This spring, the AI-teach project kicked off in Nijmegen. Partners from Austria, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Turkey, and the Netherlands came together to pave the way for a capacity-building programme that fosters meaningful and responsible use of AI in education. The project targets secondary school teachers, pre-service teachers, and teacher educators. During this first meeting, the design-based approach was discussed, and the development of e-learning modules and planned mobilities, including two summer schools and several peer-learning visits, was mapped out.
On the second day, the first peer-learning visit of the project took us to NOLAI, located on the 18th floor of the Erasmus building in Nijmegen. NOLAI, the Dutch Education Lab for AI, was founded prior to the rise of generative AI. It brings together teachers, academics, and companies in co-creation project teams to formulate clear research questions and address them through concrete research proposals aimed at improving the quality of primary and secondary education. NOLAI also seeks to uncover the pedagogical, societal, and social implications of smart technologies in education.
In this co-creation process, teachers are actively involved in every step—from articulating questions to producing validated prototypes grounded in pedagogical-didactic frameworks, evaluated for user-friendliness and positive impact on students’ learning processes. To support the responsible use of AI in Education (AIED), it is crucial to empower teachers to understand both the technical aspects of AI and the principles of meaningful, ethical AI in education.
Within AI-teach, we follow Holmes (2022) in distinguishing between learning about AI (AI literacy), learning with AI, and learning about learning with AI. Each of these themes will feature in a dedicated module. Insights from the NOLAI approach highlight that teacher learning and professionalisation must go beyond simply integrating general AI tools, such as generative chatbots, into classrooms. The goal is to develop critically reflective, autonomous teachers who can responsibly influence how AI is used in line with their ethical and pedagogical-didactic perspectives.
Roald Verhoeff, Radboud University
