THEME: Learning circle as a binding community to learn more about genAI in teaching

Project generative AI at HUM (initiated in January 2024) aims to spread knowledge of and promote the use of genAI among staff at the faculty. In the project there are three tracks: education, research, and administration, and as part of the education track, the head of the track, Tove Faber Frandsen, professor MSO at the Department of Design, Media and Educational Science, in collaboration with SDU UP, has organized a number of competence development activities for the colleagues at HUM.

One of these competence development activities is a learning circle, in which Tove herself also participates. The learning circle consists of a group of colleagues whose common interest is to test and thereby learn more about feedback and genAI. The group meets at fixed intervals about each of their projects, facilitated by an employee from SDU UP.

Tove sees the diversity in the group's projects as a great strength, because it gives access to several different experiences. The members of the group are in different teaching situations with different kinds of students, they have different knowledge of genAI tools, and they will therefore use different kinds of tools - but they share the desire and motivation to test and learn from the experiences. Now she needs to test a very specific tool that is relevant to her students and her subject, but she also gets to know other tools at by listening to her colleagues in the group about their experiences – tools that Tove in the future, in other teaching situations, can make use of.

At the same time, the group and its facilitation are important to her, because there is a mutual obligation to work with the testing of the tool by virtue of the frequency of the meetings and the common deadlines that the group decides together. In Tove's words, the group is not obliged to achieve the same thing, but to achieve something together.

SDU UP offers help to set up learning circles like this one about AI and feedback - and to facilitate them. The offer applies to everyone and in all university pedagogical subjects, whether it is generative AI or something else. Write to sduup@sdu.dk if, like Tove and her colleagues, you want to use the energy from a learning circle to test a genAI tool or do another experiment in your teaching.