I came to teaching from the factory floor. Before I stood in front of a class, I stood in front of machines that did not care what I intended, only what I actually understood. That is where I learned what education is for.
I consider myself an educator, a student, and an enabler, in that order. The order matters. It means I teach, and I expect to be taught. Paulo Freire wrote that no one educates anyone else and no one educates themselves, we educate one another. Anyone who has run an engineering lab knows this is not sentiment. It is a description of what actually happens in the room.
CeLAPI exists because that room is changing. Our courses now live partly online. Our tools now include artificial intelligence. And our students now arrive holding technology that can produce work they have not yet learned to do.
So let me state the question that will define the coming years plainly: a machine that completes the task for a student has not taught the student anything. Getting the answer and learning are not the same event. Our work is to design for the second one.
That work is practical. We build blended courses that ask something of the people inside them. We support faculty, because no technology has ever improved a course that its teacher did not believe in. We try to measure what students actually learn, not how satisfied they felt. And we hold AI to the same standard as any other instrument: does it make someone more capable, or does it only make the work disappear?
Freire also wrote about hope (not optimism, which waits), but hope that works. I take that seriously. Our universities are not short of talent. They are short of the conditions in which talent compounds. Building those conditions is the whole assignment, and it is why this centre exists.
The door is open. Come and argue with us.
Qatada Damra