AI in Education News

MIT poker AI class now builds bots in an hour with coding agents

Alpha School's Joe Liemandt on redesigning school around AI

In an a16z interview, Alpha School's Joe Liemandt argues AI lets students learn faster, so freed-up time should go to agency and teamwork rather than more academics.

EdSurge op-ed: schools must teach students to question AI election answers

Essay by former Project Vote Smart volunteer Elise Blum argues AI chatbots now answer voters' questions in seconds without revealing whether answers come from verified records, partisan commentary, or unsupported claims. Cites a 2023 Pew survey finding 61% of U.S. adults call political conversations with those they disagree with stressful and frustrating.

Google adds neuroscience lesson to AI Quests literacy program

Google's newest AI Quests lesson, "Polar Peaks," teaches AI literacy through a neuroscience framing about mapping the human brain. It is the latest addition to the education program, announced on Google's blog by Ronit Levavi Morad.

Common Sense Media exec urges AI literacy over school bans

In a pre-ban national study, 44% of teens said a tool was banned at school and 59% of those accessed it anyway on a personal device. Common Sense Media's chief program officer Yvette Renteria compares AI bans to abstinence-only sex ed, citing NYC and LAUSD bans from early September.

Fields medalist Richard Borcherds stops grading homework over AI use

The UC Berkeley mathematician now grades homework only on completion, saying AI use is unavoidable and there is "no point" paying readers to grade for correctness. He said if AI keeps improving, "in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better."

Ethan Mollick: colleges will survive AI cheating

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick argues on The Prof G Pod that AI is disrupting teaching but shows no sign of devastating higher education. The episode frames AI cheating as a survivable challenge for universities rather than an existential threat.

Bender: LLM peer review misses the point of scholarship

Ethan Mollick discusses AI agents and banking risk on Prof G Pod

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, author of "Coexistence: The Next Phase of AI," joins Scott Galloway to discuss how AI is changing work, education and which skills stay valuable. He outlines four advantages worth developing and how to tell whether AI is helping you learn or doing the work for you.

Andrew Ng discusses AI job fears and agentic AI in NDTV Profit interview

In a full NDTV Profit interview, AI pioneer Andrew Ng addresses whether AI can take jobs, whether chatbots are making students worse at learning, and which skills will matter in an AI-driven economy. He also weighs in on Big Tech's AI hype and agentic AI.

Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas touts AI-generated 5-minute explainer videos

Andrew Ng says coding careers will thrive, not die, in AI era

In an Economic Times AI podcast interview, the AI pioneer and AI Aspire managing partner argues coding as a career will thrive rather than disappear. He also says AI will never be perfectly controlled and questions whether chatbots help in classrooms and workplaces.

Higher ed leaders weigh digital sovereignty to escape Big Tech AI reliance

University presidents at Inside Higher Ed's U.S. Universities and Colleges Summit called AI "confusing" and "chaotic," with some admitting they have no policies to guide them. One leader said institutions are "creating the future we fear" but "have no choice but to participate."

Rauch: use coding agents to build and deploy AI explainers

Essay: AI forces schools to rethink how they reward high achievers

EdSurge op-ed argues that when AI can produce polished essays and correct answers in seconds, schools must stop rewarding "automated perfection" and instead credit genuine intellectual curiosity. Author Melinda Medina grounds it in her own shift from "academic minimalist" to AP English student.

Rauch: AI will compute the "perfect delta" of what you don't understand

Opus 5.5 refuses thesis paragraph over university AI rules

A Reddit user reports Opus 5.5 declined to draft an example paragraph for their thesis, citing the user's university constraints on AI usage. The model explained the risk and left the decision to the user rather than producing the text.

Penmentor uses Claude to mark up handwritten math like a teacher

Show HN project Penmentor feeds handwritten math into Claude, which annotates the work with teacher-style corrections. Code is on GitHub under AbdullahAlhariri.

Survey: 48% of employers say AI makes college degrees more important

Lumina Foundation and Gallup surveyed 2,500 employers: 48% expect AI to make college degrees more important over five years, versus 26% who expect less. 80% prefer candidates with a degree even when the job doesn't require one.

Mamdani urges New Yorkers to push back on AI at AI Now event

Speaking at the AI Now Institute's People's AI Assembly at Webster Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the federal government has abdicated AI regulation. He cited his ban on AI in elementary and middle schools and a rule requiring disclosure of AI-generated real estate listing images.

CMU and Microsoft launch PRAISE to train early-career engineers in AI

The Preceptorship for AI-accelerated Software Engineering pairs early-career Microsoft engineers with senior preceptors while they take online courses in CMU's School of Computer Science. Participants can enroll in SCS classes on software engineering and AI.

