acemate 2.0 - What's changing and what it means for you as a teacher

What is "acemate" 2.0?

acemate 2.0 is the most comprehensive update to the platform since its launch. The update is based on two years of close collaboration with our partner universities, faculty, and students, and lays the groundwork for further developing acemate not only as a learning app for students but as an AI-powered learning infrastructure for universities and educational organizations.

At the heart of this is an idea that has been important to acemate from the very beginning: AI should provide individual support to students during their self-directed learning phases without replacing the pedagogical responsibility of instructors. acemate therefore works on the basis of content provided by instructors, takes into account the pedagogical framework of the course, and will make learning activities even more accessible to instructors in the future.

With acemate 2.0, we are taking an important step in this direction. In the future, instructors will gain more structured insights into learning progress, common difficulties, and support needs within their courses. In this process, learning activities such as chat interactions, exercises, flashcards, and other learning formats are anonymized or pseudonymized and analyzed in aggregate. The goal is not to monitor individual students, but to better support teaching based on real learning activities.

At the same time, the platform is getting a new course structure, a completely redesigned interface, an admin panel for organizations, and a new technical foundation that ensures acemate’s scalability and integration capabilities for future requirements.

Why “acemate” 2.0?

Students already use AI extensively today, but often in external tools, outside the secure course environment and without feedback to the teaching process. In addition to data protection concerns, this creates a significant pedagogical disconnect: learning activities take place but remain largely invisible to instructors and organizations.

At the same time, the demands on acemate have grown significantly over the past two years. University teaching is rarely a one-off event: the same course recurs semester after semester, runs in parallel across different groups, and is often co-taught by multiple instructors. This requires a course structure that clearly separates content, delivery, and participant groups.

Organizations also use acemate differently today than they did at the beginning. Whereas individual instructors initially created their own courses, entire departments, divisions, or university administrations now coordinate its use. This requires clear roles, centralized user management, transparent licensing, and a platform that integrates better with existing systems such as LMS and SSO.

acemate Version 2.0 was developed to bring these requirements together: more personalized support for students, better pedagogical insights for instructors, and a technical and organizational foundation on which acemate can scale in the long term within universities and educational organizations.

What’s changing for you: the most important new features

AI Assistant for Instructors

With acemate 2.0, the AI chat also becomes a more powerful analysis and support tool for instructors. In the future, instructors will be able to ask questions about the learning activities in their course—for example, where students currently need support, which topics are causing particular difficulties, or how learning progress is developing in the course. To do this, acemate analyzes aggregated learning activities from chat interactions, exercises, flashcards, and other learning formats and derives concrete pedagogical insights from them. The evaluations are conducted anonymously or pseudonymously and in aggregate form. The goal is not to monitor individual students, but to gain a better understanding of how teaching can be specifically supported and further developed.

New Course Structure: Master Courses, Cohorts, and Classes

acemate Version 2.0 introduces a new distinction that better reflects the day-to-day work of university teaching: the separation between general course content and the actual implementation of the course.

Master courses will serve as central content templates in the future. Here, the materials, course structure, and didactic framework of a course are set up and maintained once. The master course itself does not contain any learners. It is the common starting point for all cohorts based on this template.

Cohorts are the specific implementations of a master course. Each cohort has its own group of participants, can be individually supplemented, and remains a closed learning space. The core content comes from the master course and does not need to be recreated. 

A concrete example: The lecture “Macroeconomics 2” takes place every semester. The content is maintained once in the master course. For the summer semester of 2026 and the winter semester of 2026/27, separate cohorts will be created, each building on the same content but working with distinct groups of participants. Instructors at the course level can also expand the content of their cohorts with their own materials.

Classes remain as a simple, standalone course type. All courses created before the launch of “acemate” 2.0 are automatically converted to the class format. No manual adjustment is required.

New User Interface for Instructors and Students

The acemate user interface has been completely redesigned. Access to course content is more direct, the course overview is clearer, and reliance on page navigation has been significantly reduced. The platform has taken on a stronger course platform character, which significantly simplifies the day-to-day use of acemate for both instructors and students.

Students will be able to personalize their learning environment more extensively in the future. Elements such as leaderboards and streaks can be customized individually, allowing the platform to better reflect individual learning styles.

Admin Panel and Organization Management

With “acemate” 2.0, organizations now have their own admin panel. There, members can be invited, roles assigned, and licenses viewed. Organization management thus takes place in a central location, without the need to navigate through individual courses.

Roles at the organizational level:

Coming Soon: The Organization Library

Another new feature is currently in development and will be introduced gradually after the launch of acemate 2.0: the organization library.

The idea behind it: Content that is used multiple times within an organization can be stored in a shared library and used by different instructors for their own courses. This reduces redundancy, promotes more consistent use of the platform within an organization, and facilitates collaboration among instructors.

We will notify you as soon as the Organizational Library is available.

Roles and Permissions at the Course Level

The role concept has also been refined at the course level. The following overview shows which role has which capabilities:

What remains unchanged

All existing content, course materials, and your students’ learning progress will be fully preserved. Ongoing courses will be automatically migrated to the new Class format, and user accounts will remain active. No manual preparation, no re-entry of materials, and no restarting of courses is required.

This also applies to courses that are actively running at the time of the update: All enrolled students remain enrolled, all materials and data are migrated, and the course can then continue as usual.

Offline Period and Schedule

Please do not schedule any uploads, course publications, or exam activities during this time. Instructors do not need to take any action during the offline phase. The migration will occur automatically in the background. After the update, it is worth taking a brief tour of the new user interface, the new roles, and the new course structure. We are happy to actively support you in this process, for example, through one of the introductory sessions listed below and via the updated Help Center.

If you encounter any issues after the update, the “acemate” support team is, of course, available to assist you directly. In the weeks immediately before and after the launch, requests will be processed with increased priority.

Introductory Sessions and Support

In the week before the update, we’re offering two university-wide introductory sessions where we can walk through the new features with you and address questions about your specific course setup.

We understand that an update of this magnitude raises questions and may also cause some friction. We take this seriously. If any uncertainties arise after the launch or if individual features do not work as expected, please contact the support team directly at any time—we’re happy to help.

Contact: Directly via our support feature or by email at [email protected]

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