Interview with Lecturio's CEO - Stefan Wisbauer
Stefan is the Co-CEO of Lecturio, where he oversees the growth and development of the company’s innovative learning & science based medical education platform, which is used by medical students and schools around the world. He sees a need to build scalable new education initiatives to address the health worker shortage around the world and believes a solid digital foundation is a necessity for the success of such efforts.

Section 1: About Me 👔
Q: Tell us about yourself
- Stefan: A few words about myself. I’m 53, German, born in Germany, father of two kids, 11 and 15, and based in Leipzig, in Germany. I’ve been doing this role at Lecturio for the last ten years
Q: What do you do in your free time?
- Stefan: I do enjoy sunshine and swimming and music and art and lots of different things. I have regular workouts every morning. Brief but intense. And otherwise, between work and family, there seems to be little time left most days.
Q: Describe your leadership style in one word.
- Stefan: The best single word I could come up with is flexible. Because I think there are different types of problems and situations to deal with. And it would be dangerous to have one fixed approach to it. At times, you need to do more listening. Other times, you need to do more directing and finding different ways of approaching each problem. Also, you’re dealing with people that are different, each with their own interests and personalities. So flexibility, in my mind, is key. Obviously, you need to set a clear vision and help everybody problem-solve. So I like the notion of serving leadership, where you sort of help people, help unblock whatever they’re trying to make happen, and otherwise, as far as possible, let them lead the way while setting an overall framework for it all.
Section 2: Behind Lecturio 🎓
Q: What was the inspiration behind Lecturio?
- Stefan: Lecturio was initially founded to be like the digitalization of university education, like EDX and Coursera. And that proved difficult within Germany. So then it ended up focusing on the higher end professional segments for education, where there was a willingness to pay. In Germany, we do law, tax, medicine and more. Medicine is the biggest segment there. And so that’s also what we went global with
Q: Tell us about the most memorable project you’ve worked on at Lecturio.
- Stefan: One of the things I’m most excited about is our work in Ethiopia, where we work across the health system, with medical schools and nursing schools and technicians and community health workers. It’s still got a long journey ahead of itself, hopefully. And working with some support from GIZ and the global fund. This ability to transform into larger scale systems, especially in Africa, where you have a chance to leapfrog, is something very rewarding and exciting.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?
- Stefan: A challenge with any digital tool or library resource is driving the engagement. And so we’ve been working very hard to make sure we have exemplary customer success management, and we continue to evolve in that arena because often for the leaders in medical institutions, the change management is not an easy challenge. So therefore, the powerful product that we have needs to be combined with the appropriate training and holding, monitoring, curriculum mapping and so on to unfold its full potential.


Section 3: The Future of Artificial Intelligence 🤖
Q: What concerns or reservations, if any, do you have regarding the integration of AI in medical education? How can these concerns be addressed?
- Stefan: One concern with regards to AI is that it’s so powerful, high performing, fast, and accurate that you can overtrust it. In reality, it still has problems. Hallucinations can get things wrong, so therefore a fully trained eye reviewing content before it is used, is very important. Other areas are a little less risky. If the AI suggests three videos for review and one is a little less necessary than the others, that’s a less risky topic. It needs to be handled with care for each application and looked at in terms of its limitations and the risk of anything going wrong. It is also the case in patient care. Still, I think there are ways where the AI becomes a decision maker. But who knows, in ten years time we might trust the AI more than the human. It’s evolving so rapidly that it is difficult to predict.
Q: As technology evolves, how can medical educators stay updated and ensure that they are effectively utilizing the latest AI tools in their teaching methods?
- Stefan: It’s a rapid evolution with such an increase in the number of powerful tools available that you have to try to stay up to date. On one hand, I can recommend our webinar series where we talk about these kinds of topics that we put effort into preparing and making sure it is up to date. On the other hand, you can join communities of educators as they share their experiences with different tools. So that from the very broad, massive volume of AI news, you already get a somewhat pre-selected, pre-digested, pre-evaluated review, which can save you time and it helps you learn from educators as they have already applied these things and obviously it gives you a room to share and ask questions as well.
Stefan shared with us lots of inspiring ideas and we can see how passionate he feels about integrating AI in medical education. With AI, we have the chance to make individual tutoring and a higher quality of education more widely available and accessible to lower and middle income countries. Reach out to us to find out more and we can even connect you to Stefan on his next visit to Singapore!