TITAN: Teaching young people to think critically with AI

What is TITAN?

TITAN is a collaboration of more than 10 European partners (see below) developing a new technology that allows citizens to learn to fact-check in order to reduce the spread of fake news.  Using artificial intelligence and based on a large dataset of news reports, citizens are guided to learn to recognise fake news by learning to ask the right critical questions.

Researchers at Arteveldehogeschool will implement and test this technology in the context of higher education. After all, this technology could make students who are not taught fact-checking skills in their education more resilient to fake news.

TITAN is a European research project funded by the European Commission as a Horizon-Europe project.

Only fraction of students learn fact-checking during training

Young people are inundated with information every hour of every day, many of which, unfortunately, includes wrong, unsubtle or incomplete information. This misinformation can sometimes have far-reaching consequences. 

Some young people are trained in their education to fact-check information and news. Journalism students, for example, are taught to check news stories for correctness. Unfortunately, this is only a fraction of young people who are confronted with fake news. 

There is a need for a streamlined and efficient didactic approach to teach young people to fact-check and thus develop a fact-checking state of mind.

TITAN tool teaching all students fact-checking

The TITAN technology developed could provide an efficient and impactful didactic tool for courses that do not offer fact-checking in their curriculum.

This project aspires to implement an AI-based, didactic tool to teach young people to check the correctness of sources themselves. The aim is that after using the TITAN tool, young people will fact-check more, better and faster than before and thus actively contribute to the fight against disinformation.