Palo Alto, CA – November 6, 2018 – Cell-Ed, a mobile learning solution for low-skilled workers, today announced the appointment of Dr. Patti Constantakis as the company’s first Chief Product Officer. Overseeing Cell-Ed’s technology and content development teams, she will be responsible for accelerating innovation across products and solutions to ensure more workers learn basic skills better and faster.
One in four adults in the U.S. lacks the basic literacy, language, and numeracy skills that are fundamental to workplace success and further education. Cell-Ed provides short, relevant and interactive lessons to upskill these low-skilled workers over any mobile device; they gain skills 84 percent faster than if in a classroom.
Constantakis will be the first C-level Latina at Cell-Ed and its third C-level female, joining CEO Rothenberg-Aalami and COO Sonali Joshi. Seventy percent of the company’s learners are women, and many are native Spanish speakers who are more underserved than upskilled. Constantakis’ appointment is another significant step in the execution of Cell-Ed’s learner-centered strategy, where its leaders represent its learners.
“Patti is an always-listening-to-the-learner type of leader who has rare expertise in creating learning pathways for low-skilled adults to advance in their jobs and education,” said Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami, founder and CEO of Cell-Ed. “As Cell-Ed looks to deepen engagement across existing products and future ones, such as micro-credentials, a key focus of Patti’s will be to build out more of the personalization features that learners love while we scale.”
Constantakis brings Cell-Ed a 25-year track record of designing, developing and deploying critically acclaimed, technology-based products that have helped low-skilled adults achieve their learning goals. Most recently, she was Director of Adult Learning Initiatives at Digital Promise where she advocated for increased educational opportunities for underserved populations using technology and directed projects around workforce training. Prior to Digital Promise, she was Director of Product, Content, and Curriculum at GreatSchools.org and Vice President of Product Development at Academic Systems/Lightspan.
“Cell-Ed represents one of the most exciting developments unfurling at the intersection of adult education and workforce preparedness: successfully upskilling the hardest-to-reach and hardest-to-teach workers today while continuously iterating to build better products for tomorrow,” said Constantakis. “I am thrilled to join Cell-Ed’s like-minded and fiercely dedicated team so together we can create more research-based and industry-leading products for the millions of low-skilled adults who are eager to learn.”
Constantakis’ appointment is the latest milestone as Cell-Ed grows. The company recently raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Lumina Impact Ventures and joined by Strada Education Innovation Fund, Partners Group Impact (Verein), Twilio.org Impact Fund and Points of Light CivicX. And in July, Cell-Ed was named a finalist in the $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE presented by the Dollar General Literacy Foundation. The winner will be announced in January 2019.
About Cell-Ed
Cell-Ed offers a complete mobile solution for employers and education providers to reach, retain and upskill millions of low-skilled, low-literate, low-wage workers worldwide on any mobile device – from smartphones to tablets to computers to even flip phones – with no internet connection or data plan needed. Our personalized and scalable platform, real-world courses and customizable content are used by Discovery, the States of New York and Virginia, SEIU, the Los Angeles Public Library and others. We are a social enterprise based in Palo Alto, California.
