Education: ComAI for learning and teaching

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Breiter
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Communication Sciences
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516511468

In education, particularly in higher education, technologies have a long history of improving learning and teaching. Most recently GPT-4 and other LLMs are seen both in media discourses and in politics as a "game changer", confronting higher education with societal expectations and fears. In the light of this, we will address how learning and teaching as well as supporting administrative processes are challenged by the appropriation of ComAI in higher education. We will investigate how higher education institutions cope with these technological changes and ist (side-)consequences of embedded biases and related social inequalities. This will be investigated with qualitative interviews in case studies at five German universities, accompanied by student surveys, analyses of data journeys and administrative process models. To understand the dynamics of ComAI’s appropriation and the challenges that emerge through ist introduction in higher education administrations - including related patterns of coping and imaginaries of future developments - we will contextualize our research at these five universities with investigations of US universities where ComAI is already being used on a larger scale.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5656: Communicative AI: The Automation of Societal Communication