Introduction

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council highly value the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on education. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized the need to implement the national education digital strategy, strengthen the national smart education public service platform, explore effective ways to empower personalized and innovative teaching through digital means, expand the reach of quality educational resources, and leverage AI to facilitate educational transformation. In April 2026, the Ministry of Education and four other departments jointly issued the “AI + Education Action Plan,” providing a historic opportunity for quality and balanced educational development in ethnic regions.

Focusing on Unique Needs: Deepening AI Empowerment in All Aspects of Education

Students in ethnic regions have unique cognitive foundations, language environments, and learning habits, with significant differences in learning conditions. It is crucial to integrate AI into the entire educational process and empower all aspects of education to respond more precisely to the personalized and differentiated needs of teachers and students. In terms of value guidance, it is essential to develop and utilize ideological models and scenario-based intelligent applications that incorporate core content such as the education of the consciousness of the Chinese national community, the inheritance and development of excellent traditional Chinese culture, and the promotion of the national common language into immersive intelligent educational products, making abstract theories tangible.

By combining red resources and examples of national unity and progress, a specialized ideological education resource library can be established to align knowledge literacy with value shaping, creating a shared spiritual home for the Chinese nation. For precise educational assistance, intelligent learning companions equipped with situational guidance and cultural adaptation functions can be employed to accurately capture students’ cognitive characteristics using technologies such as knowledge graphs and emotional computing. This allows for real-time monitoring of knowledge consolidation points and weaknesses, tailoring personalized and progressive learning paths to implement large-scale differentiated instruction. For students learning the national common language, features such as speech assessment, intelligent pronunciation correction, and engaging dialogues can enhance language skills. In terms of teaching empowerment, an intelligent teaching system can be established to create a closed-loop process of precise lesson preparation before class, dynamic optimization during class, and evidence-based research after class. Before class, intelligent recommendations for suitable teaching resources can facilitate efficient lesson preparation; during class, real-time awareness of student dynamics allows for flexible adjustments to teaching strategies; after class, in-depth analysis of teaching behaviors drives reflection and improvement, significantly enhancing classroom quality, especially in schools with weak teaching resources.

Enhancing Adaptability: Promoting Comprehensive Optimization of AI-Enabled Educational Resources

The construction of educational resources in ethnic regions has shifted from merely supplementing quantity to enhancing effectiveness. The key lies in bridging the transformation chain from supply to application and improving the adaptability of resources to teaching scenarios. In terms of resource supply, specialized, localized, and multimodal digital resources should be developed around the key educational needs of ethnic regions. Local governments are encouraged to build regional educational corpora, utilizing the national smart education platform for content adaptation, localized case transformation, and dynamic updates, ensuring precise matching between educational resources and teaching scenarios.

In resource allocation, priority should be given to deploying high-speed networks and edge computing nodes in border pastoral areas, national border schools, remote teaching points, and boarding schools to solidify the foundation for resource circulation. Leveraging provincial intelligent bases to break down data barriers across platforms enhances resource integration and scheduling, ensuring that quality resources are accessible, operational, and comprehensive. An intelligent channel for educational resource support between eastern and western regions should be established to facilitate targeted delivery and localized adaptation of quality resources. In resource application, a dynamic monitoring and feedback mechanism for resource operation and usage should be established based on the national smart education platform. This should involve layered analysis based on teacher application data, resource usage preferences, and student engagement, continuously optimizing intelligent recommendation and push strategies to enhance the effectiveness of resource application in teaching scenarios. To address the difficulties some teachers face in utilizing digital resources, expert guidance teams should conduct case promotions and on-site support, ensuring that quality resources are truly understandable, usable, and effective.

Focusing on Skill Enhancement: Strengthening Support for Teachers through AI Empowerment

Teachers are the primary resource for high-quality educational development. Improving educational quality in ethnic regions hinges on enhancing teachers’ intelligent literacy and teaching competence. In the training system, differentiated training should be implemented, with key teachers focusing on the development and application of intelligent teaching tools, young teachers strengthening data-driven learning analysis and precise teaching, and other teachers emphasizing foundational applications and concept updates. Building strong county-level “smart education teacher studios” can play a demonstrative role, encouraging young teachers to lead older colleagues, promoting a shift from “being able to use” to “willing to use and good at using”. An integrated online and offline training platform should be established, combining school-based cases for practical exercises, promoting the “National Training Program” for targeted support in building the teacher workforce in ethnic regions, and incorporating AI into the curriculum of teacher training colleges in these areas to strengthen the foundation of the workforce from the source.

