Purpose, Objectives and Impact

The purpose of the WASP Education Development program (WASP-ED) is to significantly increase the capability and capacity of Swedish universities in providing timely, relevant, and scalable education in AI and other transformative technologies.

The expected impact is a national step-change in the quality and quantity of available competence in AI and the capability of addressing the need for such competence also for coming transformative technologies. Further impact on the international level is expected as WASP-ED is very well aligned with the increasing activities in Europe and elsewhere related to the need for up-skilling and reskilling.

Objectives

The fundamental challenge that WASP-ED is designed to address is how Swedish universities can step-up and provide relevant and timely education at scale when the demand for competence in new technologies such as AI suddenly explodes and vastly broadens. Three particular challenges are to:

1. Reach a commonly agreed subject matter content as the subject is being actively and rapidly developed
2. Introduce AI in education beyond only the specialized education programs for technical experts, as the need for competence spreads from the experts developing the technology to much broader ranges of professions and disciplines.
3. Increase teaching capacity both to scale-up technical education to broader audiences and to scale-out AI education into other professions and disciplines.

Challenges

WASP-ED is designed as a program with a national perspective. It is intended to involve as many Swedish universities as possible. The main objectives of WASP-ED are:

1. Provide the educational foundations for AI and related transformative technologies.
2. Scale-up the national educational capacity in AI and transformative technologies including educating and maturing the teaching staff to make use of, and be innovative in the application of AI and transformative technologies in education.
3. Scale-out education in AI and transformative technologies to disciplines and professions beyond the technical core.
4. Develop and leverage data-based education and pedagogical transformation such as learning analytics.

WASP-ED is both a research and a development program, as it systematically delivers concrete actions to achieve the objectives while investigating innovative methods for meeting the more general challenges. WASP-ED is designed to be the educational counterpart to the highly successful WASP and WASP-HS research programs and will build upon the competence and knowledge developed in these programs.