Elli Valla is a Researcher at the Department of Health Technologies of TalTech’s School of Information Technologies. She teaches students about deep learning in healthcare – in other words, a field where artificial intelligence applications are intertwined with medical challenges. Her path to becoming a lecturer has taken her through physics, mathematics, and machine learning, giving her a broad-based experience both as a learner and as a teacher.

The Value of Learning: Building Bridges Between Knowledge 

According to Valla, learning is above all a habit of creating new connections. She describes how her physics studies gave her a strong foundation that later helped her to grasp complex topics more easily. “When I started studying physics, it was quite frustrating to look at the blackboard and understand nothing, or to read a scientific article where the only familiar words in the title were ‘the’ and ‘and’. But if you keep reading, exploring, asking questions, and pushing through, the concepts and connections gradually start to make sense. Looking back, I realise that those difficulties gave me the confidence to learn new fields later on, such as machine learning and health technologies,” she says.

As a lecturer, Valla considers it essential to instil confidence in students. Her message is simple: “Whether you learn something or not is in your own hands. If you put in the time, even the most complex topics will eventually start to unfold.” She believes that talent is not merely an inborn trait – dedication and perseverance can take you just as far. Therefore, she considers leading by example crucial: if she expects something from her students, she is also ready to do it herself.

Elli Valla’s teaching philosophy can be summed up through a growth mindset. “It’s important not to get stuck in the idea that you can’t do something or won’t manage. Nowadays there are plenty of tools and resources available – what matters is learning how to use them for your own benefit,” she emphasises. 

Opportunity or Excuse?

Valla expects her students first and foremost to take responsibility. “A lecturer can create the environment, but the responsibility lies with the student. Saying ‘I can’t’ won’t help – you need to break the problem down into smaller steps. A clearly formulated question is easier to get and give help for,” she says. “Those who want, find a way; those who don’t, find an excuse – that mindset has carried me through life.”

She encourages students not to give up after the first failure but to give themselves time and the opportunity to reach understanding. “At first, it’s hard – but that very challenge trains your thinking and builds confidence,” she adds.

In her courses, Valla aims to create assignments that go beyond memorising facts. For instance, she asks students to design a deep learning model to solve a healthcare problem – whether detecting pneumonia from an X-ray or identifying early signs of Alzheimer’s disease from MRI scans. “Such assignments force students to define the problem themselves and create a solution. Even if they use language models for support, they still need to understand how the solution would actually work in real life,” she explains.

For Valla, the greatest joy of teaching is seeing a student who initially doubted themselves accomplish something they once thought impossible. “That sense of mission gives me strength and fills my teaching with deeper meaning,” she says.

Elli Valla believes that in addition to subject knowledge, future professionals must also develop self-management, responsibility, and problem-solving skills. She emphasises that high-quality learning begins with the ability to ask the right questions and to seek answers to them. 

Learn more about good learning and teaching practices: taltech.ee/en/learning