Building Tools That Truly Empower Educators – Independent Newspaper Nigeria

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform education, but only if it’s designed to empower the people at the center of learning: educators. Today’s educators go far beyond traditional classroom teachers.

They include school instructors, learning and development professionals, curriculum designers, and independent creators, each with distinct workflows, needs and goals. Designing AI to serve them all requires more than just good engineering. It demands thoughtful, flexible, human-centered design.

Through her work at Stakestack, an AI-powered platform for building curriculum and online courses, Ifeoluwasimi Olusola, a seasoned product designer with a deep background in education technology is reimagining what it means to treat AI not as a replacement for educators, but as a collaborative teaching assistant, one that respects context, creativity, and the diverse needs of modern learning environments.

“Educators are not one-size-fits-all,” she says. “They’re classroom teachers, yes, but also workplace trainers, independent course creators, curriculum leads. Each has a unique voice and a specific goal. AI should enhance that, not flatten it.”

From Static Content to Creative Co-Creation

At the heart of Stakestack is a powerful idea: that anyone with expertise should be able to turn their knowledge into a high-quality learning experience, without needing a tech team behind them.

The platform combines text, image, and video AI tools in a unified workspace, allowing educators to design courses, generate content, and tailor delivery in just a few steps. But what sets it apart is the emphasis on creator-led customization.

Users can upload their own notes, research, training manuals, or course outlines, and Stakestack’s AI uses that information as a base to help build curriculum and multimedia content. This ensures that what’s created isn’t generic or templated, it reflects the educator’s own expertise, tone, and teaching style.

“It’s not about automating teaching,” Olusola explains. “It’s about giving educators tools that help them scale their work without losing their unique voice.”

Rethinking Assessment: Testing for Understanding, Not Just Memory

AI is also challenging the norms around how learners are assessed. In most digital learning environments, evaluation still depends on traditional, recall-based testing. But at Stakestack, her team took a more radical approach.

They developed a cognition assessment tool powered by conversational AI. Instead of selecting from multiple-choice questions, students interact with the AI in a dialogue, explaining their thinking, clarifying their ideas, and receiving responsive follow-up questions based on their answers.This approach mimics how human educators evaluate understanding in real life and pushes against the rigidity of standardized testing.

“Memorization has its place, but it doesn’t tell you if a learner really gets it,” she says. “With AI, we can shift from testing what students remember to testing how they think.”

Designing for the Full Spectrum of Educators

One of Olusola’s core design philosophies is contextual flexibility. While many AI tools are built for the traditional classroom, Stakestack is intentionally broad. It serves schools, corporate L&D teams, and solo educators alike.

This meant building for real-world constraints: varying content formats, infrastructure limitations, and diverse learner needs. It also meant prioritizing accessibility and usability—ensuring that tools worked well on shared devices, low-bandwidth connections, and across different educational cultures.

“Too many tools assume perfect conditions,” she notes. “But learning happens everywhere, and educators deserve tools that are flexible, responsive, and built for their reality.”

The Future of AI in Education is Collaborative, Not Prescriptive

AI will never replace educators and it shouldn’t try to. The most powerful role AI can play is as a collaborator, a quiet, capable assistant that helps educators do more with less, without ever losing sight of their expertise.

To get there, we must build tools with educators, not just for them. That means understanding their diverse needs, creating systems that adapt to their knowledge, and designing interfaces that support, not disrupt their creative process.

“Good design makes people feel powerful,” she says. “That’s what AI in education should do. Not overwhelm educators with features, but give them confidence and creative space.”

When built with care and contextual awareness, AI can be the most powerful assistant educators have ever had.