Abstract:

The AI Campus / KI-Campus is an innovative pilot project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) focused on developing a digital learning platform specifically geared towards AI skills and competences. Since October 2019, the AI Campus has been jointly developed by Stifterverband, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and other partners, and a beta version was released in July 2020, reaching more than 10.000 learners, mostly from Europe, so far.

The AI Campus encompasses the foundations of AI as well as interdisciplinary research in specific fields such as machine learning and robotics. In addition, the AI Campus is aimed at developing learning opportunities that specifically address the needs of individual sectors or specialist areas, such as the use of AI in medicine, education or industry . More than 30 partner institutions from Germany and Luxembourg develop training courses on different aspects of Artificial Intelligence and Data Literacy in German and English (https://ki-campus.org/overview?locale=en). All courses and other formats such as videos and podcasts are available free of charge, AI Campus Originals are openly licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0) and available for re-use by any other organisation.

The project is based on 6 guiding principles. Two of those will be reflected in this contribution:
1) Technical interoperability and cooperation with other platforms and initiatives are considered to be essential principles.
2) All educational resources created and technologies used follow the principle of openness, e.g. by developing open educational resources (OER) and open code.

These guiding principles have already had a strong impact in the first year of the pilot project. Unlike others, the project was able to significantly overachieve its goals in times of the Corona pandemic and develop new educational resources on AI quickly and with high quality through agile collaborative approaches. At the same time, open licensing allows for immediate re-use of technologies and content. The article reflects on concrete use cases and the associated opportunities and risks of a strong cooperation orientation and openness in the field of e-learning. Finally, building on this, it shows perspectives for an overarching European education area.

Keywords:

Openness, Collaboration, Cooperation, Artificial Intelligence, AI Campus, Interoperability, MOOCs, OER.