New ways to learn and teach with ChatGPT Work and Codex

What happened

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.

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.

Why it matters

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. 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. 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 philanthropic organization that funds and builds public AI datasets and resources to help bring more learning science into classrooms, which allows teachers to create materials aligned to local academic standards, the granular learning components beneath them, and the progressions that connect prior and future learning, while remaining in control of pedagogical decisions, grading, and agentic actions.

What to watch

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.