Teaching Impulses: Promote AI Skills

In a nutshell: Supporting the development of AI skills

Students are expected to acquire complex practical skills as part of their degree programmes. These practical skills are increasingly influenced by AI technologies.

On the one hand, AI grant access to new methods of gaining knowledge and enable more productive ways of working through versatile AI models. On the other hand, AI allows students to ‘cut corners’ in learning processes and circumvent requirements, even where competence development concepts are well-designed. Learning opportunities remain unused. Furthermore, AI reveals and exacerbates pre-existing structural weaknesses in teaching approaches and in the development of skills.

Given the impact of new AI technologies, AI skills must therefore be developed explicitly and systematically, as AI-supported tools are already widespread amongst students. AI competences are essential for ensuring professional competence, academic quality and good scientific practice in an AI-driven higher education. Various AI competence frameworks (e.g. that of the Stifterverband) address these areas of tension through defined areas of competence.

When teaching AI skills, teachers often face the challenge of integrating appropriate AI tools into academic studies, to present students with relevant real-world scenarios according to their future career fields. At the same time, there is often a lack of structured, ready-to-use, and didactically viable formats. Our 60-minute teaching resources provide a starting point for integrating AI skills into academic development in an accessible way.

Overview of the individual teaching impulses

Teaching Impulse #1: Developing research questions using THKI Chat

Enable students, through interaction with the university-wide AI interface THKI Chat, to develop a research question (e.g. for a project or an essay) tailored to the context of their course, thereby learning how to use large AI language models systematically in a research context.

Teaching Impulse #2: Processing text documents using THKI Chat

With the help of this teaching impulse, students learn how to work with text materials, such as their own drafts, seminar papers or shared text documents such as PDFs or Word files, whilst ensuring that they handle texts in an appropriate manner that complies with data protection and copyright laws.

Teaching Impulse #3: Critically reflecting on working methods with THKI Chat

Teach your students how to use AI tools such as THKI Chat in a targeted and effective manner and use them as a tool to critically reflect upon, structure and adapt their scientific work, as well as the methodologies and approaches they employ in academic work.

Practical advice

The teaching impulses can also be combined with one another to demonstrate, for example, how certain work processes can be supported, enhanced and made more efficient through the use of AI systems.

Furthermore, each individual teaching impulse can be adapted in terms of its structure, duration and objectives, and supplemented with other teaching methods.

You can find information on possible combinations, variations and extensions in the Lehrpfade articles for each teaching impulse, as well as in the PDF documents available for download.

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