The Institute
Human ability comes first.
SILT Institute — Systems for Integrated Learning Technologies — researches how technology and supportive experiences can improve the conditions in which people learn.
Better learners. Not just faster answers.
Our mission is to research, design, and translate better ways of learning for an AI-embedded world. We explore how feedback, thoughtful AI systems, and learning experiences can strengthen existing education systems and the people within them.
A future with more human possibility.
Our vision is a future in which technology expands our capacity to learn, think, connect, and grow. Teachers, peers, curiosity, effort, and lived experience remain essential. AI should help people receive useful support without taking their learning away from them.
The classroom is our starting point.
Junior and senior secondary education and lifelong learning are central to our direction. With particular attention to Africa and the Global South, we ask what schools can use, maintain, afford, and meaningfully oversee. Classroom realities should shape the technology, not the other way around.
A thesis opened the question.
Esther Bawo Tsotso’s final-year thesis is the starting point for SILT’s inquiry into adaptive learning, Socratic questioning, and active recall. A proposal is not proof: the Institute’s task is to turn promising questions into careful experiments and evidence.
Research, then return to practice.
SILT Research defines questions and examines evidence. SILT Labs develops testable prototypes. Flowst and Pebbles provide pathways into learning technology and real-world experiences. Observations from practice should challenge our assumptions and generate new questions.