Rune Johan Krumsvik:” Artificial intelligence and doctoral education: epistemic, pedagogical, and supervisory implications.”

Keynote abstract

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the conditions for knowledge production, raising fundamental questions for doctoral education. This keynote, Artificial intelligence and doctoral education: epistemic, pedagogical, and supervisory implications, explores how advanced AI systems—particularly large language models—signal more than technological change: they represent a potential epistemic shift in how research, expertise, and scholarly development are understood.

At the epistemic level, AI challenges established assumptions about authorship, originality, cognitive mastery, and the boundaries between human and machine-supported reasoning. If analytical synthesis, drafting, coding, and literature mapping can be partially delegated to AI systems, what constitutes doctoral-level competence? How should we understand expertise when cognitive offloading becomes structurally embedded in research practice?

At the pedagogical level, doctoral training may need to move beyond a sole emphasis on individual cognitive accumulation toward models that integrate critical AI literacy, methodological transparency, and reflexive use of AI-supported inquiry. This raises questions about assessment, progression, and even the temporal structure of doctoral programmes.

At the supervisory level, AI introduces new dynamics in guidance, trust, ethics, responsibility, and quality assurance. Supervisors must navigate between uncritical adoption and defensive resistance, developing informed frameworks for responsible experimentation, risk assessment, and scholarly integrity.

Rather than framing AI as either threat or solution, this keynote argues for epistemic clarity, empirical grounding, and institutional courage. Doctoral education stands at a crossroads: the task is not merely to adapt to new tools, but to reconsider foundational assumptions about knowledge, supervision, and the formation of future researchers in an AI-augmented research landscape.

Rune Johan Krumsvik

Rune Johan Krumsvik is a Professor (dr.philos.) of Education at the University of Bergen and a Professor II at Volda University College. Krumsvik served as Head of the Department of Education at the University of Bergen (2010–2017) and is the founder and research group leader of the Digital Learning Communities research group at the University of Bergen. He has been conducting research on artificial intelligence since 2015 and is the head of the consortium Digital Learning Communities Artificial Intelligence Centre (DLCAIC), where he has, among other things, developed a PhD chatbot for academic writing, a healthcare chatbot, and published several scientific articles on artificial intelligence in the contexts of academic writing at the PhD level, Nurse education, medicine, and methodology.  

Krumsvik is also the founder and academic director of the Nordic Graduate School of Educational Research (link), Editor-in-Chief of the Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Pediatrics (link) and Frontiers of Public Health. Over the past fifteen years, he has supervised 17 PhD candidates in fields such as education, nursing education, and other health disciplines, collaborated and published with the dental education program at the University of Bergen, delivered numerous PhD courses for health-related doctoral candidates, and published scientific articles, professional papers, and op-eds in the fields of education and health (h-index 34, i10-index 77).

He received the Teaching Award in 2012 from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Bergen and was in 2020 recognized as an Excellent Teaching Practitioner by the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Bergen.