Megan Oakleaf, a professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, has won a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to lead a three-year project training 110 academic librarians nationwide in AI literacy and assessment. The project, SSAAILL, partners Syracuse with the University of Virginia, Colorado State University and the University of Denver, using a three-track, dual-cohort train-the-trainer model in which each participant trains at least five colleagues, aiming to reach more than 550 librarians at 110 institutions. A student advisory group of undergraduates also helps shape the curriculum.
On September 9, 2026, the Canadian federal government announced C$13 million in funding to the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) to provide free AI education, with the goal of training 50,000 kindergarten-to-Grade-12 (K-12) educators. Indra Kubicek, CEO of Digital Moment, confirmed in an interview that her organization has trained 8,000 teachers on AI since 2023, while Canada has 400,000 teachers in total. She said the federal government's earlier target of training 3,000 teachers was low, and called the new funding an opportunity to build a nationwide strategic model.
A Stanford working paper released in June 2026, "The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education," uses data from about 27,000 Chinese students in grades seven to 12 to examine how self-directed generative AI use affects cumulative learning. It reports that roughly 80 percent of students began using generative AI between 2023 and 2025, and about 50 percent fully outsourced homework after five months of use. By the end of June 2025, college entrance exam scores fell 18 percent and high school entrance exam scores fell 24 percent, with no corresponding learning benefit found.
On September 21, more than 2,000 teachers protested at Bengaluru's Freedom Park against Karnataka's decision to let Classes 9 and 10 students in 1,642 government high schools replace the third language with an NSQF-aligned AI course in 2026-27. Organizers support AI education but want it as a separate skill or elective subject, and oppose a July 14 recruitment draft that they say concentrates high-school language-teacher recruitment on Kannada and English. On September 22, the issue was raised in the Legislative Council, but Chairman Saleem Ahmed did not permit a discussion.
