Report on trends in policies and practices on the use of LLM and generative AI in the partnership: Report 1

The creation of personalised AI-aided learning appears in the plan for the 2025 academic year of an open university. Placing the intention in an annual plan is what separates it from an experiment: a plan carries a date, an owner and a review.

The Graduate Education Institute revised its thesis writing guide in 2024 so that every student signs a declaration form, naming the generative AI programme used and the kind of support received. The form is a required document rather than a recommendation, which moves disclosure from good practice to a condition of submission.

A funded pilot examines the challenges and opportunities that generative AI poses for assessment in further and higher education. Placing the question inside a funded research project rather than a policy circular is what allows assessment redesign to be tested before it is prescribed.

Guidelines addressed to teachers link the use of ChatGPT directly to remote assessment. The pairing matters in a distance institution, where assessment is conducted at a distance by default and the tool question cannot be separated from the examination question.

A chatbot answers student questions on enrolment, examinations and graduation. The institution is explicit that the deployed assistant is rule-based rather than generative, while research on integrating large language models into academic and non-academic support runs separately at the Student Affairs Department of the Faculty of Open Education.

A chatbot named Minerva has been in use on the university web pages since 2023. Participants in the third round still name it as the institutional practice they recognise, which makes it one of the few assistants in the partnership that respondents identify by name across rounds.

The vice-rectorate for educational innovation runs a training and awareness programme built on several pillars, accompanied by guides for generalists, teachers and students and by courses for teaching, administrative and service staff. Locating the programme in a vice-rectorate gives it a budget line and a permanent owner.

The university maintains a set of instruments that are revised regularly: an AI guide, recommendations for action, a service agreement on the use of AI systems, and a register of processing activities. The combination places advisory guidance and data protection documentation in the same institutional package.

A policy issued by the rector in April 2024 is accompanied by instructions for using AI-based applications in studies. Issuing the instrument at rectoral level gives it institution-wide reach rather than leaving adoption to individual faculties.

While institution-wide policy was still under discussion, the university adopted an interim rule under which each teacher decides the level at which AI may be applied in learning activities and may rule it out entirely. The arrangement keeps courses operating during a policy vacuum at the cost of leaving students facing different rules in different courses.

A steering committee covering the whole institution was installed in October 2024, at a point when the university reported no institutional practices in place. The sequence constitutes a finding in itself, in that the governance structure was established before any application had been deployed.

Students may use generative AI to support their learning and, unless instructed otherwise, in assessment preparation, provided the use is acknowledged. The policy pairs permission with three prohibitions covering confidential information, personal data and copyrighted assessment content, and warns that over-reliance may hinder skill development.

Information security guidelines issued in December 2023 direct users to work primarily with Microsoft Copilot on a university device while logged in with university credentials. The instrument governs data exposure by prescribing where the interaction takes place rather than by listing prohibited content.

A dedicated research unit was established in 2023 to study developments in data analytics and artificial intelligence in higher education and to run projects, with training planned at several educational levels. The institution reports that the infrastructure of the unit was still being set up at the time of the survey.

The university runs experimental environments that bring a feedback centre, automated grading, personalised support and an immersive collaboration hub together with access to various models for testing. The arrangement gives staff a bounded space in which tools can be trialled before any decision about institutional deployment.

Germany funds specific projects to expand research and knowledge in AI, among them the AI Campus platform. The partnership records it first as a national practice and later as one of four federal initiatives, with a regional hub bundling transfer and networking in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The Council of Higher Education published an ethical guide covering the use of generative AI in scientific research and publication in higher education institutions in May 2024. The partner reports that the guidance is advisory, which leaves each university to convert it into binding institutional rules.

Principles established in September 2024 were circulated to all public institutions, universities included. The instrument reaches higher education not through education policy but through public administration law, which is a distinct route into the sector.

The quality assurance agency curates resources aimed at helping the education sector use generative AI while maintaining academic standards, and has published supplementary advice on the tools. The instrument works through the quality assurance route rather than through legislation.

Assessors, reviewers and panellists are explicitly prohibited from using generative AI in their assessment activities, while applicants are advised to exercise caution over bias and data protection. The asymmetry between a prohibition for evaluators and advice for applicants is itself a policy design choice.

A programme launched in October 2024 in collaboration between the Council of Higher Education and the Presidency of Defence Industries channels AI in the defence industry into undergraduate senior projects and graduate theses. It is a national instrument that works through the curriculum rather than through regulation.