About Us

Our Story

Learning Upgrade is a creative team of teachers, musicians, artists, and programmers based in San Diego, California, USA.  Our goal is to transform lives through innovative online courses featuring songs, video, games, and rewards. Teachers use our courses to accelerate learning and move students up to proficiency in reading and math. Over 2 million students of all ages and from countries across the world have completed Learning Upgrade lessons.

Shortly after our founding in 1998, the team produced the ground-breaking Reading Upgrade online course.  Through step-by-step musical lessons, the course helped a wide range of struggling readers including special needs students and English learners to make breakthroughs. We followed up that course with English Upgrade, Math Upgrade, and GED courses to address all levels from basic to diploma.

The secret to Learning Upgrade courses is a unique mix of the latest in educational research, curriculum standards, pop music and video, gaming, assessment, and progress tracking.

In 2017, we entered the Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE competition to develop an smartphone app for literacy.  The experience transformed the Learning Upgrade program into a smartphone app that is now used by children and adults. Proven effective with thousands of low-literacy learners, the app drives “Binge Learning” where students spend hours on their own phones completing lesson after lesson.

Learning Upgrade CEO, Vinod Lobo, accepts the Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE grand prize

Our team just completed the new Digital Literacy course after two years of development.  This course represents a whole new way to bridge the tech gap and bring every student into the digital world.

Our current focus is to scale up to bring our program to millions of new students.  Through partnerships with a wide variety of organizations and companies we aim to transform the lives of students through learning that is effective and fun!

Our Leadership Team

Vinod Lobo

Founder & CEO

Drew Robinson

Director of Partnerships

Shyla Lobo

Learning & Music Director

John Banks

Software Director

Haneen Khalaf

Haneen Khalaf

Director of Global Business Development

Sheryin Lobo

Director of Operations

Ray Blavatt

Art Director

Dr. Denis Lobo

R & D Director

Our Partners

ProLiteracy

New Readers Press

COABE

XPRIZE

Let's Go Learn

World Education