Digital systems such as virtual classrooms, target group-oriented learning portals and mobile apps, are opening up great opportunities to optimize support for all students and help them to develop their potential. Yet, in practice, there is still a dearth of appropriate concepts for the integration of the numerous technical innovations in everyday education. “There is a lot going on,” says Maria Wirzberger, “but unfortunately a lot of it misses the mark.” The pedagogical expert wants to introduce intelligent educational technologies that could later be used in a targeted manner, to which end her research is focused on multidisciplinary networks. In terms of her approach to teaching, she agrees with Socrates: “My starting assumption is that learners already have quite a lot of knowledge and that my job is to bring it out.”
Wirzberger heads up the “Department of Teaching and Learning with Intelligent Systems” (LLiS) at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Educational Science and, along with her team, forms part of Cyber Valley, one of the largest AI research collaborations in Europe. Accepting the junior professorship was just another step for her in an eclectic career. “My career profile is pretty colorful,” she says. She studied therapeutic pedagogy, psychology and human factors and trained as a personal coach. She is as well versed in infant and adult education as she is in computer-based cognitive models, digitalization and software development, the “common thread” of which is education.
To discover how people teach and learn, she analyzes such things as how learners draw upon their cognitive resources. She also uses computer models to simulate cognitive processes and compares the model data with human imaging data. To develop tools, such as AI-based training for attention monitoring and testing which she tries out in various educational contexts, she pools her pedagogical knowledge and methods as well as drawing upon psychology and information technology.
APP-Based digital teaching
When it comes to training future teachers, she focuses on interactivity and the students' own activities in addition to this interdisciplinary approach. For example, she incorporates “active breaks” into her introductory lecture on educational psychology. She uses lego in her seminars to help people visualize novel ideas and concepts. “It's good for the students to see what can be achieved beyond the traditional didactic methods,” she says. She also transfers her philosophy to the digital space, for example, with the aid of intellectual games, short experiments and embedded quiz questions. Yet her real objective is to combine analogue and digital systems and to utilize the best of both worlds. As she explains: “We don't have to make a choice. Even when we're giving digital lessons, we're still moving about in our own physical world.” Looking at her recently launched “BeeLife” project demonstrates what she means by this.
This project involves a collaboration with researchers at the Chemnitz University of Technology aimed at developing a mobile teaching app primarily aimed at younger pupils. It’s purpose is to make fifth and sixth graders aware of what they themselves can do in their everyday lives to protect the environment and endangered wild bee species, which is why the use of the app is an integral part of school project workshops. The project is specifically aimed at protecting the natural habitats of wild bees thus preserving biodiversity. When the app is launched, a virtual wild bee hatches, which the children care for like a pet thereby developing a bond with it over time.
The objective is to create favorable living conditions for their own particular wild bee by acting in an ecologically responsible manner. During the course of this interaction, the children learn such things as which flowers or herbs their wild bee needs to feed on. If these plants are then planted in the school garden as part of a project workshop the app will show how the insect is gradually faring better. Wirzberger is confident that “experiences of success such as these boost motivation and ultimately also learning efficiency.”
Introduce student teachers to reflective practice
Methods, such as those used in BeeLife, can also be applied to other subjects. The interdisciplinary scientist always considers it important to create low-threshold access to intelligent learning systems, to create transparency concerning the use of data and, above all, to enable teachers to use the new tools in a confident manner and in a spirit of reflection. “If we wish to implement digitalization in schools in a sustainable manner,” she emphasizes, “we have to begin with student teachers.” She believes that this also includes discussing the potential impact of AI-driven systems on society, such as when algorithms evoke unconscious prejudices. Wirzberger likes to refer to the “racist soap dispenser” that went viral on social media for only dispensing soap to people with light skin because infrared technology had not previously been trained to recognize dark-skinned hands.
“It’s good for the students to see what can be achieved beyond the traditional didactic methods.”
Jun.-Prof. Maria Wirzberger
“This raises questions that affect all of us in our everyday lives,” she says. One of the objectives of the “Reflecting on Intelligent Systems in the Next Generation” (RISING) teaching forum is to sensitize students to these issues at an early stage and in different contexts. RISING is being developed in the context of the University of Stuttgart’s new Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems (IRIS) of which Maria Wirzberger is the spokesperson together with Steffen Staab. The University’s purpose for RISING is to anchor the concept of “AI and society” directly in teaching across all disciplines, for example via key qualification modules or as part of introductory lectures. An overarching teaching forum will be created to this end, which will initially bundle existing course content, but will also provide new formats and methods over time. Wirzberger and her team are currently expanding the teaching courses on offer in conjunction with all stakeholders. The crucial thing, she explains, is to clarify what teachers need to trigger a process of reflection among their students, and to discover the main issues that concerned them. “Our teaching forum represents a generic framework into which we can integrate a wide variety of content going forward.”
The first reflection modules are scheduled to be launched as early as 2021 at the University of Stuttgart. Wirzberger has already made a start by including the subject of “unconscious stereotypes and prejudices in (digital) teaching materials” in her own lecture on educational psychology, which is one of numerous building blocks with which she prepares prospective teachers for digitalization and promotes a teaching and research culture aimed at exploting the “potential of the information age for a better and smarter educational environment”.
Text: Jutta Witte
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Maria Wirzberger, e-mail, phone: +49 711 685 81176