Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - AI-SKILLS

AI-SKILLS

The AI-SKILLS project aims at developing and implementing a curricular integrated certificate program "Artificial Intelligence" at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which will enable students of all disciplines to deal with AI methods and AI technologies in a subject-specific way.

AI-SKILLS - Application-oriented infrastructure for AI communities in teaching-learning settings.

Oriented towards the Humboldtian educational ideal of "unity of research and teaching", the project will establish AI content in particular in research-oriented teaching-learning settings so that students can experience "learning AI by doing AI". It is through a structured and methodologically reflected application that the potentials of these new technologies are grasped and can be independently related to subject-specific issues. In the course of their university education, students should above all be enabled to use the technologies and methods central to their respective subject in a reflected manner. At the same time, concrete applications provide an opportunity to discuss legal and ethical issues of AI technologies beyond the learning of methodological, technical and informational basics.

The aim of the project is to develop a coordinated framework concept for the application-related use of AI technologies and AI methods in teaching. With the help of the established higher education didactic and technical support structures of the bologna.lab and the CMS, teachers interested in AI and the initiatives and expertise already existing at HU will be brought together. AI-SKILLS will employ three staff members as community catalysts, who will identify learning content and design teaching-learning settings in close cooperation with the teachers, but who will also be responsible for the quality assurance of the teaching offers. Building on shared competencies and resources, this will create AI communities of teachers who, through professional support, will be enabled to develop common standards and content for teaching in order to build AI skills in all subjects in the long term.

AI-SKILLS emphasizes machine learning and symbolic AI methods to address needs from all disciplines. By relying on a JupyterHub that integrates Jupyter notebooks, computing power and storage capacity, teachers and students are enabled to focus entirely on the concrete application and its methodological reflection. Jupyter notebooks greatly simplify the application, documentation and subsequent use of corresponding methods and learning content. The subsequent introduction of computational essays as a form of examination will ensure that the concrete implementation of AI applications can be examined, rather than just their ideal description. This shifts the focus of teaching from a rather abstract description to the concrete code- and data-based application of AI technologies, so that the practical competencies and their reflected application move into the center.

By building active communities of practice and systematically involving central university institutions such as the bologna.lab and the CMS, the exchange, dissemination and subsequent use of the resulting AI-based teaching-learning materials will be driven forward according to principles of Open Science. With a close integration of competence-oriented didactics and methods of AI research, a continuous further development of the IT infrastructure, which is agilely oriented to the needs of students and teachers, as well as a continuous evaluation of the individual measures, the project ensures at the same time a sustainable implementation and effectiveness.

Project Lead

Prof. Dr. Niels Pinkwart (Vice President for Academic Affairs)

Prof. Dr. Robert Jäschke (Information Processing and Analytics)

Subproject Lead

Wolfgang Deicke (Head of the bologna.lab)

Prof. Dr. Torsten Hiltmann (Digital History)

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Mayweg (Digital Knowledge Management in Teaching and Learning)

Uwe Pirr (Head of the Digital Media Department at CMS)

Staff

Dr. Martin Dröge (Community Catalyst Humanities)

Founder

Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding code 16DHBKI014)

Project Duration

Start: 12/2021

End: 11/2025

Research Areas

Artificial intelligence, Digital Literacy, Digital Humanities, Computer Science, University Didactics, AI Didactics

 

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