About the institution and contact person
WHU did not want to accept AI as a parallel tool outside teaching. Students were already using such tools anyway. The key question was whether AI could be integrated into teaching in a controlled, course-specific and data-compliant way.
“Students were using AI anyway, but without reference to our course materials and without didactic guardrails. We lacked a controllable framework that ensures academic quality and integrates AI cleanly into teaching.”
Professor, WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management
From AI Research to Practice
The starting point was a research collaboration: together with the University of Goettingen and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, a lab study on AI tutoring was conducted. acemate provided the technical foundation. More than 330 students participated in the lab setting. The results became the basis for discussing the next step and validating effects in day-to-day course operations.
Scientific study on AI tutoring
In the randomised experiment, students with continuous access to the acemate AI tutor scored higher on the subsequent unaided test than the text-only control group.
View the scientific studyImplementation in Live Courses
After the study, acemate was integrated into the Business Ethics course with over 260 students. The rollout was deliberately simple: connect course materials, run a short onboarding and start teaching.
“The rollout was extremely straightforward. We connected materials, ran a short onboarding with acemate and the course became productive in a very short time.”
Development and Outcome
During the pilot, additional instructors at WHU joined, including colleagues from Finance and Accounting. Within a few months, around one third of WHU students were using acemate. For the teaching team, activation mattered - but so did seeing exactly where understanding gaps emerged.
“Students work more purposefully with course content and we get reliable insight into where comprehension gaps emerge. That allows us to improve teaching more precisely and raise learning quality.”