In terms of the research mechanism, an intelligent platform for professional development of teachers in ethnic regions should be constructed. By analyzing classroom teaching behavior data, personalized research suggestions can be generated, forming an integrated research model of “teaching, learning, research, and evaluation”. Support for cross-school and cross-regional online research communities should gradually narrow the regional research gap. Regular workshops and teaching competitions on AI application in teaching should be organized, with award-winning lessons promoted through the national smart education platform. In terms of incentive evaluation, intelligent literacy and teaching application effectiveness should be included in the teacher assessment and evaluation system, with special incentives and project funding established for teachers who excel in AI education and teaching, ensuring they receive preferential treatment in title evaluation and recognition, fostering a positive atmosphere of “promoting learning through use and promoting excellence through evaluation”.

Promoting Continuity Across All Educational Stages: Building an AI-Enabled Talent Cultivation System in Ethnic Regions

The cultivation of AI literacy needs to permeate the entire talent development process, establishing a vertically integrated and horizontally connected AI education and general education system across all educational stages. In terms of vertical integration, a “General Education Guide for AI in Primary and Secondary Schools” that adapts to the realities of ethnic regions can be established during the basic education stage, setting gradient goals by educational stage and stimulating students’ AI literacy through project-based learning and gamified courses. In higher education, efforts should be made to promote AI as a public foundational course in colleges in ethnic regions, facilitating the interdisciplinary integration of AI with specialized advantageous disciplines. In vocational education, traditional programs should be upgraded with AI, implementing order-based training. A comprehensive cultivation approach integrating kindergartens, primary, secondary, and higher education should be promoted, effectively utilizing student digital files to provide personalized learning path planning. AI should also be incorporated into lifelong learning systems, creating a ubiquitous learning environment that combines online and offline elements.

In terms of horizontal integration, the collaborative education mechanism among families, schools, and communities should be deepened, extending AI literacy education to family enlightenment and community spaces. General AI courses for parents should be developed, expanding coverage through community learning centers and elderly universities. Ethnic region colleges should open quality educational resources to society, promoting deep integration of education among schools, families, and communities. Collaborative education among industry, academia, and research should be advanced, focusing on the local industrial needs of ethnic regions such as smart agriculture and cultural tourism, establishing AI training bases that integrate industry and education, and supporting leading enterprises to co-build industrial colleges with ethnic region institutions, relying on the industry-education integration model to create a “industry-position-course” map, effectively connecting talent cultivation with industrial development.

Strengthening All-Factor Interaction: Promoting Systemic Reform in Educational Governance through AI Empowerment

The modernization level of educational governance in ethnic regions directly affects the overall effectiveness of AI empowerment in education. It is necessary to enhance policy coordination, resource adaptation, and condition guarantees while emphasizing the construction of intelligent hubs, monitoring and early warning systems, and collaborative safety guarantees. In terms of intelligent hub construction, relying on the national education big data center, a regional educational intelligent brain should be built, integrating data aggregation, decision support, policy push, and demand response. A cross-departmental and cross-level data sharing mechanism should be established to achieve precise policy transmission and timely feedback on execution, enhancing the responsiveness and effectiveness of educational policies in ethnic regions. Regions with favorable conditions should be supported to take the lead, prioritizing the deployment of intelligent data collection terminals in boarding schools and central schools in towns, exploring a smart service model of “one screen overview, one network for all services”.

In monitoring and early warning, big data intelligent monitoring technologies should be utilized to dynamically perceive risks such as ideological security, campus safety, and school dropout rates, constructing a multidimensional early warning indicator system covering teaching quality, teacher mobility, resource allocation, and student development. An intelligent early warning and closed-loop feedback system should be established to achieve early detection, prevention, and assistance for risks, providing scientific basis for precise governance. In terms of safety guarantees, adhering to the principle of “intelligence for good,” it is essential to ensure the safety of content, data, and algorithms, improve assessment and filing, technical monitoring, risk warning, and emergency response mechanisms, and strengthen the security protection of educational data throughout its lifecycle, effectively preventing issues such as algorithm discrimination, privacy leakage, and exam-oriented pressure, ensuring that AI applications always operate within a regulated, trustworthy, and benevolent framework.

Empowering education in ethnic regions with AI is a long-term systematic project that requires a unified national approach. Only by adhering to a problem-oriented and application-driven strategy, promoting the coordinated efforts of technology, resources, talent, and governance through innovative practices, and implementing precise policies over the long term can AI be transformed from a “key variable” into the “largest increment” for quality and balanced educational development in ethnic regions, laying a solid foundation for building a strong educational nation and advancing national unity and progress.