Göttingen receives millions in funding for innovative teaching projects!

Göttingen receives millions in funding for innovative teaching projects!

The University of Göttingen has received two grants in the “Teaching Architecture” competition run by the Innovation in University Teaching Foundation. This initiative is part of a larger effort to revitalize higher education in Germany through innovative teaching methods to meet the challenges of a changing society. The secured funds, which total 10.1 million euros, will be made available from October 2025 and will run for a maximum of six years.

The first project, “GAIA: Individual Learning Paths through AI,” aims to develop a personalized tutoring system based on generative AI. This system is intended to provide students with support in different learning phases and enable multimodal dialogue, both via text and voice. After a pilot phase in selected courses, university-wide integration is planned. The funding volume applied for for this ambitious project amounts to 6.6 million euros for the period 2025 to 2031.

Connected project with other universities

At the same time, the joint application “Campus in Transition”, which is being developed with the participation of the Technical University of Braunschweig and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, was approved. This application focuses on the development of a flexible teaching architecture that promotes individual and interdisciplinary educational paths. The Göttingen application volume for this project is 3.5 million euros. A total of 227 applications were submitted under this funding line, of which 80 were classified as worthy of funding - including 68 individual applications and 12 joint applications uni-goettingen.de reported.

These projects are supported by the foundation, which provides a total of 480 million euros for innovative teaching and learning formats in order to support a structural update of higher education. The Leuphana University of Lüneburg has also submitted an individual application and is actively involved in the joint project. The “Leuphana AI Campus (LAICA)” project aims to integrate artificial intelligence in all phases of study, both as a learning area and as a tool. This promotes comprehensive AI literacy education among students.

A broader context of AI in higher education

Since the end of 2021, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has also been promoting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education as part of the federal-state initiative “Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education”. This initiative supports the development of study programs as well as intelligent assistance systems and AI-based learning and examination systems. The focus is on educational policies and strategies that ensure the responsible use of AI in higher education, such as Education server explained.

In addition, various institutes and research partners are committed to digital transformation in society. These include, for example, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt). These institutions actively promote the research and development of AI technologies in educational institutions and offer teachers targeted support.

The latest developments at the University of Göttingen and other cooperating universities illustrate the desire to create future-oriented higher education. By supporting innovative projects, not only is learning and teaching at universities empowered, but students are also strengthened as active contributors to social transformation.