adapted for low-bandwidth environments, and the development of API pathways for future integration with external tools and education management systems. The platform architecture also allowed for multi-tenancy, enabling country-specific implementations of the Policy Academy to operate independently but under a shared infrastructure.

Deliverables

• Full adaptation of Evoke Core into a Moodle-based professional development platform
• Technical design document, roadmap, and sprint plans for phased development
• Custom Moodle modules and interface improvements for user engagement and course tracking
• Development of onboarding documentation and standards for content integration by regional teams
• Beta implementation of the Policy Academy, with site management and end-of-course reporting
• Framework for future integration with external systems, including learning analytics and certification

Impact

The Education Policy Academy platform positioned the World Bank to deliver flexible, high-quality professional development opportunities to education policymakers across the globe. It supported capacity building in edtech planning and decision-making, while modeling the use of adaptable, open-source technologies in complex institutional environments. By handing over a functional, scalable platform backed by clear documentation, the project enabled World Bank teams to continue developing new courses and expanding the Policy Academy’s reach as a global learning resource.