Impulsemos la Educación del Futuro Juntos — Chile's National AI Certification Pathway for Future Teachers

In 2025, Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, the Kodea Foundation and the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación (UMCE) launched 'Impulsemos la Educación del Futuro Juntos', a certification pathway to prepare pre-service teachers to integrate AI into their future classrooms.

The programme aims to build AI pedagogical competence in pedagogy students before they enter the workforce, and, in a funded second phase, to scale this training to lecturers who would in turn train thousands more future teachers.

In its first phase, 200 pedagogy students from four universities — UMCE, Universidad del Bío-Bío, Universidad de La Serena and Universidad de Playa Ancha — completed a 40-hour virtual course and received certification. A BHP Foundation-supported second phase plans to train 75 university lecturers, who would in turn train more than 3,300 additional pedagogy students across 26 more universities.

The first phase produced 200 certified pedagogy students; organisers project this cohort will reach over 6,000 schoolchildren once they begin teaching, and the funded second phase projects an indirect reach of more than 100,000 schoolchildren. These reach figures are the programme's own multiplier projections rather than measured outcomes, and no independent assessment of classroom use or pupil learning has been published.

The initiative is a rare example of a national AI institute partnering directly with teacher-training universities rather than only in-service teachers, though its long-term impact depends on an unproven second phase and remains unverified by independent evaluation.