Digitalisation has profoundly changed academic education in recent years. The University of Oldenburg is involved in two large joint projects in Lower Saxony that are driving this development forward.
Lecturers at universities spend many hours planning their courses: they create semester plans, design learning units, conceptualise examinations and develop assessment grids. This work can now be done in just a few seconds - by sending a request to ChatGPT or another AI-based language model. "These programmes can provide great support in teaching. In my opinion, the biggest advantage is the time saved," says Susanne Schorer, who is involved in the "Digital Teaching Hub Lower Saxony" (DLHN) project, which focuses on the potential uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in teaching and learning
Digital technologies, especially AI, are currently developing rapidly - and universities are facing the challenge of further developing academic education with the new possibilities. At the same time, it is necessary to set guidelines for the use of these technologies and establish the corresponding infrastructure. Data protection and copyright must be observed, and accessibility and the accessibility of materials also play a role in digital teaching. For some time now, the universities in Lower Saxony have been joining forces to tackle the mammoth task of clarifying open questions and establishing a suitable infrastructure.
The University of Oldenburg is involved in two large joint projects dedicated to the digitalisation of teaching: One is called "SOUVER@N - Digital Teaching and Learning in Lower Saxony". It was launched in 2021 and is being funded by the Foundation Innovation in University Teaching until the end of 2025. Under the leadership of the universities of Oldenburg, Osnabrück and Lüneburg, eight universities in Lower Saxony have joined forces to lay the foundations for the increased use of digital technologies in the areas of didactics, technology and law. One important goal is digital sovereignty: the project partners favour tools that only store data locally and rely on non-commercial providers wherever possible. In addition to so-called "proprietary software", whose source code is protected, open source services are often used. The advantage of this is that each university can adapt the programmes to its own requirements.
A shared platform with tools for digital teaching
The second major project for digital teaching is the "Digital Teaching Hub Lower Saxony" project, which was launched in 2024. The main aim is to establish a network that provides scenarios, tools and services for digital teaching, among other things. All 20 universities in Lower Saxony are involved. The state is funding the project with 25 million euros, of which the University of Oldenburg is receiving just under 1.2 million euros.
"The central topic of digitalisation has long since arrived in teaching, the development is irreversible," states Dr Norbert Kleinefeld from the new University Strategy Unit - Focus on Teaching. Together with Isabel Müskens, head of the staff unit, he is responsible for managing SOUVER@N on the Oldenburg side. Both believe that supporting teaching staff in the use of digital methods is an ongoing task. "It is essential to react quickly and flexibly to new developments in order to continuously improve the quality of teaching," says Kleinefeld. Networking with other universities is also important: So that not every institution has to reinvent the wheel, joint solutions are increasingly being developed. "We all benefit from bringing together different expertise," says the project leader.
Access to many helpful tools
While DLHN has only just started, SOUVER@N is on the home straight. The results include, for example, a collection of digital tools for teachers that can be accessed online. These include software for creating teaching materials or conducting surveys in lectures, planning appointments, producing videos or collaborating on a digital whiteboard.
Some of the services are provided locally at the university, others via the Academic Cloud. This portal, operated by the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung in Göttingen, is available to all students and staff at universities and research institutions in Lower Saxony. In addition to various useful tools for research and teaching, the chatbot ChatAI, a generative AI that can access various language models - from ChatGPT-4o and Metas Llama to the new AI DeepSeek R1 from China - is also available there. The portal also offers options for storing data and collaborative working.
Another result of SOUVER@N is, for example, an extensive collection of open learning materials - so-called Open Educational Resources (OER). The Lower Saxony OER platform twillo contains more than 1,800 teaching and learning concepts and examples of good practice from all subjects, in the form of text documents, audio files or videos. The University of Oldenburg, which coordinated the sub-project "Shared teaching-learning materials", is one of the originators of an extensive series of self-learning modules for primary school students and teachers, which provide basic qualifications for non-subject teaching in the subjects German, maths and general studies.
The SOUVER@N project team has also addressed the many small and large questions that arise when using digital methods in teaching. For example, the employees have recorded podcasts on new developments in digital teaching, created a checklist to determine whether a tool complies with data protection regulations, written practical tips on various tools and produced a video series that provides information on what needs to be considered if you want to provide OER for university teaching yourself. It deals with topics such as accessibility, licensing and the reusability of materials. Dr Janine Horn has prepared various papers on legal issues, in particular on data protection, image rights and other copyrights, the use of AI, the recognition of e-learning formats as credits and legally compliant examination regulations for online examinations.
More cross-university collaboration
In order to improve collaboration, the project partners are also setting up a cross-university qualification programme, for which a pool of speakers will soon be available. Various online meetings for project participants and service staff in the field of digital teaching offer the opportunity to exchange ideas and network. In a joint self-study module, the "eTutor:innenprogramm", the participating universities want to teach the media-didactic basics of digital teaching in the future.
The project partners are now building on the results in the Lower Saxony-wide Digital Teaching Hub Lower Saxony project. The University of Oldenburg is involved in two sub-projects in the steering group: One, led by the University of Osnabrück, focuses on the use of AI in studies, teaching and examinations, while the second, led by Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, aims to discover and test further innovative teaching and learning tools and make them available across universities.
Susanne Schorer, who regularly gives workshops on topics such as "effective prompting", is convinced of the benefits of the new AI technologies for teaching: in her view, chatbots could not only help teachers to plan seminars, but also make their work easier in other ways - for example, by making it possible to collate information more quickly or structure large amounts of data in the shortest possible time. AI tools also open up new opportunities for students: The programmes could, for example, serve as a learning buddy, query knowledge or stimulate self-reflection. Norbert Kleinefeld is certain: "The new technical possibilities will help us to further improve the quality of teaching." The structures established in the DLHN project should also enable teachers and students to deal with emerging technologies in the long term and utilise them profitably for academic teaching.
