Teaching success thanks to AI?

The Institute of Exercise Training and Sport Informatics at the German Sport University Cologne has successfully obtained project funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project "university teaching concept for AI in sports science" (uLKIS) is a research project in the field of machine learning within the funding program "Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education".

The project was positively reviewed in the context of university qualification measures and will be funded with more than 280,000 euros over a two-year project period (2022-2024). With this funding line, the BMBF supports projects that aim to transfer innovative methods from the field of artificial intelligence into university teaching.

In the project, the existing master's degree program M.A. Game Analysis at the German Sport University Cologne is to be expanded as well as with training measures for machine learning. In the future, other courses of study will also benefit from this. For this purpose, the existing expertise at the Institute for Exercise Training and Sport Informatics at the German Sport University will be used. The qualification concept is based on a multi-level dual concept that combines research work with basic training in data analytics and machine learning, the application of knowledge during practical phases, and integration into the current research of the institute. This measure should serve to strengthen the AI competence of employees and students at the German Sport University. So far, such content is completely missing in the curricula at DSHS. The created teaching materials, will be made freely available as Open Educational Resources via the own web portal and other suitable platforms. By using, extending and documenting open source software, the results will be made available for further use by the professional and research community. This also ensures the availability and extensibility of the developed content beyond the project duration.

"Ultimately, the uLKIS project aims to make sports science education in Germany future-proof and to establish an international pioneering position," says Univ. Prof. Dr. Daniel Memmert, Managing Director of the Institute for Exercise Training and Sport Informatics at the German Sport University Cologne. He and his team have been working for years on the analysis (e.g., with SOCCER©), transfer (BMBF project for the further processing of sports data), and simulation of complex positional data (so-called Big Data) and have developed and validated theoretical framework models for this purpose (cf. DFG project "e-Science").

In order to support a broad embedding in other sports science institutes even more, a special advisory board was established to promote the qualification of sports scientists in the field of AI. This includes numerous parties, such as the Federal Institute for Sports Science (Director Dr. Tiesler), IAT Leipzig (Director Dr. Tippelt, Dr. Fichtner), dvs Section Sports Informatics (Speaker PD Dr. Daniel Link, TU Munich), TU Dortmund (Prof. Jaitner), TU Darmstadt (Prof. Wiemeyer), University of Hannover (Prof. Ewerth) and University of Erlangen - Nuremberg / Chair of Machine Learning and Data Analytics (Prof. Eskofier).

Please find the modules here.

Contacts for further info:

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Daniel Memmert

Dr. Robert Rein