Smart Education in 2024: Key Reports and Insights You Shouldn’t Miss Looking back at 2024, smart...
Looking back at 2025, smart education has solidified its position as a core industry focus, driving the deepened integration of technology and learning. This year has witnessed accelerated advancements in Generative AI (GenAI), big data analytics, and adaptive learning technologies—reshaping traditional education through more precise personalized learning paths, smart campus ecosystem upgrades, and intelligent education management optimization.
Multiple authoritative reports have highlighted mature models of AI-powered education, showcasing innovative applications in interactive teaching, automated formative assessment, and teacher capacity building. In this newsletter edition, we’re excited to share a curated selection of global research reports on smart education, published in 2025! Stay informed with key insights shaping the current practice and future direction of education.
Summary of Key Reports
1.《2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition》
Release day: May 12, 2025
Publisher: Association for Higher Education Information Technology (ACUTA)
Summary: The 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report highlights critical trends transforming higher education. Key social, technological, economic, environmental, and political factors shape teaching and learning, emphasizing AI and online tools. Institutions are navigating polycrises, shifting learner expectations, and adapting to new technologies. Scenarios explore potential futures, from growth in digital engagement to constraints posed by regulatory mandates. Emphasizing inclusivity and workforce readiness, the report encourages higher education to rethink practices and technologies for sustainable advancement. Collaborative partnerships with industry emerge as essential to preparing students for a rapidly evolving job market. Read the full PDF
2.《Smart Education in the Age of AI》
Release day: August 16, 2025
Publisher: Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University
Summary: The GSENet 2025 report maps how AI and GenAI can leapfrog learning poverty, teacher shortages, and inequity, but also risks ethics and divides. Blending national frameworks, teacher voices, Africa-China practices, and top-university cases, it urges governments to embed human-centred, ethically governed, and multi-stakeholder smart education into national strategies, harnessing human-AI collaboration, data-informed feedback, and iterative improvement—as a means to realize SDG4: inclusive, equitable, and lifelong quality education for all.
3.《2025 AI in Education: A Microsoft Special Report》
Release day: 2025
Publisher: Microsoft
Summary: This report, released by Microsoft in 2025, explores the application of artificial intelligence in education, stating that generative artificial intelligence has been widely adopted. The report covers usage cases for students, teachers, and leaders, addressing issues such as plagiarism and privacy. Additionally, it elaborates on the demand for artificial intelligence literacy and proposes suggestions for aligning artificial intelligence with educational goals.
4.《AI and education: protecting the rights of learners》
Release day: 2025
Publisher: UNESCO
Summary: Digitalization and GenAI expand access and personalize learning, yet 2.6 billion people remain offline, widening digital and AI divides that hit girls, rural, disabled, and marginalized groups hardest. Without robust data protection, ethical frameworks, inclusive access, and accountability, technology threatens rights. This report demands human-centred, rights-based governance and urgent global cooperation to ensure digital tools advance, rather than endanger, every learner's right to quality education.
5.《AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions》
Release day:2025
Publisher: UNESCO
Summary: AI is revolutionizing learning, yet one-third of humanity is offline, and elite tools, languages, and values monopolize its design. This anthology convenes global voices to interrogate philosophical, ethical, and pedagogical dilemmas, challenge dominant narratives, and co-create inclusive visions for assessment, curricula, and governance. Building on UNESCO's AI ethics instruments, it forges a commons for collective dialogue that centres human rights, justice, and plural knowledge in equitable human-machine education.
6.《Impact, inequality, and imagination: envisioning a more ambitious education in the era of AI》
Release day: 2025
Publisher: UNESCO
Summary: The paper argues that AI discussions in education must transcend narrow outcome metrics and examine broader political, economic, and social impacts. It warns that personalised AI systems may replicate old pedagogical myths, reduce human interaction, and create new inequalities while promising equity. Calling for critical imagination, it advocates pedagogies that help learners interrogate AI's global labour, data, and resource chains, foreground societal consequences, and actively shape inclusive, innovative educational futures.
7.《Digital empowerment for lifelong learning and transformative andragogy (DELTA) for adult educators: introduction to the DELTA framework and resources》
Release day: October 18, 2025
Publisher: UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Shanghai Open University
Summary: The DELTA framework is tailored for adult educators. It focuses on digital empowerment, lifelong learning, and transformative andragogy, encompassing four core principles, four practice domains, educator growth stages, and supporting resources. Altogether, the framework aims to strengthen educators' digital competencies, close digital divides, and ultimately contribute to the global pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: ensuring inclusive, equitable, and quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all.
