Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

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Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
number of STEM students accepted and AI topics 
covered in future. Measures must also be taken to 
close the skills gap between school education and 
the requirements of a degree or job. As regards the 
specific use of AI in school education, the recommen-
dation is to further enhance teachers’ skills in using 
AI sensibly and beneficially in lessons by making AI 
an integral part of their training and continuing edu-
cation and development. Teachers are also to be sup-
ported by providing them with an (information) plat-
form showcasing available AI systems and the meth-
odological opportunities that they offer.
150
One area of application in higher education that 
uses artificial intelligence and that is already being 
discussed and trialled at Austrian higher education 
institutions (sometimes under a different name) is 
learning analytics (LA).
Learning analytics 
“means 
analysing, presenting and interpreting data from 
teaching and learning settings so that students can 
make direct, immediate changes to their learning“.
151
AI technologies (such as machine and deep learn-
ing) can be used to gain new insights into success-
ful learning and its potential determining factors 
from a significant volume of data of all conceivable 
kinds. Learning analytics puts students at the cen-
tre and gives them support, particularly to improve 
their learning performance, e.g. via adaptive feed-
back, personalised answers or recommendations. 
And this support need not necessarily be delivered 
by automatic means. Instead, it generally requires 
input from teachers, who can use dashboards (a 
graphical user interface) to view the insights ob-
tained from the data and presented in visual form. 
Learning analytics can also improve teachers’ teach-
ing skills by encouraging them to reflect on their 
teaching methods and strategies and enabling them 
to provide their students with more targeted, more 
tailored support. Analysing learning processes also 
allows flawed approaches to be identified and thus 
150 See Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) and Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs 
(BMDW) (2019b).
151 Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria (Austrian Forum for New Media in Teaching) (2019, 8).
152 Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria (Austrian Forum for New Media in Teaching) (2019, 4).
the quality of teaching to be improved for everyone 
involved.
In November 2019, the Forum Neue Medien in der 
Lehre Austria (Austrian Forum for New Media in 
Teaching), which is made up of representatives from 
Austrian higher education institutions and the Feder-
al Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMB-
WF), published a white paper entitled “Learning An-
alytics: Einsatz an österreichischen Hochschulen” 
(“Learning analytics: its use at Austrian higher edu-
cation institutions”) in order to raise awareness of 
the topic and place it in the public eye. The paper 
makes four substantive recommendations:
•
“produce and share information on learning ana-
lytics in a targeted way to inform, mobilise and 
raise awareness amongst all stakeholders; 
•
promote specific implementation projects of vary-
ing sizes in Austrian educational establishments;
•
build up a national exchange platform to promote 
expert exchange on the ethical and legal frame-
work, formulate a common code of conduct or de-
velop joint technical standards amongst educa-
tional establishments;
•
actively involve all stakeholders, particularly stu-
dents.“ 
152
So-called