Essay examines AI-detector flags on Dartmouth provost's op-eds

Semafor ran Pangram against 310 guest newspaper articles and found 50 that appeared LLM-written, including Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell's Washington Post op-ed; a student paper later flagged nine of his works. Schnell admits using AI for "language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization."

Gemini Notebook adds Short Video Overviews and new quiz formats

Google rolled out three study features in Gemini Notebook: 60-second Short Video Overviews, Interactive Learning Overviews that weave summaries with slides, quizzes and flashcards, and new quiz formats including short-answer, multi-select and fill-in-the-blank.

Chollet: conversational AI can scale 1-on-1 tutoring

OpenAI adds Brazilian Portuguese to AI for Educators

OpenAI marked Teachers' Day by expanding AI for Educators to Brazilian Portuguese, pairing it with Study Mode for step-by-step learning support. The offering is aimed at helping teachers guide active, question-driven classroom learning.

Universities go on AI philosopher hiring spree

More than a dozen philosophy departments—including Purdue, UIC and Georgia Tech—have announced AI-focused tenure-track searches this fall. Cameron Buckner, who became an endowed chair in the philosophy of AI at the University of Florida in 2024, credits undergraduate demand to understand how AI is reshaping the world.

Learning Commons launches open K-12 AI platform with 70+ partners

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-backed nonprofit launched an open platform with open knowledge graphs and AI evaluators to check whether generated lessons align with state standards. More than 70 partners, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have joined.

ML course systemizes empirical intuition via next-experiment prediction

Students followed ChatGPT's wrong answers 62% of the time, study finds

Microsoft Research's StudentSim simulates students to test AI tutors

StudentSim trains personalized AI student simulators from public, de-identified learner records, one simulator per student, to evaluate tutors before real-learner studies. It beats leading baselines across chess, second-language English writing, and math, scoring on whether simulators respond like a specific student and update after tutor guidance.

Colleges' uneven AI policies create admissions disadvantage, essay argues

The Common App treats AI-generated content as "fraud," but colleges rarely disclose how detection systems work, while some allow Grammarly or AI "to support your original ideas." Applicants from underfunded districts must navigate differing AI policies and supplemental AI prompts across schools.

Ethan Mollick: AI is breaking the apprenticeship model for young workers

In a Prof G Pod clip, Ethan Mollick argues AI is quietly dismantling the apprenticeship model that trains young workers, while Scott Galloway sees no sign AI is disrupting higher ed. The discussion also covers AI's effects on academic research and medicine.

Study: 10 minutes of AI use erodes persistence at hard tasks

Researchers ran three randomized trials with 1,222 participants using a GPT-5 assistant on math and reading tasks; performance improved with AI, then dropped after it was removed. The peer-reviewed paper was presented at the Conference on Language Modeling.

ChatGPT Astra used as math tutor with document-scanning camera tool

The Medical Futurist lists 6 questions doctors must answer on AI

The Medical Futurist outlines six questions medical students and practising doctors should be able to answer as AI reshapes medical practice, starting with whether they know enough about AI. It points to the outlet's own paper, "A short guide for medical professionals in the era of artificial intelligence," covering AI definitions, methods, levels, dangers and advantages.

OpenAI adds College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens

College Planner tracks application requirements, deadlines, tasks, and financial-aid steps for a student's school list; it arrives "soon," starting with US grades 10-12 applying to four-year colleges. ChatGPT also gains multi-photo capture to PDF on iOS and flashcards generated from notes.

Maryland AI tutor trial yields unclear results, rollout paused

A randomized controlled trial of UMD's Virtual Study Assistant ran in fall 2025 with 2,379 undergraduates and 30 instructors, comparing grades and course participation of users vs. nonusers. Provost Jennifer King Rice said the study produced no clear findings, and campuswide deployment is on hold.

Ai2's TutorMoments eval tests Astra and Opus 5.5 on tutoring

Khanmigo AI tutoring trial finds small math gains

Two-year randomized trial across 18 Tennessee middle schools found Khanmigo raised math achievement 1.3 national percentile ranks per term, or 0.06-0.08 SD per school year. Gains resemble plain Khan Academy practice; 96% of students tried the tutor but the median student messaged it on only a third of practice days.

Kazakhstan AI school pilot to scale from 10 to 500 schools

Khan Academy video shows Khanmigo Tutor Me for home-school links

Khan Academy published a video on how district and school administrators can connect home and school using its platform, including the Khanmigo Tutor Me AI feature and parent account access. The video highlights anytime, anywhere access on mobile and desktop.