8. 《International Day of Education 2025: AI and education - Preserving human agency in a world of automation》
Release day: February 18, 2025
Publisher: UNESCO
Summary: The 2025 International Day of Education, co-hosted by the AU and UNESCO, rallied Africa to embed the AU-AI Strategy and UNESCO ethical frameworks in higher-education and school reforms, championing AI that amplifies human agency, widens access for marginalized learners, and safeguards rights, while calling for new investments, cross-sector dialogue, and continent-wide capacity-building to accelerate inclusive, quality education.
9.《AI and Education: Building the Future Through Digital Transformation》
Release day: April 2025
Publisher: Inter-American Development Bank Education Division
Summary: This 2025 technical report examines the role of artificial intelligence in the field of education. The report highlights the mixed effects of past educational technologies, emphasizes the potential of artificial intelligence in personalized learning, resource accessibility, and efficiency improvement, and points out risks such as inequality and bias. The report proposes a framework that includes necessary conditions and implementation paths to achieve effective and fair integration of artificial intelligence.
10. 《Integrating AI and gamification in higher education for e-learning optimization and soft skills assessment through a cross-study synthesis》
Release day: September 1, 2025
Publisher: Frontiers
Summary: This study explores AI and gamification in higher education, using a systematic review, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), and Machine Learning(ML). It finds AI boosts personalized learning and engagement, gamification aids soft skills, but data privacy and tech accessibility issues persist; future research should examine long-term workforce adaptability impacts.
11.《Adopting AI in education: optimizing human resource management considering teacher perceptions》
Release day: February 19, 2025
Publisher: Frontiers
Summary: There is widespread concern about fully quantifying how AI foundational tech's rapid development impacts education, especially on teachers' methods. Positive perceptions of AI in education are key to developing AI-driven methods. This research explores how variables like Generative AI perception, familiarity, and resilience influence teachers' AI utility perception, attitude, and usage intention. Results validate an empirical model explaining teachers' intention to use AI tools, with implications for education HR management discussed.
CTL's Event Update
Upcoming Workshop: Rethinking Learning and Teaching Design in the Age of AI
Workshop Overview
AI’s role in education is growing, but its impact on educational routines, relationships and core assumptions is understudied. This workshop guides educators to view AI as an active part of pedagogical interactions (not just a neutral tool). Through hands-on activities, it explores AI’s "intra-action" with teaching/learning, and its implications for assessment, creativity and knowledge-making. It also draws on posthumanist and sociomaterial theories to address new questions about agency, authorship and learning, while developing practical AI-integrated teaching strategies.
Amid the deepened integration of AI and education in 2025, the foundational insights from 2024 reports have laid a solid groundwork for this year's practice, while emerging trends bring new opportunities and challenges to intelligent education. We hope this curated collection of 2025 key reports adds practical value to your work and strategic thinking. Stay tuned! We will select core content from this newsletter and post it in the "Technological Professional Development" section of the CTL website, ensuring easy access for your reference and in-depth exploration of cutting-edge AI education applications.
The Key Details of the Workshops：
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Time: 9:30-11:30 AM, Tuesday, October 28th
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Venue: SLAC 201A
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Guest Speaker: Dr. Freek Olaf de Groot
Dr. Freek Olaf de Groot—an assistant professor of Applied Linguistics at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University. He uses sociocultural theory to study how language, learning, and technology interact amid technology, media, and society, with his research published in indexed academic journals. He also has experience delivering workshops for global institutions like publishers and embassies.
All faculty are welcome—this session offers cross-disciplinary insights. Light refreshments will be served.
To register for the workshop, please click here.
Reference
Association for Higher Education Information Technology (ACUTA). (2025, May 12). 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition. ACUTA.
Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University. (2025, August 16). Smart Education in the Age of AI. Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University..
UNESCO. (2025). AI and education: protecting the rights of learners. UNESCO.
UNESCO. (2025). AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions. UNESCO.
UNESCO. (2025). Impact, inequality, and imagination: envisioning a more ambitious education in the era of AI. UNESCO.
UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Shanghai Open University. (2025, October 18). Digital empowerment for lifelong learning and transformative andragogy (DELTA) for adult educators: introduction to the DELTA framework and resources. UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Shanghai Open University.
UNESCO, African Union (AU). (2025, February 18). International Day of Education 2025: AI and education - Preserving human agency in a world of automation. UNESCO.
Inter-American Development Bank Education Division. (2025, April). AI and Education: Building the Future Through Digital Transformation. Inter-American Development Bank Education Division.
Frontiers. (2025, September 1). Integrating AI and gamification in higher education for e-learning optimization and soft skills assessment through a cross-study synthesis. Frontiers.
Frontiers. (2025, February 19). Adopting AI in education: optimizing human resource management considering teacher perceptions. Frontiers.
Microsoft. (2025). 2025 AI in Education: A Microsoft Special Report. Microsoft.
Author: Yan (Tanya) Tang
Subeditor: Anqi (Angel) Wei
Chief Editor: Yirui (Sandy) Jiang