Teaching

I write and teach AI courses

Jihad Ftouny as the AI Instructor class, in violet light

Some I teach myself. Some are taught by other instructors, from notes I write for them.

The material I wrote at ZAKA reached more than 7,000 people in 2025.

I have taught and mentored more than 400 people directly.

2026

SE Factory AI Engineering Bootcamp

Separate from ZAKA, and my most recent teaching. Ten weeks taking people from understanding AI to shipping it. I co-designed it with Jean-Pierre Fakhry and Hasan Kanaan, and I ran the code reviews for the AI track.

Code review is the part of teaching that actually changes how someone works. You can explain a principle in a lecture and watch it not survive contact with a deadline. Reviewing what someone actually wrote, and being honest about it, is slower and it sticks.

  • SE Factory

About the bootcamp →

7,000+ Students trained through courses I wrote
400+ Students taught and mentored directly
8 Cohorts taught at ZAKA

2023 to 2025

ZAKA

Most of my teaching happened here. ZAKA is an AI education company in Beirut, and the programmes below were built and delivered under it.

  1. AUB AI Starter Kit

    2025

    An eight week online professional certificate for the American University of Beirut, for people starting from zero. I wrote it end to end: the syllabus, the lessons, the assessments, and the notes future instructors teach it from. Someone else delivers it, which was the point. The examples are local, including ones in Arabic.

    Course artwork for the AI Starter Kit, an AUB Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture certificate in partnership with ZAKA
    View the programme
  2. UAE AI Academy, with Microsoft

    2025

    A national AI programme for university students, faculty and staff, run with Microsoft. I co-wrote the course and taught on it. Two months, self-paced material, live workshops, and a hackathon at the end.

    Campaign artwork for the UAE Artificial Intelligence Academy, run with Microsoft and ZAKA
    Read about the initiative
  3. Judging the Clyntech hackathon

    2025

    Judged the Clyntech climate tech hackathon, run by Berytech. Judging is teaching compressed into ten minutes: you have one pitch to work out whether a team understands their own system, and the feedback has to be useful to people who just spent a weekend on it.

    Clyntech Hackathon 2025 winners with Berytech, holding first, second and third place prize cheques
    Berytech
  4. Data Analytics for the Professionally Abled

    2025

    A Data Analytics track delivered with shareQ and ProAbled alongside ZAKA's education team, graduating twenty Professionally Abled participants. The same week I ran the Career Map workshop, walking high-school students through what AI careers actually look like.

    The Professionally Abled Data Analytics cohort at their graduation ceremony
  5. SEEDS, K-12

    2025

    The first K-12 AI curriculum in the MENA region. I wrote content covering grades 4 to 12: data, how machines learn, what the tools can do, and how to use them responsibly.

    • SEEDS by ZAKA
    SEEDS
  6. AI Personal Toolkit

    2024 to 2025

    For people who use AI rather than build it. Seven modules and about twenty-four tools, covering AI fundamentals, getting real work out of ChatGPT, generating images, video and audio, using all of it for creative problem solving, and where the ethical lines are. Twenty-one hours across seven sessions, built to survive a working week. I taught three cohorts, retailored each time for the room it was going into, including a training for teachers at Université Saint-Joseph.

    Cover artwork for ZAKA's AI Personal Toolkit course
    View the course
  7. Corporate training

    2024 to 2025

    AI training written and delivered for Inception, a G42 company, and VISA Jordan in 2024, and IMAGIC in 2025. Different rooms, same problem: people who are good at their jobs and now have to work out what these tools are actually for. Practical sessions, not theory.

    The IMAGIC training cohort with ZAKA in 2025
    • Inception, a G42 company
    • Visa
    • IMAGIC
  8. AI certification and bootcamps

    2023 to 2025

    The technical track, and the one that turns people into practitioners rather than users. The four week bootcamp runs from data science and machine learning through deep learning and computer vision to natural language processing and time series, and nobody is certified without presenting a capstone. The longer certification track covers the same ground at depth, across four cohorts. One bootcamp cohort in 2023, then certification from there.

    A ZAKA cohort gathered in Beirut
    View the bootcamp

Appearances

Talks and panels

Where the teaching leaves the classroom: conference tutorials, embassy halls, ethics panels, and training rooms across the region.

The virtual room of the Al Sharq Forum webinar, participants joining from across the region

AI for Young Social Innovators

2025

Ran the training for Al Sharq Forum's two-day AI-Driven Solutions for Young Social Innovators webinar: how changemakers across the region can put AI to work on the problems their communities actually have.

The Youth Empowered by AI panel on stage

The Ethics Behind AI Decisions

2025

A session at the Youth Empowered by AI event, held with Together For Lebanon, followed by a panel on the same ground: privacy, bias, responsibility, safety, and what using these systems carefully actually asks of you.

Presenting at a podium at the Embassy of Palestine in Beirut

AI at the Embassy of Palestine

2025

A presentation in Beirut with ZAKA and Tech Trendy: is AI hype or here to stay, what makes ChatGPT tick, how image generation actually works, and where all of it might go next.

LegalTech Essentials

2025

Taught the blockchain and crypto session of the LegalTech Essentials course at Université La Sagesse, run with SADER Legal and ZAKA for law professionals and students.

DSC MENA 24

2024

A tutorial at the MENA Data Science Conference in Egypt: The Developer's Guide to ChatGPT API.

Results

What my students built

The projects are the honest measure of whether the teaching worked. These came out of the SE Factory bootcamp.