Shaping the Future of Education

For Javier Tejera, the starting point was frustration. Not with teaching itself, but with the digital tools surrounding it.

As both a learning technologist at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and a tutor, Javier found himself repeatedly running into the same issue: educational software often felt disconnected from the realities of teaching.

“Sometimes I try to use digital tools for teaching and learning, and you always have to come up with workarounds,” he explains. “They are designed in different places from where teaching actually takes place.”

Rather than adapting his teaching around existing platforms, Javier began building his own tools instead.

Although his academic background is rooted in psychology and education, coding had long been a personal interest.

“I’ve been coding since I was a teenager,” he says.

Initially, he created small AI-powered teaching interfaces for his own courses, experimenting with ways to make learning more engaging and interactive. The results were promising. From there, the idea gradually expanded beyond his own teaching practice and into collaborative projects with academics across the university.

What emerged became AI for Teaching Innovation, a growing platform designed to support more creative, research-led approaches to digital education.

Essentially, the project develops web applications that support teaching and learning. But Javier increasingly sees it as something broader: an innovation hub bringing together educational tools, consultancy support and a wider community of practice around AI and education.

“The idea is to have a more creative and critical approach to digital education and artificial intelligence that makes teaching more fun, creative and innovative.”

The project is not being developed in isolation. Javier works alongside Professor Sian Bayne who leads the project from the academic side, as well as two software developer interns, Yvonne Ding and Kokulan Thangasuthan. Together, they collaborate closely with academics across different disciplines to design tools around real teaching needs rather than generic software assumptions.

That practical, educator-led approach has become one of the project’s defining features.

“When you understand the context where you teach, the tools work,” Javier says. “People have fun and the teaching becomes very engaging.”

Commercialisation, however, was not originally part of the plan.

As the team presented their work at conferences, academics from other institutions increasingly began asking whether the applications could be accessed elsewhere.

“People were asking if there was a subscription or if they could access them,” Javier explains. “And we realised there might actually be an opportunity for commercialisation.”

That realisation led Javier towards the Data-Driven Innovation Fellows Programme (DDI). Delivered by the Bayes Centre and Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, the programme supports transforming innovative, data-driven ideas into real-world ventures through expert guidance, funding opportunities and commercialisation support.

At the time, the project was still in the very early stages of exploring what commercialisation could even look like. The DDI Fellowship arrived at exactly the right moment.

“It was perfect,” Javier says. “We really needed the basics of how to turn an idea into a product or commercial venture.”

Coming from an academic and educational background, the shift towards commercial thinking required an entirely new mindset.

“It opens a whole new world,” he explains. “I had never thought about things like branding, marketing, storytelling, value proposition or business models.”

The programme helped the team begin navigating those unfamiliar areas while also giving them a clearer pathway towards commercialisation.

“There is a lot of support with the DDI Fellowship and resources that were super useful to clear the thinking and have a clearer strategy.”

One of the biggest challenges has been preparing the technology itself for life beyond the university environment. Building tools for internal educational use is very different from developing a robust commercial platform that can support external users, subscriptions and wider deployment.

At the same time, Javier and the team were also learning how to think differently about the project itself, not simply as an academic initiative, but as a potential product and service.

That progress has accelerated significantly during the fellowship.

The team is now preparing to pilot parts of the platform with other universities while continuing to refine the branding, messaging and wider commercial offering.

“I don’t think we would be at this point now without the DDI Fellowship,” Javier says.

The longer-term ambition extends far beyond a catalogue of teaching tools. Javier sees the project evolving into a wider ecosystem around AI and digital education, combining applications, consultancy, training and collaborative communities focused on innovation in teaching practice.

“Our vision is a future where higher education benefits from critical, research-based AI built with educators to increase teaching creativity and innovation.”

For now, however, the immediate focus is on taking the first commercial steps.

The next major milestone will be securing the project’s first commercial subscriptions and proving that the platform can operate successfully beyond its original university setting.

Alongside the formal programme content, Javier says one of the most valuable parts of the fellowship has been the wider community surrounding it.

“Talking to the other fellows was really helpful,” he says. “We were all on the same page.”

For Javier, that combination of support, collaboration and commercial learning has helped transform the project from an internal educational experiment into something with much wider potential.

What started as frustration with existing teaching tools is now becoming a platform designed to help shape how AI can be used more creatively, critically and collaboratively within higher education.

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