Interview with Prof. Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci by didacta – Das Magazin für lebenslanges Lernen
In the 02/2026 issue of didacta – Das Magazin für lebenslanges Lernen, journalist Roman Eisner interviews Prof. Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci, Professor of Human-Centered Technologies for Learning at the Technical University of Munich and Director of the TUM Center for Educational Technologies. Under the title “Between Hype and Reality”, the interview explores how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape education, what opportunities it offers, and what risks schools must address responsibly.
Prof. Kasneci emphasizes that AI has not yet transformed everyday school life as radically as public debate sometimes suggests. Many schools still lack the digital infrastructure, stable networks, devices, and pedagogical concepts required for systematic AI use. Nevertheless, AI has already reached classrooms in many informal ways: students use it for research, writing, homework, and feedback, while teachers use it for lesson preparation and material creation. The most immediate change is not yet a fully AI-supported school system, but a new awareness among students, teachers, and parents that AI is easily accessible and will affect homework, assessment, and learning processes.
A central point of the interview is the need to move beyond the unstructured use of publicly available AI tools. Prof. Kasneci argues that education needs dedicated Educational Technologies: AI systems designed according to pedagogical, didactic, and learning-psychological standards. Without such careful design, AI use may lead to deskilling, the loss or weakening of human competences; skill skipping, the bypassing of important learning steps; and cognitive offloading, the transfer of thinking tasks to digital tools before learners have built the necessary understanding themselves.
For students, this means that AI should not be used as a shortcut at the beginning of a learning process. Prof. Kasneci recommends that learners first build basic knowledge and skills themselves, then use AI later for revision, comparison, explanation, feedback, and reflection. For example, students should first learn how to write an essay before asking an AI system to provide feedback. Used in this way, AI can support deeper learning rather than replace it.
The interview also highlights the risk of a new digital divide. Students with strong prior knowledge and a supportive social environment are more likely to use AI productively. Students who lack foundational knowledge may be more tempted to automate tasks or skip learning steps, which could widen educational inequalities. Prof. Kasneci therefore calls for systematic, age-appropriate AI literacy from an early stage, ideally before or by secondary school.
For teachers, the main challenge is not a complete redesign of teacher education, but continuous professional development. Because AI technologies change rapidly, one-off training during university studies is not enough. Teachers need reliable structures for ongoing training, experimentation, reflection, and co-creation. Prof. Kasneci stresses that teachers should not remain passive users of AI technologies; their practical experience should inform the development of future educational tools.
The interview also highlights TUM research projects such as PEER, a free web application that supports essay writing through guided feedback, and SARAkids, an AI-driven reading assistant that uses eye-tracking to provide children with real-time support while reading. Prof. Kasneci also points to the potential of augmented and virtual reality for complex learning content, from chemistry and physics to data science. In AI-supported virtual environments, students can practise skills such as public speaking with adaptive feedback from AI avatars, while teachers could use similar simulations for training and testing new didactic methods.
Looking ahead, Prof. Kasneci sees digital technologies and AI becoming cooperative partners in learning and work. They will support organizing, researching, writing, programming, visualizing, and analyzing data. However, the decisive question is whether learners and teachers become mere consumers of technology or active designers of their own learning environments. For Prof. Kasneci, even in the age of AI, good education remains a deeply social, pedagogical, and human task.
More Information
Link to the Interview: https://avr-emags.de/emags/didacta/didacta_2_2026/#0
