New ways to learn and teach with ChatGPT Work and Codex

August 4, 2026

Introducing new plugins specifically designed to guide K-12 teachers, college educators, and college students.

• Helping students and educators do more with AI
• Ensuring AI use in education leads to opportunity
• Expanding access and practical support with partners
• The year ahead

AI is moving from tools that primarily answer questions to systems that can reason across context, use other tools, and help carry out complex, multi-step work. That shift is changing what it means to be prepared for school, work, and what comes next.

As students and educators return to classrooms and campuses this fall, we're introducing three new education plugins for ChatGPT Work and Codex, specifically designed to help students and educators leverage agentic capabilities using the course materials and context they choose. A plugin is a package of apps, role-specific skills, instructions, and common workflows that helps students and educators get started immediately without having to construct complex prompts on their own. These new plugins are available through both ChatGPT Edu and ChatGPT for Teachers district deployments.

This builds on the principle that guides our work in education: AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and the best learning experiences keep educators and students in control.

Helping students and educators do more with AI

The new plugins include one for college students, one for K-12 educators, and one for college educators. By connecting to the tools and materials they already rely on, from documents and course materials to calendars and other approved apps, the plugins understand the context and task at hand and help students and educators move from curiosity to practice, lesson idea to classroom material, and project concept to execution.

We have been focused on partnering with schools and universities to make AI available in secure, institution-managed environments. Introduced in 2024, ChatGPT Edu gives educational institutions managed workspaces with enterprise-level privacy, security, and administrative controls. ChatGPT for Teachers⁠ (opens in a new window), introduced in 2025, is free for verified U.S. K-12 educators and districts and offers education-grade protections and compliance features. School and district leaders can claim their domain to bring educators into a shared workspace with greater oversight and guidance, including protections to support FERPA requirements and a data privacy agreement.

The K-12 Educator plugin is designed to help teachers plan and create for their classrooms. Developed alongside K-12 educators, it can work with the materials and tools teachers already use to create differentiated resources, design interactive visuals, and surface actionable insights. It also integrates with Learning Commons⁠ (opens in a new window), a nonprofit working to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner, which allows teachers to create materials aligned to local academic standards, frameworks, and pathways, while remaining in control of pedagogical decisions, grading, and agentic actions.

This work reflects what we've learned through our engagement with educators, including our partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). OpenAI is the founding partner in the National Academy for AI Instruction, a five-year initiative to equip 400,000 K-12 educators-about one in every 10 teachers in the US-to use AI effectively and lead the way in shaping how AI is taught and used in classrooms across the country.

The College Educator plugin enables course design, teaching, and academic planning. Faculty can update syllabi, create interactive websites or multimedia assessments, adapt materials for diverse learners, or package content for their LMS. With connected calendars, documents, and other approved tools, instructors can also work across teaching, research, and everyday tasks without having to recreate the context for each new project.

The College Student plugin helps students turn what they are already studying into more personalized learning experiences. Students can work with a guided tutor, practice difficult concepts, and create study guides, quizzes, flashcards, and interactive visual explanations from the sources they choose. Designed with university students across majors, geographies, and levels of AI fluency, the plugin draws on learning science to prioritize deeper understanding and build stronger study habits.

Together, these plugins give students and educators a more useful starting point for working with AI by bringing the right context, tools, and workflows together so they can spend less time setting up how ChatGPT should work and more time learning, teaching, researching, and creating, while institutions retain control over which tools and permissions are available.

Ensuring AI use in education leads to opportunity

As AI becomes more capable, the opportunity for education is bigger than simply helping people learn how to use a new technology. It is helping students develop agency: the ability to direct these tools toward meaningful goals, exercise judgment, learn continuously, solve hard problems, and turn ideas into something real.

More than 200 million young adults ages 18-24 now use ChatGPT every week, making them some of the stronger mainstream users. However, among college-age users, we see a widening global "capability overhang," defined as the gap between what AI tools can do and how people actually use them. Even advanced student users leverage ChatGPT's capabilities roughly 90-99% less than power users, pointing to significant room to deepen AI skills.

Structured access can help close that gap. Across ChatGPT Edu deployments, students develop more advanced patterns of use over time, outperforming free users across nearly every capability and moving closer to power-user behavior, particularly in analysis, calculation, and learning. Since the launch of ChatGPT Edu in 2024, we have partnered with K-12 schools and districts including Houston ISD, Texas; Fairfax, Virginia and Fulton, Georgia and hundreds of college and university campuses, including the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania⁠, The University of Texas at Austin, and the California State University system to responsibly deploy AI to teachers and campuses.

Through our investments in education, hundreds of thousands of educators across K-12 and higher education have free access to OpenAI tools, training, and research to advance equity and innovation. Now, we're delivering new features to support teachers and students to better leverage the full capabilities of ChatGPT.

Expanding access and practical support with partners

Frontier technology needs to be paired with education-specific workspaces, training, peer-led programs, rigorous research, and trusted partners to build the confidence to leverage new capabilities responsibly.

For college students, the new OpenAI Student Collective is a student-led community for learning, building, and shaping what's next with AI. Applications⁠ are now open for students to become Campus Leads and bring the community to life on their campuses. Through peer-led experiences and hands-on projects, students can develop practical skills and put their ideas into practice. And, through partnerships with platforms like Handshake, college students can connect those skills to internships and early-career opportunities.

In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation, OpenAI Academy is bringing together more than 1,600 K-12 teachers, administrators, and district leaders across eight U.S. cities for free in-person, hands-on workshops for building practical skills for applying AI to real classroom challenges.

OpenAI K-12 Teacher Jam in Jonesboro, Georgia

Through OpenAI Education for Countries, we work with governments and national leaders to develop deployments designed for local needs and evidence-based research. In Estonia, for example, ChatGPT Edu now reaches more than 20,000 students and 4,600 teachers alongside a longitudinal research initiative with the University of Tartu and Stanford.

Academic research is also central to the mission of higher education, and frontier AI is opening new possibilities for scientific discovery. The new ChatGPT for Academic Researchersprogram gives eligible researchers 12 months of free Pro-level access to apply ChatGPT Work and Codex to ambitious scientific work in a secure workspace.

The year ahead

The next chapter of AI in education will be shaped by what students create, what educators make possible, and what institutions and partners discover together. Throughout the school year, we'll keep building alongside the education community to advance new tools, expand training and research, and deliver evidence-based insights. Our shared goal is to empower every student and educator with the confidence and capabilities to expand what they can learn, imagine, create, and achieve.

The educator and student plugins are available in ChatGPT Edu and ChatGPT for Teachers district deployments. Contact our team to learn more.

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