Florence is a professor and digital enthusiast. She creatively harnesses the full potential of digitalisation in academic teaching. This leads to new challenges which will enable brand-new opportunities for international cooperation.
Florence is a professor and digital enthusiast. She creatively harnesses the full potential of digitalisation in academic teaching. This leads to new challenges which will enable brand-new opportunities for international cooperation.
The students in Florence’s courses are very diverse. They have different levels of competence, practical experience and prior knowledge. Accordingly, students perceive the technical and content-related barriers of a task in different ways.
Problem: Many students won’t achieve the intended learning success. Florence’s courses have a high dropout rate, which is very disappointing for everyone involved. Florence has an idea and visits her university’s e-learning centre.
I would like to offer my students an adaptive digital learning system in preparation for my course “Media Use in Educational Work” next semester. I want to be able to evaluate the students’ prior knowledge with the help of AI methods. This way, I can provide adequate tutorials in advance and facilitate a consistent starting point. Do we have a tool like that?
What a great idea! Students would be able to prepare for course content in their own environment. But this plan is also very ambitious. We don’t have a suitable tool with this level of automated evaluation. And I’m pretty sure this would have to be a customised tool, too. But if you’d like to gain a deeper understanding of using artificial intelligence you should visit the learning platform KI-Campus (in German). It offers a lot of material about using AI and you yourself could gain new skills on related topics.
But to identify an appropriate tool you should also have a look at research projects. The Digital Learning Map 2020 created by e-teaching.org provides an overview of German projects for educational contexts. And then you could use the European Project Database CORDIS to search for and contact suitable projects throughout Europe.
Here’s an important note before you start: Please remember that your students should decide for themselves which information they want to share with you or the university. Their data belongs to them, and they need to be able to retrace who is using it and for which purpose. The initiative OpenAIRE provides webinars on this topic, which you can use to inform yourself.
As recommended, Florence looks into research projects on adaptive learning systems and automation. She finds a number of interesting projects about data-driven learning assistants, for example the BMBF funded project SIDDATA...
In addition to fascinating German projects, Florence discovers a research project in Spain—they are developing and testing a tool similar to what she is looking for.
Collaborating with the Spanish lecturer Cecilia serves as an immense inspiration for Florence.
The two dedicated lecturers are planning to visit one another for some time in order to learn from each other. Thanks to Erasmus+, they are able to meet during a teacher exchange. For 6 weeks respectively, Florence will be in Sevilla and Cecilia will be in Schönburg. Florence is also involving her departmental colleagues, who are looking forward to the new input from Spain.
6 months later, back in Schönburg: At a small university event, Florence presented a digital report on her experience. She also learned a lot while Cecilia was in Germany. Her written report is available online on the university’s website. Florence already plans to include it in her next course. The current course is a virtual collaboration with Cecilia’s course in Sevilla.
Their goal: Together with the students, they want to evaluate country-specific differences and cultural characteristics.
The Basis: They are using an adaptive automated tool for preliminary inquiries which Cecilia developed in a research project.
You can find out how a Virtual Exchange works in this clip by the EVOLVE project. Florence and Cecilia created a unique learning environment for their diverse group of students. The joint seminar is location-independent with appointments in Schönburg and Sevilla, which can be attended in person or online. Even beyond the contents of the course, the students gained a cultural understanding. They were able to communicate without the need to leave their home university.
Currently, AI methods are used in a variety of projects and contexts in the education sector. This story illustrates only some examples of this development.
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This is an infographic under Creative Common License (CC BY-SA) about the “Dimensions of Student Diversity in Germany” based on this chart of the CHE. Florence made this visualisation and is going to use it in her next lecture. You can download this chart in different file formats and use it in educational contexts!
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For her courses, Florence uses and creates Open Educational Resources (OER), license-free material that can be used in educational contexts. There are different online platforms that offer a variety of OER, for example openRUB or OER-Hörnchen(in German). Within the scope of supporting OER initiatives, the BMBF is funding the research project “EduArc” which develops a digital infrastructure for OER between universities.
Florence wrote her dissertation on the topic of peer learning in different educational sectors.
Tim is a third-semester student in educational sciences at the University of Schönburg. Last semester, he quit Florence’s course after three weeks. But he needs this module, so he asked Florence for a meeting to talk about his personal situation. The last semester was not easy for Tim. He hopes Florence will offer an alternative solution when she understands his financial and schedule problems.
It’s not easy to balance family life and a job. Florence can share tasks with her husband, but opportunities for shared professional experiences are incredibly important. This is why Florence’s husband and their son Luca will travel to Sevilla for an extended weekend. So they can get valuable insight in Florence’s exciting time in Spain.
Thanks to various initiatives like EduGain and EU-wide efforts to better connect university infrastructure, Florence is always connected to all web services her host university in Sevilla provides. She can assist students in digitally-driven projects and can use the library and similar services like she is used to.
Florence and Cecilia are co-teaching a seminar for the Spanish students. Together, they developed a course with a Research Based Learning setting. The students will conduct an empirical experiment and gather data on collaborative knowledge building, using Wikidata.
When the semester and Florence’s course finally come to an end, she receives mostly positive feedback from her students about the use and additional value of this tool for course preparation.
Florence gets in touch with a university in Sevilla and explains her interest and her willingness to use their tool together with her students. Florence and the Spanish lecturer Cecilia immediately like each other and reach an agreement. Florence can use the tool. The collected data will be available to Florence as well as to a Spanish research team, launching a joint research expedition.
Her family is the most important thing in Florence’s life. She can always rely on her husband Stefan. He supports her in everyday matters and also provides valuable advice professionally. For a couple of years, Florence and Stefan have been a small family now. At first, the birth of her child had turned Florence’s life upside down.
Florence (43) has been a professor for educational sciences for 5 years. She works at the University of Schönburg, a cosy student town. Since her appointment, Florence has been especially occupied with the challenges and opportunities of digitalising academic teaching. In her courses, she loves to experiment with digital media and wants to use the practical experience to proceed with her dissertation topic.
