2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning
The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition identifies the major forces likely to shape higher education teaching and learning over the next decade. A recurring theme is that colleges and universities are being asked to prove their value while also adapting to rapid technological, economic, environmental, and policy changes.
AI appears throughout the report as both a challenge and an opportunity. It is reshaping how students find information, how they complete assignments, how faculty design assessments, and how institutions support student success. The report notes that some faculty are moving away from traditional assignments that can be easily completed with AI and toward assessments that emphasize process, reflection, oral explanation, authentic projects, and critical evaluation of AI outputs.
The report also warns that AI can affect trust in the classroom. Students may turn to AI instead of instructors for help, while faculty may feel pressure to monitor student work more closely. The report cautions against overreliance on AI detection tools and emphasizes the need for clear norms, transparent expectations, and learning designs that preserve mentoring, belonging, and academic judgment.
Several examples show how institutions are already responding. The University of Utah’s Student-Led AI Symposium invited students to lead conversations about how they are actually using AI. Purdue’s “Charlie” provides rubric-based AI feedback on writing drafts within a peer-review platform. Boise State’s boisestate.ai offers a university-hosted AI platform designed to protect data and reduce dependence on commercial vendors. Grand Canyon University’s work on verification-first assessment moves away from AI detection and toward faculty judgment of student mastery.
Beyond AI, the report highlights growing cybersecurity and privacy threats, new digital accessibility requirements, enrollment and funding pressures, and increasing attention to sustainability. For example, the report points to faculty-facing accessibility resources that use AI prompts and workflows to help instructors make course materials more accessible. It also describes microcredential efforts, such as Penn State Engineering’s Go Beyond initiative, that connect learning more directly to workforce needs.
The report’s new “signals of change” section looks at early developments that may shape the future, including AI learning assistants, AI-powered textbooks, 3D model generation for immersive learning, apprenticeship-for-credit models, and new approaches to shared administrative services. These are not predictions, but they invite faculty and institutions to consider how teaching and learning might evolve.
For faculty, the takeaway is the need to pose more rigorous questions: What should students learn? How should they demonstrate learning? Where can AI deepen understanding, and where might it weaken it? How do we protect trust, equity, accessibility, privacy, and human connection while preparing students for a changing world?
To read the full report, visit: https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2026/5/2026hrteachinglearning.pdf