CLARIN ERIC has published the report from the CLARIN in University Curricula Workshop, held in Utrecht in April 2026. Thirty educators and researchers from 20 European countries spent two days mapping out how CLARIN’s language resources and tools can be embedded into university teaching, what gets in the way, and what the next priorities should be. The full report and the slides from both days are openly available on Zenodo.
CLARIN ERIC has just published Teaching with CLARIN: Insights and Recommendations from the 2026 University Curricula Workshop. The report summarises two days of discussions held in Utrecht on 21–22 April 2026, where 30 participants from 20 European countries explored how CLARIN’s language resources, tools, and infrastructure can be meaningfully integrated into university teaching across disciplines.
The workshop brought together educators, researchers with teaching duties, and representatives of the CLARIN Board of Directors, the User Involvement Committee, and the Knowledge Infrastructure Committee. It was organised by Iulianna van der Lek and Thalassia Kontino (CLARIN ERIC), with a Programme Committee made up of Jurgita Vaičenonienė, Petya Osenova, Valeria Quochi, Maria Gavriilidou, and Tanja Wissik.
Where things stand
A pre-workshop survey of 23 respondents from 22 institutions in 18 EU countries gave a snapshot of how CLARIN currently shows up in teaching. Linguistics, language studies, and digital humanities remain the main disciplinary homes. Hybrid teaching is now the norm. Awareness of CLARIN’s central hub services is high, but pedagogical use varies widely, and national offerings tend to be better integrated locally than the central ones.
Key takeaways
- Integration succeeds when educators understand the curriculum they are working with.
Keynote speaker Vesna Lušicky (University of Vienna) made the case that curricula are multi-level systems — international, national, institutional, classroom, individual — shaped by values and stakeholders that are often invisible. CLARIN integration works best when it identifies the right level to act on and acknowledges what it cannot change. - The main barriers are structural, not technical.
Respondents pointed to limited institutional support, lack of time, and the absence of ready-to-use materials more often than to problems with the tools themselves. - Teachers want ready-to-use materials.
The clearest signals from the survey were demand for ready-to-use datasets suited to teaching, reusable slides for local adaptation, sample lesson plans, train-the-trainer sessions, and student-oriented tutorials for self-learning. The CLARIN Learning Hub is the central place where these resources are being gathered. - Applied use cases matter more than tool overviews. Future training should focus on connecting tools and resources to real research questions, including data analysis workflows, AI and LLM literacy, sentiment analysis, multilingual alignment, and guidance on licensing, ethics, and GDPR. Tools like the Virtual Language Observatory and the Language Resource Switchboard were highlighted as practical entry points.
- Collaboration beyond the classroom is essential.
Teachers alone are not the main entry point. CLARIN consortia were encouraged to work more closely with university libraries, research data management offices, and digital humanities centres, and to build a data stewardship network with expertise in language data. - Students are a route into the curriculum.
Theses, data citations, and repository deposits were highlighted as practical ways to bring CLARIN into student work without redesigning whole courses.
Access the report
The full report and the slides from both days are openly available on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/20410182
