Digital Literacy in University Contexts
Empowering university staff and students in the critical use of AI writing tools for first and foreign languages
Factsheet
- Lead school School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences
- Additional schools Business School
- Institute(s) Knowledge Systems and Knowledge Sharing
- Research unit(s) Knowledge Systems and Knowledge Sharing
- Funding organisation BFH
- Duration (planned) 01.01.2021 - 31.12.2024
- Project management Elizabeth Steele
- Head of project Elizabeth Steele
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Project staff
Elizabeth Steele
Mara Haller
Daniel Dünner
Tina Maurer
Prof. Dr. Reinhard Riedl
Nicole Küffer -
Partner
swissuniversities
Berner Fachhochschule BFH
Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich
Université de Neuchâtel - Keywords machine learning, generative artificial intelligence, neural machine translation, machine translation, large language models, automatic text production
Situation
This project is co-financed by swissuniversities via the P-8 programme. Recent developments in artificial intelligence have resulted in neural machine translation (NMT), eg DeepL, and automatic text production (ATP), eg ChatGPT. These are powerful tools for the tertiary-level teaching and learning of first, second and foreign language use. The project aims to foster digital literacy in university staff and students to empower them in harnessing these tools critically. Multilingual communication in the academic context should thus be facilitated.
Course of action
Comprehensive literature review; online survey of all Swiss university staff and students on their current use of and attitude towards machine translation; focus-group interviews at partner universities (staff only) regarding current use of and attitude towards automatic text production; interventions at all Swiss universities based on the survey results; follow-up online survey of intervention participants and subsequent individual interviews; dissemination of project findings via publications and conferences (Swiss and European); project website containing teaching and learning resources.
