Abstract:

Higher education plays a pivotal role in shaping individuals' intellectual and professional development. In an era characterized by rapid technological advancements, economic shifts, and global challenges, it is crucial for universities to adapt their curricula to equip students with the skills necessary for the future.These skills, often referred to as "future skills," encompass a set of competencies that go beyond subject-specific knowledge and are essential for success in the evolving workforce and society. Future skills are accordingly a diverse set of competencies that enable individuals to navigate an increasingly complex world effectively. These skills-set includes the so-called digital literacy, which encompasses a range of skills, knowledge, and competencies that enable individuals to access, evaluate, create, and communicate information using digital tools (Ehlers 2020; Schüller et al.2019;). However, digital literacy as a future skill is increasingly the subject of debate, as the rapid spread of AI is raising the question for many universities as to which core skills students actually still need and what AI can do for them in terms of academic work (Nix & Buxmann 2021). No one would have thought in the current fall of 2023 that we would find ChatGPT almost a normality and that there would be a multitude of similar AI´s by now. Jenny AI, Jasper or Copy AI are just a few examples of how scientific writing and scientific work are significantly influenced by AI today. For universities, this does not only pose problems with regard to authorship and author issues or plagiarism checks. On a didactic level, many university teachers feel that their role is being sensitively disturbed by AI-based writing tools. If technical questions can also be posed to the AI or technical discussions can be held with ChatGPT, who still needs the expertise of university lecturers? The paper takes up this, deliberately striking question, by critically analyzing the classical understanding of education at universities, especially at German universities. As a counter-proposal, a co-constructive educational framework is introduced, which enables educators to change their role (Weimann-Sandig 2023). The main difference between constructivism (Vygotskij 1964)and co-constructivism lies in the emphasis on the social element, i.e. a two-way teaching-learning relationship. While constructivism focuses on individual learning, co-constructivism emphasizes the importance of social interactions and the joint construction of knowledge in social contexts. In the co-constructivist concept, lecturers also become knowledge recipients and thus continue to educate themselves through the input of their students (Weimann-Sandig et al. 2023). This role change offers them the possibility of a fundamental further development of their understanding of teaching and makes them adaptable to the needs of the universities of the future. In a best practice example from our university development project BediRa, we provide didactic recommendations and exercises for teachers to face the new challenge of AI in teaching and try it out together with students. We will thus present evaluations of our TestLab, which we have been running for three years and which is based on a co-constructive approach.

Keywords:

AI, Higher Education, Higher Education Didactics, Role of Educators.