How might we reform curricula to help students adapt to new ways of working, ensuring they can collaborate, solve problems, and effectively use AI in their lives and careers?
How do we equip learners with the knowledge and life skills needed for jobs in a world that is still taking shape and rapidly transforming in the age of AI? This is one challenge the world faces in the ever-evolving landscape of AI in education — and AI in our societies more broadly.
Each week we are spotlighting a section of the framework, showing how early signals of change inform it so that we can share progress and invite reflection on its development. This week, we’re charting how education systems are enabling learners to adapt to new ways of working in the age of AI.
Early signals
The growing role of personalised adaptive learning
Recent work highlights how LLM-powered tutors can enhance accessibility for diverse learners (Cheng et. al, 2025), while personalised adaptive learning continues to show potential in ensuring more inclusive and equitable access to education (Guettala, 2025; PAL Works).
- India – Personalised Adaptive Learning (PAL) programme: As India shifts toward competency-based learning, a randomised controlled trial (RCT) with the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab found that Andhra Pradesh students using PAL achieved almost two years of additional learning in 17 months. (Eble et. al, 2025)
- Global – OECD Learning Compass 2030: A conceptual reference tool designed to help countries reflect on what students will need to thrive in 2030. It places emphasis on students’ ability to navigate through unfamiliar contexts, and find their direction in a meaningful and responsible way. (OECD)
Using AI to bridge the gap between skills demand and curricula
At a recent conference, Muriel Poisson from IIEP-UNESCO highlighted how AI is being applied in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) to anticipate skills demand in order to align curricula with labour market needs. (IIEP-UNESCO, 2025)
- Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines – The Global Skills Tracker: Developed with UNESCO, the Global Skills Tracker applies AI and big data to analyse real-time online job ads, mapping emerging skills demand and trends, to inform TVET curricula. (UNESCO-UNEVOC)
- China – Industry Education Mapping Tool: A data-driven tool using AI and natural language processing to help align vocational training programmes with labour market demand across 18 sectors, referenced in Muriel Poisson’s presentation. (IIEP-UNESCO, 2025)
Positioning learners as architects of AI, not only end users
Much of the discussion on preparing learners for the age of AI is framed by the Future of Jobs Report 2025 (WEF, 2025), which casts learners as end users of AI in their future roles as employees. In contrast, we’re seeing signals that position learners as architects of AI.
- Africa – African Girls Can Code Initiative: Over the past decade, digital-skills programmes for girls have championed young women as shapers of Africa’s digital future. Many of these same programmes, like the African Girls Can Code Initiative, now integrate AI modules alongside coding, positioning young women as key contributors to the continent’s AI future. (ITU)
- Philippines – The AI laboratory at Dansolihon National High School: Located in an Indigenous Peoples community, this public school became the first in the Philippines to provide AI technology training and laboratory facilities, enabling students to gain hands-on experience designing, deploying, and testing AI systems themselves. (Philippine News Agency, 2025)
Reflections:
- Complementing, not competing with AI: If AI performs most technical, routine, or analytical tasks in the future, then curricula needs to pivot towards what makes humans uniquely human, and towards skills that allow people to thrive alongside AI, not compete with it.
- Developing human-centred curricula: Curricula needs to focus on nurturing critical thinking, creativity, imagination, empathy, compassion, ethical reasoning, environmental and social responsibility, life-long learning, and metacognition.
- Cultivating hybrid intelligence: As students increasingly work with AI to extend their cognition, human-AI collaboration (Holstein & Aleven, 2022) and hybrid intelligence (Cukurova, 2025) skills need to be cultivated.
- Developing a broader sense of purpose: Ultimately, if AI handles productivity needs of the future, humans must find value beyond economic output. Education should therefore support holistic development of learners and nurture a broader sense of purpose, belonging, and contribution to collective well-being.
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We’d love to hear from you! What’s been shaping your thinking on AI? Drop your thoughts (and reading recommendations) in the comments. Explore more from EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory.
EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory is made possible with the support of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
