A new report by Coursera shows that 95% of students and teachers are using AI in higher education – but only a quarter of teachers worldwide feel ready to use it effectively.

By Marni Baker Stein, Chief Content Officer, Coursera

I’m excited to share the first Coursera AI in Higher Education Reportto assess AI usage and attitudes among students and teachers around the world. Drawing on responses from a survey of more than 4,200 university and college students in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, the report found that nearly all students and teachers are using AI to facilitate personalized learning, provide real-time feedback, and increase productivity and efficiency.

An important finding of ours AI in Higher Education The report includes:

1. The use of AI is now effectively ubiquitous throughout higher education – among students and teachers.
   • Of all faculty and students surveyed by Coursera, more than 95% of respondents reported being users of AI tools in an academic setting.
   • Across the five countries surveyed by Coursera, the majority of respondents reported using AI tools ‘always’ or ‘often’.
   • Faculty in the United States were the most consistent adopters of AI: 75% of American educators reported that they use AI tools ‘often’ or ‘always’ in their work.
2. Students and faculty alike express consistently positive feelings about the impact of AI on higher education.
   • 81% of students and instructors surveyed by Coursera report that AI is having a positive impact on higher education.
   • Students (83% positive) were more likely to express positive feelings than teachers (77% total).
   • Only 9% of respondents (11% of teachers and 7% of students) believed that AI had a negative effect on higher education.

3. Students and teachers are very optimistic about the potential of AI to facilitate personalized learning.
   • When asked to specify the positive effects they believe AI can bring to educational settings, the most frequently chosen answer was ‘facilitating personalized learning’, chosen by 47% of respondents.
   • Students (49%) were more optimistic about AI’s potential for personalized learning than intelligence (44%), although it was the most commonly chosen benefit among both groups.
   • Faculty and students also expressed optimism about AI’s ability to increase productivity and efficiency (40%), drive better support (40%), and support real-time feedback on work (36%).
4. However, despite broad optimism about the role of AI in higher education, faculty expressed concerns about regulation, governance, and their preparation.
   • 52% of teachers believe that the higher education system in their country is not ready to handle AI, and only 26% of teacher respondents worldwide say that their institution has a formal policy governing the use of AI.
   • Only 28% believe their university is ready to manage student use of AI.
   • Human skills gaps are also a consistent concern for faculty: only 25% of faculty believe they and their peers have the right skills to use AI to their advantage.
5. Students report that AI enhances their learning—rather than replacing traditional learning methods.
   • The most frequently cited AI use case by students surveyed by Coursera was research (identified by 51% of student respondents)
   • Students use AI to support writing (49%), do practice questions or tests (46%), and help with time management (44%).
   • The majority of student respondents (63%) use AI in less than half of their jobs.

Survey results are supplemented by case studies from Coursera’s 210+ university partners and 770+ Coursera on Campus clients, as well as recommendations for successful AI implementations. These recommendations include:

• Integrating AI literacy into intellectual professional development
• Equipping teachers with practical AI skills
• Establish transparent policies that guide appropriate use in teaching, assessment and research.

By supporting decision-making in research, encouraging human interaction, and creating systematic guidance for both faculty and students, universities can build confidence, protect academic standards, and use AI to strengthen learning outcomes.

Caroline Williams, Executive Director, Oxford Saïd Online, commented: “At Oxford Saïd, we see AI as a learning companion, not a content authority or a source of answers. Drawing on evidence-based learning design, we are creating online courses for 2026 where AI helps students understand ideas, think critically, and do things together, acting as a thinking partner. The key to this approach is a responsible and transparent framework towards a sensitive human-AI relationship, revealing a sensitive human relationship and AI, which reveals the critical relationship of learning between humans and AI, which deeply reveals things together. and meaningful use, to ensure that the responsibility of understanding is always there for the student.

As a global online learning platform, Coursera offers a range of solutions to empower faculty as they navigate AI in the classroom, including Academic Integrity tools that have promoted rigorous learning among over 13 million course completions; and a range of courses from leading universities designed to support faculty engagement, including Generative AI for Teachers and Teachers from Vanderbilt University and AI in Education: Leveraging ChatGPT for Teaching from The Wharton School, in partnership with OpenAI.

To learn more, download the full report here.