AI & teaching in social work symposium

An important first step for the entire SW department and a trend-setting impulse for Fulda University of Applied Sciences:

The AI symposium on 27 November 2025 created the basics for directly addressing the current concerns and needs of students and instructors and discussing them in an open atmosphere. This allowed burning questions about the use of AI to be discussed together. Questions such as...

• How can the use of AI support learning processes in everyday student life?
• What AI competences do we want to teach and how do we teach them?
• In which teaching context should AI be consciously used, or not?
• What are the risks with regard to social work and AI?

The explosive nature of the topic was demonstrated by the lively participation of the students. Prof. Dr Jörg Kreiker, Vice-President for Learning and Teaching and Digitisation, was also impressed by the great response to this voluntary offer for all semesters of all study programmes in the Department of Social Work.

The symposium was organised by the student association and instructors and implemented as a hybrid barcamp. Ideas and topics could be submitted online in advance and the workshop content was only voted on the day of the course. Anyone who was unable to attend live on campus was able to join in online at any time. 

The organisation and implementation was a joint effort by all levels of the SW department and was professionally supported by Felix Averbeck, research employee in the project "Digital and virtual teaching in social work" and an expert in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, media didactics and media education.

Another symposium next year will focus on AI and social work practice.