Introduction

Recently, the Ministry of Education and four other departments jointly issued the “AI + Education Action Plan” (hereinafter referred to as the “Action Plan”), aimed at promoting the cultivation of AI talent and innovation in application, systematically constructing an educational system for the intelligent era. What are the key deployments for “AI + Education” during the 14th Five-Year Plan period?

Key Proposals

The Action Plan emphasizes the following:

• Basic Education: Ensure comprehensive and effective AI courses to cultivate students’ intelligent thinking.
• Higher Education: Integrate AI into the public foundational curriculum.
• Vocational Education: Promote the intelligent transformation of traditional industry-related majors, training high-skilled talents adapted to industrial changes.
• Lifelong Education: Aggregate and develop quality educational resources, ensuring equal learning opportunities in AI for all learners.

Additionally, it aims to enhance teachers’ digital literacy and skills, fully stimulating their intrinsic motivation to innovate educational teaching models using AI. AI will be included in the content of teacher qualification exams and certifications.

Implementation Strategies

The Action Plan clearly states the need to accelerate the popularization of AI education among primary and secondary school students, ensuring comprehensive and effective related courses. It promotes the full integration of AI education into local curriculum systems, guiding regions to develop AI curriculum guidelines that specify course objectives, content, and hour requirements for each educational stage. It encourages interdisciplinary teaching of AI and promotes the integration of AI education into after-school services and research practices.

Focusing on cultivating high-level talents for the intelligent era, the Action Plan requires:

• AI to become a public foundational course in higher education, with textbooks categorized by subject and major, ensuring all students master AI knowledge.
• Optimization of traditional discipline and major training programs, guiding universities to offer interdisciplinary AI courses, enriching the curriculum with cross-disciplinary and cross-major offerings to cultivate versatile talents.
• Adjustment of discipline and major settings based on the intelligent upgrade of the industrial structure, establishing new disciplines and majors that align with new technologies, industries, and business formats.

Future Goals

Furthermore, according to the Action Plan, AI will be leveraged to empower student learning, educational governance, and scientific research, strengthening and optimizing the foundational environment and development ecology of “AI + Education.” By 2030, a vertically integrated and horizontally connected AI education system across all educational stages and a general education system for society will be established.