Patron Nathanael Liminski, Minister for Federal and European Affairs, International Affairs and Media and Head of the State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia: “It is already impossible to imagine our everyday life without the use of artificial intelligence. With the rapid development of possible applications, we must not neglect to take people along with us so that they can recognise and classify the great opportunities on the one hand, but also the possible risks of AI. What AI means in concrete terms for learning and teaching of the future along the entire education chain is now being addressed by the task force with representatives from science and practice, whose work we hope will generate new ideas and impulses for a responsible approach to AI in education.”
Science Minister Ina Brandes: “The application of artificial intelligence must go hand in hand with the question of ethics. As the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, we are investing in AI research to counterbalance the large American corporations for whom ethical issues are not a priority. The task force will help us to make the opportunities of artificial intelligence available to everyone and enable more spatial and temporal flexibility in studying with new teaching/learning formats. In this way, we will facilitate access to education and degrees – also for working people, students with children or relatives in need of care and people with disabilities.”
“How seriously North Rhine-Westphalia takes the topic of AI is made clear, among other things, by the fact that we are the first federal state to have provided our schools with comprehensive guidelines for dealing with text-generating artificial intelligence,” says North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister of Schools and Education Dorothee Feller. “With this, we are supporting teachers, school administrators and school supervisors to use AI in a balanced way in the classroom, to recognise challenges and to take advantage of opportunities. Artificial intelligence, used responsibly, will enrich our everyday school life and help to develop learning and performance tasks.”
Identify needs for action and regulation in the education sector
The Task Force is characterised by a diversity of academic disciplines and practical perspectives: Scientists from the educational and social sciences as well as computer science, together with representatives from the responsible state ministries and state administration and educational practice, identify needs for action and regulation and develop concrete proposals for state policy measures for the responsible integration of AI in teaching and learning processes. Together, strategies for the implementation of AI innovations in schools, universities and further education organisations will thus be developed.
“Generative AI such as ChatGPT or DALL∙E are on everyone’s lips at the moment, but the application potential for AI in education goes far beyond that. We want to analyse these innovation potentials and the challenges associated with them from different scientific and practical perspectives and develop concrete recommendations for action for state policy,” says Prof. Michael Baurmann, founding director of CAIS.
CAIS coordinates the task force. Its members include representatives from NRW research institutions (Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Kompetenzplattform KI.NRW, Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security, Zentrum für Wissenschaftsdidaktik der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, KI:edu.nrw, German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning, CATALPA – Center of Advanced Technology for Assisted Learning and Predictive Analytics and the Faculty of Law at the FernUniversität Hagen), from the Ministries for Culture and Science, for Schools and Education and the State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia and from educational practice, the Grimme Institute, the Landesverband VHS NRW, Fraunhofer Institute IAIS (AI4schools), the District Government of Münster, Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft für katholische Erwachsenen- und Familienbildung in NRW.
About CAIS:
The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has been providing long-term funding to the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum as a central institute for digitisation research since April 2021. By proposing evidence-based solutions, the CAIS contributes to shaping the digital transformation in the interest of the people. The CAIS was founded as a research college at the beginning of 2017 and has since been awarding fellowships to national and international guest researchers in the field of digitalisation research. The first research programme “Digital Democratic Innovations” started in October 2021, and the second research programme “Educational Technologies and Artificial Intelligence” has been running since mid-2022. The third research programme “Design of trustworthy artificial intelligence” is planned for the beginning of 2024. The research programmes interlink the subject worlds of social sciences and humanities to computer science and test research results in practice.
Über das Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS)
Das Land Nordrhein-Westfalen fördert das Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum seit April 2021 langfristig als zentrales Institut für Digitalisierungsforschung. Durch evidenzbasierte Lösungsvorschläge trägt das CAIS zur Gestaltung des digitalen Wandels im Interesse der Menschen bei. Gegründet wurde das CAIS als Wissenschaftskolleg Anfang 2017 und vergibt seitdem Fellowships an nationale und internationale Gastwissenschaftler:innen im Bereich der Digitalisierungsforschung. Das erste Forschungsprogramm „Digitale demokratische Innovationen“ ist im Oktober 2021 gestartet, seit Mitte 2022 läuft das zweite Forschungsprogramm „Bildungstechnologien und Künstlicher Intelligenz“. Im April 2024 folgt das dritte Forschungsprogramm zum Thema „Design vertrauenswürdiger Künstlicher Intelligenz“. Die Forschungsprogramme verzahnen die Fächerwelten von Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften bis zur Informatik und erproben Forschungsergebnisse in der Praxis. Weitere Informationen über das CAIS finden Sie unter www.cais-research.de.