About us

The University of Maribor (UM) is the second largest and the second oldest university in Slovenia. Approximately 15,000 students attend the University. The number of research and teaching staff is 1,050, the number of accompanying staffs, which offer administrative and professional support to the teaching process and research work, is 700. UM has seventeen faculties offering undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, as full time or part time studies. UM concluded adapting its study programmes according to the requirements of the Bologna Declaration. Since the academic year 2010/2011, University of Maribor is enrolling only students in Bologna study programmes. The development strategy and vision of University of Maribor and its faculties is reflected in the range and contents of degree programmes (learning contents are based on scientific research and artistic work of teachers).

Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (FNM UM)

Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (FNM UM) is a scientific, research and educational organization. The faculty carries out many different study programs whose quality is insured by our excellent academic staff. The faculty’s employees are world-renowned scientists and researchers and with their work, they put the faculty at the top in the field of research. Successful research activities can be seen in different projects and publications.

At the faculty we carry out study programs and enable our students to acquire new knowledge in the fields of biology, ecology, physics informatics and mathematics; also, we enable acquiring education for the teaching of biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and technical education in elementary and secondary schools. Students of this programme acquire basic knowledge about the use of ICT in education. At the faculty we are experts in curriculum preparation, ICT in education, teacher training and different competencies connected with ICT (digital, media and information competency). We are highly involved in the development of teaching and learning methodologies to incorporate ICT in education.

One of the departments at the faculty is the Department for Technical Education with its research Institute for contemporary technologies, that cooperates with various institutions of higher education and academic associations in different research fields. Cooperation encompasses numerous activities ranging from research projects to joint research projects. In the area of research work, department intensively cooperates with the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport Slovenia, schools, NGOs, Pedagogical research institute and with the business sector, which creates an important link between education and labour market.

Various members of the institute participate in the project. Faculty members working on the research part of the project are: assistant professor dr. Andrej Flogie, assistant Dejan Zemjak, assistant Urška Martinc and Maja Vičič Krabonja. Helena Fošnjar takes care of the administrative part of the project at the faculty.

Our project goals

We decided to participate in this project because we are interested in the field of artificial intelligence in education. This is also the focus of the research work at the Institute, so we believe we can make an important contribution to the project. We expect that the results of the project will shed light on teachers’ readiness for artificial intelligence in education and show how much interest they have in this field. This will be important for further development work in this area.