Digital Equipment Evolution and IT Activity of TU Graz study beginners (2011-2025): Challenges of Tablet and AI Dominance for University Digital-Sovereignty Initiatives

The study analyses the annual survey of first-semester students at TU Graz conducted since 2011. It shows a shift from notebooks and desktops towards tablets, along with a very rapid uptake of generative AI tools.

The longitudinal data show that student equipment changes considerably faster than the assumptions on which courses and central IT services are built. Where universities assume a notebook with locally installed software, a growing share of students works with tablets and with services hosted in a single vendor’s cloud.

From this, the paper derives implications for digital-sovereignty initiatives: services need to be usable independently of the device, and dealing with AI tools belongs explicitly in the first study phase rather than being tacitly assumed.

Presentation material

• Slides· repository.tugraz.at (external site) ↗

How to cite

Nagler, W., Mayr, B., Ebner, M., Schön, S., & Bruenner, B. (2026). Digital Equipment Evolution and IT Activity of TU Graz study beginners (2011-2025): Challenges of Tablet and AI Dominance for University Digital-Sovereignty Initiatives. In Proceedings of EdMedia 2026 Edinburgh (pp. 119–129). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/2129631/

@inproceedings{nagler2026digitalequipment,
  author    = {Nagler, W. and Mayr, B. and Ebner, M. and Schön, S. and Bruenner, B.},
  title     = {{Digital Equipment Evolution and IT Activity of TU Graz study beginners (2011-2025): Challenges of Tablet and AI Dominance for University Digital-Sovereignty Initiatives}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of EdMedia 2026 Edinburgh},
  publisher = {Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)},
  address   = {Waynesville, NC},
  pages     = {119--129},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/2129631/}
}

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