True education starts at home, and Jesse Williams is on a mission to ensure that learning is fun for everyone involved.

In January 2021, AfroTech reported that uLesson — an African edtech startup — announced it raised a $7.5 million Series A funding round for its online learning platform to make remote learning a breeze. Now, less than a year later, it has announced that it’s raised $15 million in a Series B funding round, according to TechCrunch. Five investors led their latest round — Tencent, Nielsen Ventures, and existing investors Owl Ventures, TLcom Capital, and Founder Collective — in what is said to be the largest known investment for an edtech startup in Africa.

Alphonso “Fonz” Morris is a senior product designer at Coursera, one of the world’s largest EdTech platforms. We sat down to talk to him about his journey and his vision for the company and himself. The Beginning Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, Fonz made his way to the south in search of higher education at the historically Black Morehouse College. As a self-described “engineering-minded kind of kid,” his childhood dream was to become an architect. However, when he got to college, a computer science career seemed to have more potential than an architectural one. While at Morehouse, he also participated in a study-abroad program at Oxford University, where he studied art history and visited some of the world’s most iconic museums and galleries. Although he began his computer science degree at Morehouse, he later transferred to Georgia State after two years because he could no longer afford tuition. While he made this move purely out of financial necessity, he believes everything worked...