New ways to learn and teach with ChatGPT Work and Codex

AI is moving from tools that primarily answer questions to systems that can reason across context, use other tools, and help carry out complex, multi-step work. That shift is changing what it means to be prepared for school, work, and what comes next.

As students and educators return to classrooms and campuses this fall, we’re introducing three new education plugins for ChatGPT Work and Codex, specifically designed to help students and educators leverage agentic capabilities using the course materials and context they choose. A plugin is a package of apps, role-specific skills, instructions, and common workflows that helps students and educators get started immediately without having to construct complex prompts on their own. These new plugins are available through both ChatGPT Edu and ChatGPT for Teachers district deployments.

This builds on the principle that guides our work in education: AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and the best learning experiences keep educators and students in control.

We have been focused on partnering with schools and universities to make AI available in secure, institution-managed environments. Introduced in 2024, ChatGPT Edu gives educational institutions managed workspaces with enterprise-level privacy, security, and administrative controls. ChatGPT for Teachers ⁠ (opens in a new window) , introduced in 2025, is free for verified U.S. K–12 educators and districts and offers education-grade protections and compliance features. School and district leaders can claim their domain to bring educators into a shared workspace with greater oversight and guidance, including protections to support FERPA requirements and a data privacy agreement.

Through our investments in education, hundreds of thousands of educators across K – 12 and higher education have free access to OpenAI tools, training, and research to advance equity and innovation. Now, we’re delivering new features to support teachers and students to better leverage the full capabilities of ChatGPT.

The new plugins include one for college students, one for K–12 educators, and one for college educators. By connecting to the tools and materials they already rely on, from documents and course materials to calendars and other approved apps, the plugins understand the context and task at hand and help students and educators move from curiosity to practice, lesson idea to classroom material, and project concept to execution.

The K–12 Educator plugin is designed to help teachers plan and create for their classrooms. Developed alongside K–12 educators, it can work with the materials and tools teachers already use to create differentiated resources, design interactive visuals, and surface actionable insights. It also integrates with Learning Commons⁠ ⁠ (opens in a new window) , a philanthropic organization that funds and builds public AI datasets and resources to help bring more learning science into classrooms, which allows teachers to create materials aligned to local academic standards, the granular learning components beneath them, and the progressions that connect prior and future learning, while remaining in control of pedagogical decisions, grading, and agentic actions.

This work reflects what we’ve learned through our engagement with educators, including our partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). OpenAI is the founding partner in the National Academy for AI Instruction, a five-year initiative to equip 400,000 K–12 educators—about one in every 10 teachers in the US—to use AI effectively and lead the way in shaping how AI is taught and used in classrooms across the country.