Javier Tejera - Edinburgh Futures Institute (project in partnership with Moray House). What problem are you trying to solve?Most AI-in-education tools today focus on productivity and efficiency: faster grading, lesson planning, admin. While perhaps useful in some contexts, they don’t contribute to genuine pedagogical innovation.At the same time, these tools are usually designed in isolation from real classrooms. Consequently, educators become “software consumers” with little influence over what gets built or how it fits their specific teaching contexts.This creates a disconnect: teachers have deep subject expertise and rich ideas for learning activities, but almost no space or mechanism to turn those ideas into tools. As a result, many AI products don’t resonate with teachers, see low adoption, and miss opportunities for more innovative, critical and engaging forms of teaching and learning.What is your idea?Our innovation, the AI Teaching Innovation project, adopts a ground-up approach that transforms educators into co-designers and producers of AI applications tailored to their specific teaching contexts. Collaborating with teachers, students, and learning technologists, we develop adaptable, scalable AI applications to be used in teaching and learning across various courses and disciplines.This initiative is spearheaded by a new ‘startup’ within the University of Edinburgh, ensuring these innovations remain closely integrated with academic research and the university’s broader educational objectives, while also offering these tools to other universities to contribute to education innovation beyond Edinburgh. This article was published on 2025-11-17
