Organisers

Alison Clark-Wilson

Alison has 30+ years experience in education as a schoolteacher, teacher educator, and educational researcher, all of which has been wholly concerned with the design, implementation, and evaluation of educational technologies. 

An early adopter of EdTech (whilst still a school-age learner), Alison has always worked at the two extremes of EdTech innovation: creation and widespread uptake. Her own school classroom served as an edtech testbed for early maths products, and her 2010 PhD study created an EdTech testbed involving 15 teachers and 7 schools (resulting in the “hiccup” theory). 

Alison has always thought that every teacher should be supported to offer their classroom as a testbed, as a more sustainable way for teachers to develop professionally in an increasingly digital world. Alison offers global consultancy on school EdTech policy, development and implementations, with a particular interest in both the EdTech developers’ and teachers’ perspective. Alongside, she has developed multiple online toolkits/resources for a wide range of EdTech stakeholders.

Katie Boody Adorno

Katie started her career as a middle school math teacher in her native Kansas City, Missouri in the United States. After teaching for five years and working in school administration, Katie went on to found Leanlab Education in 2013 a non-profit organization that studies and launches transformational education innovations that have national impact.  

Over the past 9 years, Katie and her team have trained over 60 education entrepreneurs and partnered with more than 25 school districts. Her organization has developed a unique Codesign product development research framework that centers school practioner voice in giving product recommendations throughout differing stages of an edtech product’s product development cycle, while evaluating the effectiveness of the product.  Leanlab Education has completed more than two dozen codesigned studies between schools and edtech developers.

Björn Hassler

Björn is an advocate for international cooperation and development, Global Public Goods, and open development practices. He specializes in sustainable and scalable approaches for programme implementation to improve educational outcomes — across primary, secondary, and higher education.

His research interests include digital technology (for education and research), teacher professional development, education systems research and equity/inclusion. Björn has undertaken and supported a large range of education improvement programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and South Asia, as well as conducted extensive research in EdTech and teacher education. 

Björn is a founding director at the EdTech Hub and a visiting researcher at the University of Johannesburg.

Stefanie Vanbecelaere

Stefanie developed expertise in methodologies to evaluate the impact of digital learning tools through two projects: 

1. Educational researcher on the LEAPS project (an imec.icon research project funded by imec and Flemish government, 2016-2018), responsible for the evaluation of a multi-purpose self-learning analytics system. 

2. Post-doctoral researcher on the i-Learn project (Flemish government, €20m, 2019 – ongoing) which is a strategic initiative in Flanders that aims to lower the barriers for implementing personalized learning with digital tools in primary and secondary education in Flanders (Belgium). 

The i-Learn portal provides a one-stop-shop for teachers and pupils that integrates the digital applications and content of EdTech providers, and allows teachers to create personalized learning paths for their pupils across EdTech applications. The project also offers online coaching and training to teachers through the iLearn Academy. Responsible for the evaluation of the impact of the i-Learn portal throughout the project.

Taskeen Adam

Taskeen is the Co-Director of Open Development & Education. She has over 10 years of international education research and development experience, with in-country experience in India, Rwanda, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and the UK and remote technical assistance to ministries of education in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Jordan. 

Her thematic areas of expertise are justice-oriented inclusive education models, decolonising EdTech, digital neocolonialism, Massive Open Online Courses, open educational practices, blended learning and EdTech for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), critical digital pedagogies, education data management, national virtual learning environments, digital platform building blocks, tech-supported teacher professional development (TPD), structured pedagogy and personalised adaptive learning. 

She completed her PhD on ‘Addressing Injustices through MOOCs: A study among peri-urban, marginalised South African youth’ at the University of Cambridge. Her research highlighted that historical injustices, cultural imposition, and economic dependence continue to play a pivotal role in education.