Starting from the 2027 fall semester, primary schools in upper grades, junior high schools, and senior high schools in Gansu Province will be required to offer no fewer than 8 class hours of artificial intelligence-related courses per academic year, according to a new action plan released by the provincial education department and four other government agencies.
The "Gansu Artificial Intelligence + Education Action Plan (2026-2030)" sets a target that by 2030, the province will strive to become a nationally influential demonstration zone for AI-integrated education, with a comprehensive general education system covering all primary and secondary schools.
Schools are encouraged to integrate AI into interdisciplinary teaching, after-school services, research-based learning activities, teaching supervision, and educational research. The plan also calls for strengthening the development of model AI education base schools and exploring effective pathways for using AI to enhance ideological and political education, mental health, physical education, aesthetic education, labor education, science and technology education, and club activities.
For higher education, around 10 provincial-level general AI courses will be established, covering all students across all majors. In vocational education, AI general courses will be offered across the full spectrum from secondary vocational schools to junior colleges and undergraduate vocational programs.
To build a stronger AI teaching workforce, the plan promotes collaborative teaching involving both human teachers and AI systems, exploring the use of virtual classrooms and large language models to assist in lesson planning, grading, personalized tutoring, classroom behavior assessment, and evidence-based teaching research. Leveraging universities with teacher training programs, model high schools, academic societies, and east-west "group-style" education assistance resources, AI will be incorporated into joint teaching research and cross-regional digital teaching support initiatives.
Through projects such as "AI Empowering Teacher Professional Development," a blended online-offline teacher training model will be established, with over 10,000 young teachers annually receiving "AI classroom teaching capability intelligent diagnosis." During the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), the province plans to certify around 500 digital-intelligence leading mentors and establish more than 15 AI education expert guidance teams. A series of hands-on workshops for generative AI tool-assisted teaching will be set up at AI education base schools, smart education demonstration zones, and benchmark schools, aiming to enhance teachers' AI teaching capabilities across grade levels, schools, and regions through group school operation, urban-rural education consortia, and teaching research communities.
AI education achievements, research projects, and innovative applications will be incorporated as key assessment factors in teacher professional title evaluations and performance appraisals.
To improve student AI literacy, schools across the province will explore a three-in-one evaluation mechanism combining "process recording, competency certification, and achievement showcasing," integrating AI literacy into students' comprehensive digital quality evaluation archives. Multimodal data analysis will be used to understand students' cognitive characteristics, create personalized learning profiles, construct adaptive learning models, and enable personalized learning pathway navigation.
Building on the Gansu Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Competition, branded events such as the "AI Innovation Challenge" will be developed to encourage students to engage in multi-dimensional practices including algorithm design and ethical reasoning, with no fewer than 30,000 students participating annually. Schools will be supported in identifying and nurturing top innovative talent in AI from an early stage, creating an integrated pathway for AI talent development spanning primary school through university.
The plan also emphasizes promoting interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary development in higher education. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, more than 20 new AI-related disciplines and majors will be added at universities in the province, leveraging the advantages of local universities' distinctive discipline layouts. AI will be strongly supported to empower the development of advantageous disciplines such as education, grassland science, transportation engineering, materials science and engineering, and bamboo slip studies. Specialized "AI+" interdisciplinary platforms will be established in areas including intelligent construction, intelligent transportation, smart grassland management, and intelligent education governance.
To drive the intelligent transformation of research paradigms, existing platforms including the "Gansu Provincial Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Computing Power Technology," the "Gansu International Cooperation Base for Medical Imaging AI," and the "Intelligent Education Research Base" will be strengthened. University-enterprise collaborations will be supported to create key laboratories, technology innovation centers, and industrial research institutes in AI, while existing research platforms undergo intelligent upgrades. Universities with advantageous disciplines and research teams will be supported to conduct fundamental and applied research in AI, developing vertical-domain teaching and research intelligent agents and application tools. Through platforms such as the Ministry of Education's Gansu Higher Education Research Institute, priority support will be given to "AI+" industrial development projects in relevant science and technology research programs.
To accelerate the transformation and application of scientific and technological achievements, a number of AI industrialization demonstration projects will be cultivated in key industries including new energy, new materials, and equipment manufacturing. A coordinated "technology + industry + finance" investment mechanism will be explored to speed up the application of university AI research achievements in enterprises. University-enterprise collaboration will be encouraged to develop and promote innovative AI education products. Research teams will be supported to undertake enterprise intelligent transformation projects, with technical solutions and engineering cases converted into teaching resources to feed back into talent cultivation.
The plan calls for deepening reforms in training systems and models, making AI a required public course or designated elective at universities. Universities will be guided to embed AI fundamentals, core technologies, and industry application modules into teaching and internship practices when formulating or revising talent training plans and curriculum guidelines. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, around 200 AI-featured majors will be upgraded or transformed, and about 200 provincial-level smart courses will be developed. Undergraduate universities will be supported to dynamically adjust their discipline and curriculum matrices, and those with appropriate conditions are encouraged to explore offering AI-related minor majors, micro-majors, and digital textbooks.
Focused on specific "AI+" industry scenarios, a batch of high-level virtual simulation laboratories will be built, intelligent experiment systems developed, and experimental teaching equipment such as intelligent robots and cloud computing clusters provided. These will support industry-education integrated training combining teaching and research, data annotation, and achievement transformation.
To strengthen product and service supply support, the plan supports junior and senior high schools in purchasing AI experimental instruments and equipment, and universities in building teaching and research facilities and updating training and research equipment. Industry-education integrated internship and training bases will be established in frontier fields such as next-generation information technology, high-end CNC machine tools, and robotics. University science and technology parks will be leveraged to cultivate AI enterprises in education and other sectors, developing or co-developing educational vertical models, intelligent learning terminals, virtual simulation training systems, and other technology products suited to educational scenarios.
An education "intelligent brain" will be built relying on the provincial education digital intelligence center, strengthening data integration, corpus supply, model training, and computing power support. Cities and prefectures will be encouraged to build education industry dataset platforms and data annotation bases tailored to local conditions, connecting with national, provincial, and municipal education data and resource platforms. AI-assisted decision-making will be applied to optimize educational resource allocation in areas such as school layout adapting to demographic changes, degree supply, and teacher staffing.
A precise governance service system will be established, promoting in-depth AI applications in exam admissions, student record management, teacher development, and funding supervision, achieving intelligent processing of key business workflows. The application of AI large models and intelligent agents in school administration and governance will be actively advanced to improve work efficiency and enhance educational governance resilience. Education administration intelligence will be strengthened to provide round-the-clock, companion-style policy consulting and education administration services for teachers, students, and parents.
By 2028, the province aims to establish a complete AI general education curriculum and textbook system spanning all educational stages, create more than 2 city or prefecture-level pilot zones for AI-enabled education, establish more than 45 national and provincial AI education base schools, and develop more than 1,000 typical "AI + education" application scenario cases.
By 2030, the provincial education network bandwidth will be upgraded to 40G, with cloud computing resources of no less than 100P. AI will fully play its strategic supporting role in promoting personalized student learning, teacher professional growth, modern educational governance, and high-quality development. Teachers, students, and education administrators will significantly improve their AI thinking awareness, application innovation, and ethical literacy. Human-machine collaborative teaching will be basically fully covered among teachers, and student intelligent learning companion applications will achieve normalized use. The smart education ecosystem will continue to mature, positioning Gansu as a nationally influential "AI + education" demonstration zone.
The plan was jointly released by the provincial education department and four other agencies, as part of the province's broader efforts to accelerate educational modernization through artificial intelligence technology.
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