About the author
Paul Welty, Ph.D. — former Vice Provost for Academic Innovation at Emory University. Founder of The Hatchery. Co-founder of the Center for AI Learning.
Paul Welty, Ph.D.
I spent 25 years on the question of how institutions actually help people learn, most recently as Vice Provost for Academic Innovation at Emory University, where I founded The Hatchery innovation center and co-founded the Center for AI Learning. I designed and built the university’s faculty information system, and ran 43 systematic experiments on where AI does and does not belong in real workplace practice.
Before that I consulted with Fortune 500 companies including Disney, Delta, The Home Depot, and IHG. My doctorate is in philosophy, which is less of a detour than it sounds: most of what goes wrong in education technology is a category error about what the tool is for.
My book, The Work of Being, is about judgment, agency, and staying human in an AI-saturated world.
Why I built this
From inside a university you watch a particular student fail on a loop.
They are not lazy and not unintelligent. They know the material and they know what is due. They lose the term to the distance between an assignment appearing and a first step existing — a gap that is invisible in every dashboard the institution owns, because nothing measures it.
The support that exists is good and it is thin. Disability services is understaffed. Coaching is expensive and weekly. The planners are built for people who already have the executive function the planner is supposed to supply.
So the tool assumes competence the student is there to acquire, and when it does not work, everyone involved reads it as a motivation problem.
I built Scholexis for the specific failure I kept watching: not knowing what to do, but not being able to start, and having no honest way to say so.
Reaching me
[email protected] — questions about the product, access for a student, or anything a coach or disability services office needs to evaluate it.