BUas present at UNESCO's Digital Learning Week in Paris

Monday started well. A workshop with Bert Verhoeven and Vishal produced a framework that slotted straight into work BUas is already doing with AI in education, and a session on an AI literacy competency tool gave Springael something concrete to bring back to her team.

AI's transformation of higher education

Tuesday brought the sharpest moment of the week. A panel on AI's transformation of higher education ran a live poll asking teachers how they currently shape AI in their institutions: 44 percent said recipients, only 13 percent co-designers, 12 percent system shapers. Asked what would move them from users to shapers, the room's word cloud came back with Training, Time, Agency, Support, Trust. Not better tools.

That 44 percent stayed with Springael, because it echoes something BUas has already learned the hard way: literacy alone does not grant agency. Staff can understand exactly how a model works and still have no say in whether, when, or how it gets used in their own course. That is precisely why the AI Strategy Compass was never built as a training programme. It is a framework for building agency in, not layering it on top.

Panels with speakers from Bangladesh, Jordan and Ghana reinforced the point. Jordan has trained teachers at scale, and trust still broke down wherever they were left out of the decisions. Later, Sal Khan and Wayne Holmes pushed the question further still: what might personalised, AI-assisted learning cost education in the long run.

 AI Strategy Compass

On Thursday Springael presented the AI Strategy Compass, BUas's six-part framework built and tested over three years, as part of a panel on closing the implementation gap in higher education AI. She argued that no institution solves this alone, it has to be tackled together. That claim was tested immediately: a University of Mauritius study showed performance dropping from around 40 to 17 percent once AI access was removed, and the room wanted to know what that means for what assessment actually measures. BUas's own answer has not been to lock AI out. It has been to shift the focus from the finished product to the process behind it, a shift still in progress, but the only direction that holds up.

Friday's UNESCO Strategy Lab turned out to be one of the most useful sessions of the week. It let Springael map BUas's institutional maturity directly onto UNESCO's national-level framework, and see exactly where the university's own next steps sit.
Beyond the sessions, the connections mattered just as much: with Jacqui Edwards from the University of Amsterdam, with Sarah Ratner through Oxford's AIEOU network, and renewed conversations with Bert Verhoeven comparing Dutch and Australian higher education.

Springael came home with a full notebook, new collaborators, and, fittingly, more questions than she left with.