2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition
The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition identifies the most influential trends and early signals shaping higher education teaching and learning over the next decade.
Based on the work of an expert panel using the STEEP framework, the report highlights how artificial intelligence, enrollment pressures, policy shifts, and sustainability concerns are reshaping instructional practice and institutional strategy.
What’s new in the 2026 report? Signals of Change highlight early, emerging indicators of how teaching and learning may evolve, before they reach scale.
What’s in the report?
- Executive Summary: What’s shaping teaching and learning now?
- Key Trends across social, technological, economic, environmental, and policy domains, including exemplary projects from your peers that demonstrate the trends in practice.
- Signals of Change: What’s emerging next?
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Hear from the report authors about what’s exciting and what you need to know in this report.
Community members share examples of the Horizon trends in practice at their institutions.
What are the key takeaways from the report?
- Higher education is under growing pressure to prove value, trust, and relevance amid declining enrollments, tight budgets, and rapid change.
- AI is already reshaping teaching and learning, especially assessment, instructional design, academic support, and student–faculty relationships.
- AI increasingly complicates traditional assessments; institutions are moving toward authentic, process‑based demonstrations of learning.
- New this year, the report introduces “signals of change,” early indicators that hint at where teaching and learning may be headed next.
Who should use this report?
This report is designed to support institutional leaders, faculty, instructional designers, and technologists in strategic planning, teaching innovation, and risk awareness.
Reports and Supporting Materials
FAQs
- What is the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report? The Horizon Report is a research-based report that looks at the key trends and early signals shaping the future of higher education. It is designed to help college and university leaders anticipate change, understand what’s coming next, and make more informed, strategic decisions rather than reacting after shifts are already underway.
- How is the Horizon Report developed? Using the structured STEEP framework, which includes social, technological, economic, environmental, and policy domains, a global panel of experts prioritized the trends most likely to influence teaching and learning at scale. These trends are paired with established examples of practice to illustrate how they are already taking shape across institutions. Building on this foundation, this year’s report introduces signals of change, early indicators and emerging examples that surface nascent ideas and innovations at the edges of practice. Taken together, these perspectives provide both a view of the current landscape and a forward-looking lens on how teaching and learning may continue to evolve, helping institutional leaders respond to current realities while also preparing for futures that are still unfolding.
- What’s new in the 2026 Teaching and Learning Edition? The 2026 Horizon Report introduces signals of change to help institutions spot indicators of how teaching and learning may evolve and to discern those possible changes earlier than traditional trend analysis allows.
Issues, Technologies, and Trends Resources
Higher education leaders and decision makers use the annual Issues, Technologies, and Trends resources—the EDUCAUSE Top 10 and the Horizon Reports—to know what's important and where to focus in their technology planning and management activities. When viewed together these resources provide more complete and nuanced guidance on institutional technology priorities.