Call for Papers: Standing Section “AI+ Education: Reimagining Learning, Teaching, and Educational Systems in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”

2026-10-03

Education and Lifelong Development Research is pleased to announce a new standing section: “AI+ Education: Reimagining Learning, Teaching, and Educational Systems in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

The idea for this section came from in-depth discussions among some members of our editorial board. AI has become an unavoidable issue in educational development. It is not only a technology that drives change or makes teaching more efficient; it also signals a shift in how we think about education itself. Over the past two years, AI learning assistants, generative AI writing tools, and intelligent tutoring systems have entered everyday teaching and learning. We have received more submissions on these topics, but many still focus on whether a particular tool works. Fewer look at how AI changes organizations, governance, equity, and the daily work of teachers and students. This section is meant to make room for those larger questions.

Governments around the world are also moving quickly. China’s Ministry of Education and four other departments jointly issued the “AI+ Education” Action Plan in April 2026, which calls for promoting AI as a public foundation course in higher education and advancing the intelligent upgrading of traditional vocational education programs. The United States released its 2024 National Educational Technology Plan, with attention to closing digital access, design, and use divides. Singapore’s EdTech Masterplan 2030 aims to transform the education system through technology. The European Union has also advanced digital education through its Digital Education Action Plan. These policies differ in emphasis, but they point to a common question: how can AI actually enter educational systems, rather than remain at the level of tools?

We welcome empirical studies, theoretical contributions, comparative analyses, and methodological innovations. We are less interested in descriptive accounts of individual AI tools or small pilot projects. We are more interested in work that examines AI-driven change at the systemic level: how learning environments are redesigned, how teacher professional competence is redefined, how assessment and feedback practices are reconstructed, how educational data and AI ethics are governed, and what AI means for equity and inclusion across different countries and institutions.

We invite manuscripts on themes including, but not limited to:

  • AI and teacher professional competence: new frameworks, assessment, professional development, and the changing role of the teacher.

  • Generative AI and student learning: help-seeking, cognitive autonomy, metacognitive regulation, academic integrity, and when AI works as a scaffold rather than a shortcut.

  • AI-driven educational governance and policy: strategic planning, data governance, ethical frameworks, and institutional arrangements.

  • AI and educational equity: rural–urban divides, resource constraints, disability and inclusion, and the distributional consequences of AI-mediated learning.

  • Learning analytics and educational data mining: models, methods, and applications that connect data to meaningful pedagogical action.

  • Human–AI collaboration in teaching and learning: the design and evaluation of AI learning assistants, intelligent tutoring systems, and adaptive learning environments.

  • Comparative and cross-cultural perspectives on AI+education: how national and institutional contexts shape the purposes, pathways, and outcomes of AI integration.

  • AI and the future of educational organizations: organizational transformation, infrastructure, collaboration networks, and the embedding of digital practices in institutional routines.

Submissions should clearly indicate “AI+ Education Standing Section” in the header of the first page. We hope to receive work from different countries, institutions, and disciplines, and to build a critical conversation about where AI+education is going and what it means for learning and teaching.

Special Issue Information

This standing section will publish a special issue in the near future. The Guest Editors are Dr. Yingbin Zhang, Associate Professor at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Education, South China Normal University, and Dr. Youliang Zhang, Associate Professor in the College of Teacher Education, South China Normal University.

Dr. Yingbin Zhang is an Associate Professor and Master’s Supervisor at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Education, South China Normal University. He received his Ph.D. from the DELTA programme at the College of Education, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research focuses on AI in education, educational data mining, and learning analytics, with particular attention to teacher and student competence modelling, metacognition, and self-regulated learning in intelligent environments. He has led projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Guangdong Provincial Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Programme. His work has appeared in Computers & Education, Contemporary Educational Psychology, and e-Education Research, among other SCI/SSCI/CSSCI journals. He serves as a reviewer for leading international journals including Computers & Education, Learning and Instruction, and Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, and for international conferences including EDM, CogSci, AERA, and ACM SIGCSE.

Full profile: http://aied.scnu.edu.cn/a/20230414/241.html

Dr. Youliang Zhang is an Associate Professor in the College of Teacher Education at South China Normal University and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Studies at Lingnan University. He was selected into the Hong Kong Scholar Programme in 2020. His research and teaching focus on the internationalization of education, educational organizations and governance, and teacher education.

Full profile: http://cte.scnu.edu.cn/shiziduiwu/zhuanrenjiaoshi/