Following a debate on the DigitalPakt Schule that focused primarily on the school infrastructure, the project poses the central question of how the fundamental possibilities of digital learning contexts can be realized in the real school context for the effective digitalization of school education.
In the first project phase of ALEE, we set ourselves the challenge of designing and developing an adaptive AI-based learning platform for individual support in business lessons. We created a prototype learning platform for a selected subject area with over 700 different tasks of varying complexity and empirically evaluated it in a pilot study in the real world of education.
Listening skills are known to pose a great challenge for many language learners, as their development requires a lot of exposure to spoken language, which is in many ways less accessible than written language. Authentic spoken language is often considerably above learners' comprehension level and, compared to written language, is more difficult to adapt. In addition, learners (and often teachers) have little awareness of the building blocks of successful listening, such as the ability to recognize specific phonemic contrasts or to segment continuous speech stream into words. If these abilities are not well developed, this becomes a bottleneck in accessing any top-down listening strategies, such as using contextual information or speakers' intonation, which is very important to infer speaker's intentions and attitudes.
Reading competences in foreign languages are essential for young Europeans to gain access to information in other countries, to compare different perspectives on complex issues and to cooperate in solving problems in international contexts. The teaching of these crucial competences cannot rely on pre-packaged materials in textbooks and readers, but needs to use reading materials that (1) address current issues to build and maintain reading motivation and that (2) meet the language levels of students to develop their reading competences. In order to increase fluency in reading, it is of particular importance that the texts' linguistic features correspond to the individual learner's level of second language acquisition. Most learning environments require individualisation, and in the field of reading in a foreign language, this means that teachers need to be able to provide texts of different difficulty level to a group of students in order to effectively foster indidivual development. Therefore, the LATILL project supports foreign language teachers by developing digital tools that enable them to identify such level-adequate texts of interest for their various classes and individual learners.
PostdocTEIFUN is an interdisciplinary postdoctoral college in the field of education and AI. Research is conducted into technology-supported innovations in subject-specific teaching settings and their practical application. Extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications permeate almost all areas of social life. How education and teaching relate to this is the subject of intense debate. The dynamics that can currently be observed are correspondingly high: research work on the relationship between school education and the new XR and AI technologies is already available or is currently being developed. However, there is still not enough research to be able to make conclusive statements about how technology-supported innovations can best contribute to an actual and sustainable improvement in subject-specific teaching. The cooperative postdoctoral college TEIFUN, which is being run jointly by the Professional School of Education Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg (PSE) and the Tübingen School of Education (TüSE) from 2024 to 2029, is dedicated to precisely this question.
In the WoLKE project, which is funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (MWK), AI methods are specifically analyzed in order to develop technically and didactically suitable teaching-learning formats for use in teacher training. The increasing spread of AI in education and society requires teachers to develop not only technical skills, but also a deep understanding of the ethical and didactic implications of AI tools. Without sound training, there is a risk that AI will be used without reflection, which can lead to unforeseeable consequences in the classroom.
Prof. Dr. Walt Detmar Meurers
phone:
+49 7071 979-180