Technology, Empathy, and Education: A Journey at UGHE
When you see The University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) from a distance for the first time, it looks out of place, rising above the lush green farm fields that surround it. The campus, a medical school opened in 2019, is in rural northern Rwanda and was designed with a contemporary black-and-white Rwandan style that sharply contrasts with its agricultural surroundings.
The campus is surrounded by potato, bean, and sorghum fields, and the only way to reach it is by an almost 50-kilometer dirt road that winds through small villages. Even though I walked the dirt trails outside the university hundreds of times, I was often called mzungu, foreigner. Not only was there a geographic distance, but a social one as well.
Over time, despite these distances, I became familiar with local families and businesspeople, learned a little Kinyarwanda, and started to fit in in my own way. After four years in the area, many locals called me Matayo, the Kinyarwanda version of Matthew. As UGHE was such a strange presence in the area—a modern university placed in rural Rwanda—it felt important for me, a white man from the United States, to serve as a kind of informal and friendly diplomat.
I had traveled through Rwanda in 2016 and found it beautiful and peaceful. When an opportunity arose in 2019 to join UGHE as an instructional technologist and assistant professor, I accepted. Before my arrival, I had never heard of Partners in Health (PIH) or Dr. Paul Farmer, its primary visionary. It did not take long for me to realize that I shared their values.
PIH’s commitment to treating others as we would want our own loved ones treated—especially those in the poorest parts of the world—felt like a living embodiment of the Golden Rule. Empathy, in this sense, was not abstract; it demanded action, resources, and sustained care.
During 2020, I lived in a dormitory on campus alongside approximately 60 students, a small group of faculty, and essential staff. The campus was fully locked down during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Days were filled with long walks, badminton, writing music, and watching old films, as the outside world remained inaccessible.
That summer, UGHE leadership decided that incoming medical students would begin their studies online rather than on campus. This required a rapid mobilization of ideas, infrastructure, hardware, and training by a small team facing an unprecedented challenge. In a single day, the IT department distributed laptops and modems across Rwanda to new students.
UGHE’s Prep Phase—designed to prepare students for the rigors of medical school—includes courses in English, IT and Health, Critical Thinking, and Medical Anthropology. I was responsible for designing and teaching the IT and Health course, which became both the students’ first medical school course and their first sustained experience with online learning.
The incoming cohort was deeply disappointed that they would not begin their studies on campus. I knew that the course had to do more than convey content; it had to create a sense of belonging and connection to the university itself. Instructional design is never accidental. Every activity must be intentional.
Drawing on established frameworks such as ADDIE, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Gagné’s Nine Events, and particularly Keller’s ARCS model, I designed the course to address motivation explicitly. Students’ attention, sense of relevance, confidence, and satisfaction were central concerns.
Using synchronous and asynchronous tools—chat, discussion boards, and Zoom—we maintained regular contact. To establish relevance, second-year students shared their experiences through short videos. Confidence was supported through clear daily modules and consistent structure. Satisfaction emerged through playful, creative activities that allowed students to express themselves and connect with one another.
Survey data collected before, during, and after the course indicated substantial growth in student confidence and sense of connection to UGHE. The design choices—grounded in motivational theory—appeared to achieve their intended outcomes.
In later iterations of the course, as students returned to campus, new topics such as telemedicine, artificial intelligence, storytelling, and ChatGPT were introduced. The pandemic, as Arundhati Roy observed, acted as a portal—forcing rapid change and opening new possibilities.
In the summer of 2024, during my final months at UGHE, I took a small group of students to visit a Twa village near the Ugandan border. The visit was a reminder that education, empathy, and technology must always remain grounded in human connection.
As technology continues to transform education, models like ARCS remind us that learning is not merely about efficiency or innovation. It is about people. Empathy ensures that progress remains meaningful—and human.