Khan Academy video walks teachers through Khanmigo reports

Tutorial covers Khanmigo's Usage and Activity reports, showing teachers how to analyze student engagement and track interaction depth. It also covers flagging critical check-in moments and connecting report data to targeted instruction.

Khan Academy video explains AI-enhanced mastery learning

Khan Academy's Katie, a former science teacher and content creator, walks through how mastery learning is implemented on Khan Academy with AI support, aimed at building strong foundations and high expectations for every student.

Khan Academy video walks through Khanmigo as student tutor and teacher assistant

Khan Academy's Tim Williams, a former classroom educator, demonstrates Khanmigo guiding students with questions and hints rather than answers, and supporting teachers. The walkthrough covers both the student tutoring and teacher-assistant roles.

Google blog series shows teachers using Gemini in classrooms

Six teacher-authored posts on Google's blog describe Gemini use in K-12 classrooms, from fifth-grade prompt-writing via Google Forms to data-mining students using Gemini in Google Colab as a tutor. One professor replaced coding tests with verbal interviews where students defend AI-suggested modelling choices.

Google expands free AI Educator Series to UK and Ireland

The program reaches all 650,000 educators in the UK and Ireland, after launching to 6 million US educators and expanding to India and Korea. Teachers earn micro-credentials and badges; Google also partnered with the National Governance Association on an AI Policy Toolkit.

Educause 2026: 7,000+ convene as AI reshapes higher ed

Educause 2026 drew 7,000-plus educators, IT professionals and vendors to Denver, where the 2027 Educause Top 10 was unveiled and dubbed "the age of perpetual change." Colleges have invested in AI-powered learning tools despite nearly nonexistent independent research showing widespread efficacy.

Community college AI lab seeks curriculum advice

An instructor at a public further education college in Ireland with funding for a small AI lab asks r/LocalLLaMA what to teach students beyond basic AI use. The lab has "reasonably decent" hardware but no defined curriculum.

Gauth builds interactive AI course with 3D objects and simulations

Study: Students with GPT-4 scored 48% higher, then dropped 17% below peers without AI

Google Badge-a-thon draws 1,400 educators for AI training

Google's first AI Educator Series Badge-a-thon, a 10-hour live event, drew 1,400+ educators who earned over 4,000 digital badges. All 20 sessions are on-demand on YouTube, with a "Badge-a-thon in a Box" toolkit for local events.

Lathoa math app teaches kids to catch AI mistakes

Aimed at ages 10-14, the app has a robot named Errol solve problems step by step with one step deliberately wrong; kids tap the bad step and explain the error in their own words. Errors come in three tiers (Obvious, Sneaky, Expert), and sometimes nothing is wrong.

CS 240 instructor publishes AI cheating retrospective

A CS 240: Programming in C instructor recounts the Spring 2026 semester AI-cheating incident, saying his handling of it was flawed and that students who violated the syllabus ban on using ChatGPT to generate assignment solutions faced little to no consequence. The syllabus allowed silently accumulating evidence rather than notifying students promptly.

Google.org backs three higher-ed AI readiness initiatives

Google.org announced support for higher education AI initiatives at EDUCAUSE 2026, citing that 41% of higher-ed educators report no formal AI training. The Coalition of Urban Serving Universities will integrate Grow with Google resources into its Urban Adult Learner Institute certification, tested by educators across 30 universities.

Instructure data: AI tools lag in higher ed LMS integration

Instructure's analysis of 19.5 million U.S. higher ed users found the top Canvas LTIs were McGraw Hill (11,369,232 users), Watermark (10,632,703) and Zoom (9,051,162). The most-adopted dedicated AI tool, Google Gemini, reached just 87,788 users across 211 institutions and missed the top 100.

EdReports: Only 1 of 10 EdTech Vendors Has Evidence AI Helps Learning

EdReports reviewed 10 K-12 curriculum and edtech providers and found just one included third-party evidence that its embedded AI features improved educational outcomes. The sample covered four top-10 publishers, three mid-sized curriculum providers and three digital-first edtech companies.

Opinion: AI-generated Springer Nature books reach UC library shelves

Springer Nature has published "AI-based" literature reviews since May 2021 mixing human text with machine-generated overviews, now available across University of California campuses via the California Digital Library. One such title, Criticism and Critical Theory: A Machine-Generated Overview, lists at $159.99 hardcover.

Dartmouth provost faces backlash over AI-written articles

Pangram flagged Santiago Schnell's Washington Post op-ed as 100% AI-generated and his nine 2026 professional articles as 96% AI-written, per The Dartmouth's investigation. Students and faculty are calling for his firing; Schnell says he used ChatGPT to refine arguments and check grammar.