News
- Representatives from nine CRUCH universities made progress in preparing the next stage of the agreement signed with the Ministry of Science, Undersecretariat of Higher Education, UMCE, CENIA and KODEA.
- The initiative seeks to build capacity to integrate AI into initial teacher training.
The Future Teachers program It took a new step in its development with a working meeting that brought together representatives from the nine higher education institutions of the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH) that participate in its first training cycle. This initiative seeks to strengthen initial teacher training through the responsible incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) and advance to a new stage aimed at bringing training from academic teams to pedagogy students..
The meeting focused on preparing the program's rollout in participating institutions, reviewing the projects developed by academic teams and the necessary conditions to support their implementation. The support, resources, and assistance planned to facilitate this process and strengthen institutional capacities to ensure the initiative's continuity were also presented.
The Secretary General of CRUCH, Angélica Bosch, highlighted that the challenge of this stage is to consolidate the work developed during the last few months and project it within the institutions.
“This stage of the program is relevant because The challenge lies in creating the conditions for that knowledge to be projected within universities and reach the training of future teachers.. ”At CRUCH, we value the commitment of the participating institutions and hope that this collaborative work will allow us to establish capacities that will last over time and strengthen initial teacher training through the incorporation of artificial intelligence,” he commented.
What is Future Teachers?
Future Teachers is an initiative promoted by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation and the CRUCH, together with the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences (UMCE), the Undersecretariat of Higher Education, the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) and the KODEA Foundation.
Following the results obtained during the 2025 pilot, which involved four universities, trained nearly 200 future teachers in the pedagogical integration of AI and projected an impact on more than 6,000 students in basic and secondary education, the program began its national scaling phase through a trainer-trainer model (Train-the-Trainer), aimed at installing permanent capacities in the participating institutions.
In March 2026, the first training cycle began with the participation of academics from nine CRUCH universities: University of Bío-Bío, University of Magallanes, University of Playa Ancha, Catholic University of the Holy Conception, Catholic University of Temuco, Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences, University of Atacama, University of Talca and Arturo Prat University.
The model envisions that academics trained by CENIA, KODEA, and UMCE will subsequently replicate this learning with pedagogy students in their own universities, allowing institutions to develop capacities to integrate AI in a progressive and sustainable manner.
From training to implementation
One of the main focuses of this new phase is for each university to transform the work developed during the training process into concrete implementation projects. Depending on the characteristics of each institution, the proposals consider different modalities, such as elective courses, mandatory transversal courses, mid-curricular modules, and model programs. minor, Workshops on ethics and artificial intelligence and integration of these contents into existing subjects.
According to Dr. David Reyes, an academic at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences (UMCE), who spoke during the meeting, this new stage will allow the training developed with the academic teams to begin reaching directly those preparing to teach.
“This step allows us to build capacity from early training so that future teachers can respond to the challenges of the technological age and the ethical and pedagogical use of artificial intelligence. Education students need practical tools because schoolchildren are already using these technologies in the classroom.”, he explained.
During the meeting, the main challenges to advance in this stage were also reviewed, including the availability of infrastructure and connectivity, the incorporation of these contents into the curricula, the generation of institutional guidelines for an ethical use of AI and the strengthening of the conditions that allow these initiatives to be sustained over time.
In that context, Reyes highlighted the program's contribution to supporting this process in universities. “One of the main challenges is the lack of ethical guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence. In this context, Future Teachers acts as an accelerator, because it allows knowledge to move beyond theory and become an installed capacity within the institution,” he stated.
As part of the program's roadmap, during the second semester, support workshops will be developed for the design of the courses in the participating universities, with specialized mentoring, communities of practice and a monitoring system that will allow support for the implementation of the projects promoted by the institutions.
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