Keynote at the Day of Teaching 2023: "AI in education is not new"

2023-11-29 Prof. Dr Niels Pinkwart, Vice President for Teaching and Studies at HU Berlin and Scientific Director of the Educational Technology Lab at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin, was the keynote speaker at this year's Day of Teaching. He spoke about the history and future of AI in higher education.

"AI harbours a number of opportunities for diversity and inclusion. But AI also has a training bias." ©Jascha Brandes
"AI harbours a number of opportunities for diversity and inclusion. But AI also has a training bias."

Artificial intelligence was born in 1956, when scientists first used the term at the Dartmouth Conference. They looked at how automatic computers can work, how computers can be programmed to use languages and how computers can learn, i.e. develop neural networks," says Prof Dr Niels Pinkwart in the Central Building. In his lecture, he addresses the increasingly present topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and its application in higher education. His most important message for the audience: "AI in education is not new." He shows a typewritten page on Intelligent CAI. The publication appeared in the 1970s. The first sentence reads: "If computerised instruction is ever to have a large impact on education, computer-assisted instruction (CAI) systems must have the flexibility and skill of a human teacher."

"That was a strong statement in the 1970s, but it still is today," comments Niels Pinkwart. The system presented is called Scholar and was developed by Jamie Carbonell at Stanford. It is considered the first intelligent tutoring system. Scholar works like a chatbot and can answer questions about facts, such as the size of cities.

Niels Pinkwart used concrete application examples from research and practice to demonstrate the range of possibilities that AI technologies can offer teachers and learners: The BMBF research project MILKI-PSY, for example, uses AI to analyse movement and performance in sports or dance. The AI.EDU Lab researches the use of AI in university teaching and improves individual learning through the automatic evaluation of solutions. Niels Pinkwart cooperated with the FernUniversität Hagen. AI-based language courses are being developed in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut.

For Niels Pinkwart, AI, like any technology in education, has advantages and disadvantages: "For example, AI can support individual learning progressions, which we have long known in didactics as internal differentiation. AI harbours a number of opportunities for diversity and inclusion. But AI also has a training bias."

The researcher believes that the roles of teachers and learners in higher education will shift: "AI is here to stay."