Society & AI Named in the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report on Teaching and Learning

There is a particular kind of recognition that feels different from citation counts, altmetrics, or any institutional benchmark I know how to name. This is one of those.

In July 2025, I founded Society & AI as an independent research group: a scholar-led commons for open, peer-curated work on how artificial intelligence is reshaping teaching, learning, and the institutions that hold them together. There was no grant behind it, no institutional affiliation, and no publishing infrastructure beyond what I could design and sustain on my own. What it had, from the very first day, was a clear purpose: to keep rigorous, society-centered scholarship on AI and education freely accessible to educators, researchers, practitioners, and communities, without paywalls, without gatekeeping, and without the long lag times that conventional academic publishing routinely demands.

I am genuinely proud to share that Society & AI has been recognized in the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition. The citation appears in the Social Trends section on page 7, with a fuller treatment on page 9 under the In Practice highlights. The Horizon Report is among higher education’s most closely watched annual environmental scans, published by EDUCAUSE to map the key trends, emerging technologies, and institutional forces that will shape teaching and learning over the coming years. To be named in it, as an independent platform built from the ground up less than a year ago, means more than I can easily articulate.

A Note of Gratitude

Projects like this one do not survive on purpose alone. They survive because people trust them: with their ideas, their time, and their willingness to put serious work somewhere that is still finding its footing.

To every contributor who chose Society & AI as the venue for work they genuinely cared about, the scholars, classroom practitioners, doctoral researchers, and independent thinkers who wrote for an independent platform when they could easily have published elsewhere: this recognition belongs to you as much as it does to me.

To the reviewers who gave their time without compensation, and to the readers who have engaged seriously with this work and shared it widely: you are the reason any of this matters. A scholarly commons is only as meaningful as the community it serves.

And to the EDUCAUSE Teaching and Learning Program team and the members of the 2026 Horizon Report panel: thank you for recognizing that serious scholarship on AI and education can originate outside established institutions, outside well-resourced research centers, and outside the structures that usually confer this kind of visibility. It is precisely the kind of signal the broader community needs to see.

Built by Its Contributors

Everything this platform has become is inseparable from the people who have written for it. Society & AI exists as a venue for open, rigorous, society-centered scholarship, but it becomes something real only when researchers, educators, and practitioners choose to trust it with work they genuinely care about.

The contributors who have published here come from universities, classrooms, libraries, policy organizations, and independent practice. They represent institutions across multiple continents and disciplines that do not always speak to one another. Each of them chose to make their thinking freely accessible, and each piece they published has extended the reach and credibility of this platform in ways no single founder could have achieved alone.

In an attempt to honor each of them, I designed a dedicated author dashboard to showcase our contributors and their writing in an accessible and easy-to-navigate manner. You can meet every author who has contributed to Society & AI. Their work is what this platform is made of.

Society & AI was built on the premise that rigor and accessibility are not in conflict. That premise is holding — and the work, from here, only continues.

What the 2026 Report Examines

The 2026 edition of the Horizon Report spans three interconnected domains: institutional strategy, instructional practice, and student success. It is designed to give educators, administrators, and institutional leaders a clear account of both the shifts already reshaping the field and the forces beginning to emerge on the horizon.

New this year is the Signals of Change section, a forward-looking addition that surfaces early indicators across higher education, intended to help teams respond strategically ahead of the curve rather than only after the fact.

The full report is freely available, without registration, from EDUCAUSE:

Read the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition

I would encourage every educator, researcher, and administrator working at the intersection of AI and higher education to read it. It is a serious piece of work, and it points with unusual clarity at what the next decade is likely to demand of the institutions we work within and the pedagogical practices we defend.

About the Author

Sai Gattupalli, Ph.D. is the Founding Principal Research Scientist of Society & AI, and a postdoctoral alumnus of the Advanced Learning Technologies Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research examines how AI systems mediate learning, knowledge production, and educational access, with sustained attention to culturally responsive design, learning technologies, and the structural conditions under which learners in diverse and under-resourced settings can genuinely flourish. Society & AI is his independent scholarly commons, a platform designed to keep rigorous, society-centered scholarship on artificial intelligence and education freely accessible to educators, researchers, and communities worldwide, without paywalls or institutional gatekeeping.

Cite this article

Gattupalli, S. (2026). Society & AI named in the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and learning edition. Society and AI. https://societyandai.org/editorial/educause-horizon-2026/

Write for Society & AI

Society & AI remains open for guest contributions year-round. We welcome perspectives from educators, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners at the intersection of artificial intelligence, education, and society. All work is published openly and free of charge. Send your proposal to submissions@societyandai.org.