Inaugural Lecture 6 and Network Spotlight on Learning Transformation
On April 29, 2025, IT:U hosted a special hybrid event, continuing the F1RST Lecture Series and the ongoing Network Spotlight format. The evening featured Assistant Professor Sebastian Dennerlein, Christina Nyström (Founding Director of Learning), and Carla Barreiros (Head of Project-Based Learning), highlighting IT:U’s interdisciplinary, project-based approach to future-ready education.
Technology Meets Education: Learning in the Age of AI
Prof. Sebastian Dennerlein shared insights from his research on how transformation unfolds through well-designed learning processes—not just technology-driven but minding the human in the loop. His work focuses on technology-enhanced learning in higher education and at the workplace, examining how people work, learn and innovate in interdisciplinary and interprofessional groups. This includes understanding and supporting individual and collaborative learning processes with intelligent technologies, as well as supporting software development teams in the design of ethically responsible AI
Key applications include:
- EU-LIFE Project- HeatCraftHP: Europe’s heat pump sector is facing a significant skills shortage, with over 500,000 professionals needed to meet demand. This project addresses this challenge by identifying key competencies and developing targeted programs for upskilling and reskilling. Training is embedded in daily work through a hands-on curriculum supported by simulators for troubleshooting and system integration—ensuring high-quality installations and faster adoption of heat pump technology across Europe.
- AI for Teaching & Learning: As tools like ChatGPT increasingly influence how we teach and learn, this line of research is focused on making AI a meaningful and responsible part of education. Their work explores human-AI collaboration with students as well as teachers by designing conversational agents for computational thinking and project-based learning, for example. These efforts aim at ensuring AI scales active and not passive learning processes.
“Addressing societal challenges like the energy transition requires working, learning and innovating across disciplinary, professional and organisational boundaries. Supporting these interprofessional transformations requires taking a process perspective and understanding the dynamic nature of team learning. A research challenge that can ideally be tackled by joining forces of learning and computer science.”
— Sebastian Dennerlein, Assistant Professor for Digital Transformation in Learning
Future-Ready Education: Interdisciplinary & Project-Based Learning
In the second session, Christina Nyström and Carla Barreiros took the spotlight to share how IT:U is rethinking the learning experience—placing interdisciplinary project-based learning at the heart of its educational model. They highlighted that future-ready education must be collaboration-driven, competence-focused, and supported by intelligent technologies that enhance both teaching and learning. Some key examples of interdisciplinary student projects at IT:U:
- ‘Do Algorithms Care?’ – critiquing the commercialization of bio-data in healthcare tech, the project explores personal data’s predictive potential for well-being.
- “Cript Sensorama” reimagines accessibility within extended reality (XR) by developing innovative mouth- and eye-controlled interfaces, empowering individuals with quadriplegia to actively navigate virtual environments.
- Studying Neurodiversity such as ADHD in Virtual Reality – Using VR to better understand and support learners with ADHD by simulating engaging, inclusive learning environments.
- Designing and Evaluating LLM-based AI Tutors – Creating and testing AI tutors to offer personalized, adaptive learning experiences powered by large language models.
“We believe that interdisciplinary and project-based learning are vital because they reflect how real-world problems actually appear in the real world— they are complex, unpredictable, and not limited to one subject or field.”
— Christina Nyström, Founding Director of Learning
“These approaches help students think more deeply, collaborate effectively, and tackle challenges from multiple perspectives. They make learning more meaningful and prepare young people to navigate a changing world with confidence and clarity.”
— Carla Barreiros, Head of Center and Project-based learning
“Tonight made one thing clear: Future-ready education is about far more than just knowledge transfer. It must be built on interdisciplinary collaboration, enable project-based and competence-oriented learning, and make purposeful use of intelligent digital technologies. Only then can people learn, work, and innovate together in a world increasingly shaped by AI— and that’s exactly what we aim to make possible at IT:U.”
— Stefanie Lindstaedt, Founding President of IT:U
