Technology and the human learning process. It is a logical combination for Inge. She learns the basics of programming as a child in primary school. During her studies of International Business and Psychology at the Radboud University she not only finds out how an organisation learns, but also how individual people learn. The pieces of the puzzle fall together perfectly with her appointment.
“It is the icing on the cake of my hard work,” Inge laughs. “It is wonderful that this professorship has been formed for me personally, and it means that it is very dear to me. AI takes on two different roles in my research. On the one hand, you can use the technology to better understand the learning and learning process of students. On the other hand, you can use those new insights to develop the AI so that the technology can support and improve learning.
It’s so incredibly important that we investigate how to design the collaboration with AI optimally, especially in education where human relationships are and will remain very important.
Human-AI collaboration
Her appointment and the creation of the professorship indicate how relevant it is to investigate AI in education. “Within AI, there is the replacement perspective and the multiplication perspective. The former has the goal of having the application complete the entire process, from beginning to end. In current discussion AI therefore has an active role, taking over human tasks. In the latter, there is a human-AI collaboration to come to a solution and these collaborations, in various forms, appear more and more frequently. That is why it is incredibly important that we investigate how to design the collaboration with AI optimally, especially in education where human relationships are and will remain very important.”
Measuring and understanding learning
Besides AI’s active role, it also has an underexplored role that is important for education, Inge explains: “It can also be used to measure learning and to map learning processes. With AI, we can thus understand learning better, and that is why we know more than ever about our students and how they learn. An important aspect of my research programme focuses on the question: How do we turn these insights into support with the help of AI, so that they can learn better and teachers can teach better?”
