Future learning center opens at Zhejiang University

During the World Digital Education Conference held in Hangzhou in May 2026, Zhejiang University (ZJU) unveiled its Future Learning Center as part of a site visit for international guests. The new center is a major initiative under the university's AI STEP plan and reflects ZJU's broader effort to rethink learning in the age of artificial intelligence.

The center is designed to help students grow from readers into innovators. Guided by a student-centered, competence-oriented and interest-driven approach, it brings together new learning spaces, interdisciplinary resources and technology-enabled teaching models to support a more future-ready education. Its work focuses on three directions: AI-powered knowledge innovation, interdisciplinary training in complex real-world scenarios, and task-based learning that connects physical and digital environments through digital twin technologies.

The center's four floors are arranged as a step-by-step pathway for student development. The first floor is intended to spark curiosity through "teacher-student-machine" co-creation, where students use AI tools to recreate landmark interdisciplinary research and explore how new ideas are generated. The second floor emphasizes capability building through facilities such as Future Classrooms and Koala Studio, an engineering innovation platform that supports hands-on research and project-based learning. The third floor is dedicated to project incubation, with the student-run X-Lab community offering peer support, mentoring and preparation for academic competitions.The fourth floor focuses on deeper innovation and stronger links with industry. Working with leading companies and alumni enterprises including ByteDance and Huawei, the center helps student teams engage with real-world industrial scenarios through open-source collaboration, hackathons and startup incubation. In this way, it extends learning beyond the classroom and into a broader innovation ecosystem.

Looking ahead, the Future Learning Center is expected to serve as a hub for ZJU's education reform. By connecting innovation bases, key laboratories and departmental platforms across campus, the university aims to integrate resources more effectively and build a distinctive model for cultivating innovative talent.

Adapted and translated from the article written by LI Yunqian, GAO Yuanqi, HAN Wei and WU Fei
Translator: DING Chenwei
Photo: the official WeChat account of Zhejiang University and the World Digital Education Conference 2026
Editor: DING Chenwei