From Learning by Teaching to Collective Knowledge Construction: Institutional Support and the Social Purpose of IPK, 2000–2008

This article examines Internet and Project Competence (IPK) as a historical bridge between Jean-Pol Martin’s Learning by Teaching (LdL) and his later work on the New Human Rights and human–AI collaboration.

Drawing on historical course documentation, a university press release dated 24 August 2005, a university directory from the summer semester of 2008, later International Project (IPC) descriptions and autobiographical testimony, the study reconstructs both the educational concept and its institutional conditions.

Its central contribution is the analysis of the 2005 document, which explicitly connects self-organised student learning, international cooperation, the Internet-as-brain metaphor and the ambition to improve the world. IPK thus emerges as a setting in which collective knowledge construction was linked to a social purpose.

The article also documents the complementary roles of academic initiative and university administration. Martin developed the educational direction and recruited cooperation partners, while the administration provided decisive assistance with the vhb application. According to his retrospective account, vhb funding of EUR 70,000 was matched by an equal university contribution. The later continuation as IPC under Klaudia Schultheis adds a perspective beyond the founder’s university activity.

Within the publication series on LdL, the New Human Rights and human–AI cooperation, this article provides a historical and institutional account of intellectual continuity. Contemporary documents and retrospective testimony are explicitly distinguished.

Author: Jean-Pol Martin. Prepared with assistance from ChatGPT in English drafting, source comparison and layout.