Agency and AI: Co-Creating the University of the Future

Transformative learning, relationship-based education and co-design in healthcare, business and society

We are living in a time of profound upheaval: AI makes knowledge available at all times and is changing professions and skills - including in medicine and the social sciences. In the face of global crises, many young people are also experiencing a feeling of powerlessness and helplessness.

At a time when machines can deliver content, universities need to be more than knowledge providers: they need to open up spaces in which students learn to think, make critical judgements, make decisions, take responsibility and create meaning. Universities need to be developed that enable self-efficacy by co-designing studies and real-life challenges and developing solutions together.

Participants at the conference will address this task and further explore the following questions:

• What role does the university have when AI imparts knowledge - and what role do students have?
• What is the difference between studying medicine and studying social sciences or humanities when AI supports diagnoses, writes texts and analyses data?
• What skills will people need in the future: powers of judgement, relationship skills, creativity, courage to take the initiative?

The underlying key questions will be:

• How do we as a university create spaces in which people remain or become curious, take responsibility and want to shape things themselves?
• How do students enter into lively learning relationships with each other and with lecturers - in formats in which relationship-orientated, experience-based learning becomes possible?
• Can the world become a campus?
• And can students and lecturers contribute something to the current challenges?
• What mindset do students need to develop in order to be able to act in a complex future - in medicine, the social sciences and beyond?
• How can AI be integrated in such a way that it deepens learning instead of replacing it - and makes the specifically human visible?
  

At the conference, the university of the future can be experienced by all interested parties: In impulses, open teaching events, "Encountering AI" formats, future skills labs, barcamps and co-creation sessions, sketches of future studying will be developed together. Participants will experience moments of agency - from their own project to curriculum design - and the power of community across disciplinary boundaries. Experts and speakers from different countries and contexts will also be guests. Among them: Prof David Hirsh; Dr Yamini Saravanan; Dr Tara A Singh, Harvard Medical School, Prof Paul Worley, Riverland Academy, Ph.D Henrike Besche, MIT, Prof Dr Raphaël Bonvin, University of Fribourg, Dr Katrin Käufer, MIT.

The conference will thus become a creative momentum that initiates long-term changes in university teaching.

The event will be held in both German and English.