What Is AI-PACK? – Outline of AI Competencies for Teaching with DPACK

Abstract

The changes brought by digital transformation have already been addressed in various places for schools and teacher training. Among other things, competence frameworks have been developed for practical orientation and to describe required skills. However, the reflective handling of the now widespread phenomena of the “AI world” requires different competencies than the handling of conventional informatics systems mainly discussed so far, because “AI systems” are based on a different design approach that gives these systems special properties. This, in turn, poses new demands on the professionalization of all teachers, since the development has clear implications for their central areas of action. The goal of this paper is to define a framework that outlines these new AI-related requirements to support the design of holistic education and study programs for teaching in the digitally networked “AI world” that give equal weight to the user-oriented, technological, socio-cultural perspective. This contribution approaches the topic theoretically: first, the need to delineate an area of AI-related digital competencies is justified. Then this area is located in the DPACK model. Since teachers combine pedagogical, subject-related, and technical competencies in their work, the domains of “AI related Pedagogical Knowledge" (AI-PK), “AI related Content Knowledge" (AI-CK), and “AI related Pedagogical Content Knowledge" (AI-PCK) are deductively determined and illustrated with exemplary competencies. The “AI-PACK” framework enables a structured description and investigation of AI teacher education requirements.