Kay Berkling

Kay Berkling is a professor of computer science, researcher, author, and university designer. For more than three decades, she has examined how educational and social systems enable, or constrain, human development. Her work ranges from orthography acquisition to individualized learning, neurodiversity, educational access, artificial intelligence, and university design. At the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, she founded New Study, a flexible English-language online Computer Science program. With Open University of Germany: Designing a University from First Principles, she developed the design for a university conceived from the perspective of its learners. Her work is connected by one central question: How can institutions be designed so that differences become sources of possibility rather than barriers to participation?

Her early work on orthography acquisition and literacy addressed this question at the beginning of formal education. Learning to read and write opens access to almost everything that follows; small differences in educational opportunity can accumulate over time. Berkling developed approaches to learning that recognize individual developmental pathways while also taking systematic practice, feedback, and the development of competence seriously.

The same questions later reappeared in higher education. Flexibility, international participation, diversity, and different life circumstances should be incorporated into educational design from the outset. Her work on microcredentials, recognition, AI, and educational access led to a broader question: What would educational institutions look like if they were designed around the people who learn within them?

This perspective extends beyond curricula. Berkling’s work addresses neurodiversity, microaggressions, and institutional power: whose knowledge is heard, whose differences are accommodated, and who is expected to adapt. Her more recent work also investigates the relationship between humans, language, meaning, and artificial intelligence. She approaches AI not simply as a technology for automation, but as a participant in interpretation, learning, dialogue, and intellectual creation, and as a source of agency and empowerment.

Across her scientific work, educational projects, and books runs one fundamental proposition: institutions shape people. As such, education can reproduce barriers, or it can be deliberately designed to reduce them and allow people to unfold their full potential.