June 2026 - EduTec Science

Jun252026 by Prof. Dr. Hendrik DrachslerNo Comments

Keynote: From Experiment to Infrastructure: Reflections on AI in Higher Education

Academy, Artificial Intelligence, Conference, Higher Education, Keynote, Keynote

Today, Hendrik Drachsler gave a keynote at the VHB annual Conference in Bamberg, speaking to an audience of over 33 AI project leaders from higher education institutions in Germany. The topic was "From Experiment to Infrastructure: Scaling, Evaluation, and Governance of AI Systems in Higher Education," reflecting his thinking on various grassroots projects and how to scale them across the whole university. The gap between performance and learning Hendrik opened with a provocation: Is AI the new calculator? Both technologies automate cognitive processes, both faced early scepticism, and both promised efficiency gains. But the analogy breaks down quickly. A calculator takes over arithmetic, not problem-solving. AI takes over the formulation, analysis, and argument. That is a qualitative difference, and it demands a different institutional / governance response. Mixed results on…

Jun182026 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

JTELSS Workshop: Designing Empirical TEL Studies in Higher Education: Practical Research Insights from the CORE Project

Event, Workshop

The 20th EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning 2026 took place in Burgas, Bulgaria. The event featured a comprehensive program including inspiring keynote talks, mentoring activities, networking opportunities, and workshop presentations. The EduTec team, represented by Fabíola Gonçalves Coelho Ribeiro, Gianluca Romano, Leon Camus, and Sebastian Gombert had the opportunity to present the workshop Designing Empirical TEL Studies in Higher Education: Practical Research Insights from the CORE Project. The workshop highlighted the design, main characteristics, challenges, lessons learned, and key findings of the Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE) project. Through discussions based on real research experiences, participants explored how methodological decisions and research strategies can support the generation of meaningful evidence about learning processes in empirical and longitudinal studies within the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL).…

Jun152026 by Nina MouhammadNo Comments

JTELSS workshop: Academic Note-Taking with Obsidian + Zotero

Summer School

Have you ever started writing the background section of a paper and suddenly thought: "Where did I read that again?" You know the finding, you remember it mattered, but you just can't place it. This is exactly the kind of problem this workshop was designed to help with, by building a note-taking system that lets you actually find what you've read, even years later, and make sense of it in context. The workshop was run by Nina Mouhammad at this year's Joint Technology-Enhanced Learning Summer School (JTELSS) in Bulgaria. After a welcome and a short introduction to the topic, we got into one of the more interesting parts of the session: a structured controversy on the question "Do I still need to read papers and make notes on them, if…

Jun102026 by Heather WehnerNo Comments

New Pub: Competent Usage of AI and Digital Technology in Education

Artificial Intelligence, New Pub, Publication

[caption id="attachment_8403" align="alignright" width="300"] Modified TPACK model as Level 2 of the AIEDTEC-CDM. Note. TPK = technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK), TCK = technological content knowledge, PCK = pedagogical content knowledge, TPCK = technological pedagogical content knowledge.[/caption] How can teachers and learners use AI and digital technology competently, critically and safely in education? Simply using AI tools and digital technology in educational settings does not necessarily mean that learners will profit from these tools. Some tools may have a positive effect on learning, while others may not. A newly published paper addresses this issue and formulates a theoretical framework for the “Competence to Use Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology in Educational Processes” (AIEDTEC competence). Combining insights from psychology and computer science, it aims to provide a theoretical definition of the competent…

Jun102026 by Sebastian GombertNo Comments

[New Pub] Analyzing students’ conceptual understanding over the course of a teaching unit: Tracking changes in knowledge structures over time

New Pub

In a recent study, we explored how students’ conceptual understanding develops throughout a digitally supported chemistry unit on chemical kinetics. Working with approximately 300 upper-secondary students, we combined automated scoring of students’ written responses and other learning artifacts with network analysis techniques to model the growth of individual knowledge structures over time. The results showed that transformer-based language models can reliably identify and score chemistry-related knowledge elements from classroom data, enabling the construction of longitudinal knowledge networks that reflect how students connect scientific concepts. Several network characteristics were associated with students’ posttest performance, suggesting that these representations capture meaningful aspects of learning progress. The findings highlight the potential of combining automated assessment and learning analytics to provide teachers with real-time insights into students’ developing understanding and to support adaptive instructional…