Dr. Martin Adane

I teach on the premise that educational technology is only as good as its fit with where it's actually used. In Ghana, and across a lot of Sub-Saharan Africa, that means uneven infrastructure, connectivity that comes and goes, and students walking in with wildly different amounts of prior exposure to digital tools. My own research on ICT adoption barriers in Ghanaian schools, and on pre-service teachers' STEM and coding competencies, is what pushed me here. I build courses assuming the network will drop at some point, not assuming it won't. And I tell students directly where a given tool or method stops working the moment you leave a well-resourced setting because most of them are going to teach somewhere that isn't one.

Project-based and problem-based learning are how I teach most ICT and STEM content. Instead of walking through a fixed set of procedures, I hand students real constraints: design something that still works on low bandwidth, or evaluate a tool for accessibility before you adopt it, not after. Pre-service teachers heading into under-resourced schools need practice weighing trade-offs. Familiarity with a demo built for a classroom with money behind it doesn't get them very far.

There's one question I keep putting back to students about every tool we cover, and it's basically the same question every time: who does this actually work for, and who gets left out? That comes straight out of my own research interest in accessibility and assistive technology. I expect them to ask it of their own future teaching, not just of whatever I put in front of them.

I'm also wary of overselling what educational technology can do. A lot of the current enthusiasm for AI in education is running ahead of the evidence, particularly once you're in a setting that looks nothing like where that evidence was generated. I try to model that skepticism in class. Before we decide whether or how to adopt something, we look at what the claim is actually resting on, not just what it promises.

Supervision counts as teaching too, as far as I'm concerned. Postgraduate and undergraduate research projects, the Global Code Summer Program, all of it. The goal does not change: help students build the judgment to evaluate technology and evidence on their own, in the environments they will actually be working in, not the idealized ones the literature tends to describe.