Top 10 AI News for July 27, 20206

A quieter week for splashy launches, but a revealing one for the classroom: a new national survey put student AI use at 90% while roughly four in ten instructors report no formal AI training at all, and several colleges spent the week doing something about it — launching degrees, convening industry, and building coursework from scratch. On the company side, Anthropic shipped a new flagship model and OpenAI aimed a free training program at small business owners. Plus a run of free half-hour AI training sessions you can still fit in before fall term. Here's what community college educators should know.

EdTech & Campus AI

New survey: 90% of college students use AI — and 4 in 10 instructors have had no training

A national survey released July 21 at InstructureCon found that 90% of higher education students, 61% of higher ed educators, 68% of K-12 educators, and 73% of parents now use AI at least occasionally — but 41% of higher ed instructors and 45% of K-12 educators report receiving no formal AI training, with only about one in ten calling their training comprehensive. Respondents across all four groups drew the same line: AI is welcome for explaining concepts, brainstorming, and finding resources, and unwelcome for final grades and academic decisions. The training gap is the actionable finding here — students are already fluent, and the professional development to help faculty guide them hasn't caught up. Read more →

Northeastern Illinois launches Chicago's first public-university AI bachelor's degree

Northeastern Illinois University announced July 23 that it will become the first public university in Chicago to offer a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence, starting this fall, with domestic applications open through Aug. 1. The program requires no prior AI experience, threads ethics and social responsibility through the curriculum rather than bolting on a single ethics course, and pairs with NEIU's "NEIU For You" scholarship covering tuition for up to 12 credit hours a semester after grants. For community college advisers, it's a concrete, affordable transfer destination to put in front of students finishing an associate degree in computer science or IT. Read more →

A community college brings industry to campus to write its AI curriculum

Northwest Arkansas Community College hosted a two-day working conference July 22–23 that pulled industry professionals and AI educators together for a single purpose: drafting AI literacy coursework that NWACC — and, it hopes, other two-year colleges — can actually adopt. The college is building on its participation in the National Applied AI Consortium's 2025–26 AI Mentorship Program, which supports AI pathways at community colleges nationally. It's a repeatable, low-cost model for any college stuck at the "we know we need AI courses, but who writes them?" stage. Read more →

Alabama convenes 350 faculty and employers around one question: which AI skills?

Roughly 350 faculty, career services professionals, and business and industry representatives met at Auburn University on July 21 for the Alabama Higher Education AI Exchange, co-hosted with Auburn Montgomery, Southern Union State Community College, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, and the Alabama Association of Colleges and Employers. The framing was deliberately practical — AI isn't just changing industries, it's changing the skills behind them — with panels pairing employers describing how roles are shifting against faculty describing what they've changed in their courses. Statewide convenings like this are how many colleges will get their skills signal, and a two-year college sitting at the co-host table is worth noticing. Read more →

ASU launches a Content Creation bachelor's degree for the creator economy

Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School has launched a 120-credit Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation, starting in the 2026–27 academic year at its Downtown Phoenix and Los Angeles locations, covering content planning, video and podcast production, personal branding, and audience analytics — capped by a final project in which students must grow a real audience on a real platform. To be clear, ASU does not market this as an AI degree and the published curriculum doesn't foreground AI. We're flagging it anyway because generative tools are rewriting exactly this work, and it's a transfer destination worth knowing if your college has media, communications, or digital marketing students asking where a two-year degree can take them. Read more →

Major AI Companies

Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5 — cheaper, less restricted, and no 30-day data retention

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, positioning it as cheaper and less restrictive than its larger Fable 5 model while beating it on a number of benchmarks, with particular strength at checking its own work and iterating until a task actually succeeds. Notably for institutions, Opus 5 does not carry Fable's 30-day data retention policy, and a new beta feature automatically routes blocked requests to a less powerful model instead of erroring out. There's no education product in this release, but two things matter to colleges: the privacy terms are the kind of detail your IT and legal reviewers will ask about, and continued price pressure at the frontier keeps campus AI budgets moving in the right direction. Read more →

OpenAI launches a free small business AI program — including in-person academies

OpenAI announced its ChatGPT for small business program on July 21, bundling free virtual training webinars, in-person AI Academy events across the U.S., a library of guides and customer stories, and partner integrations with tools like Shopify, Intuit, Slack, and Wix, all built around its GPT-5.6-powered ChatGPT Work agent. This is a business initiative rather than an education one, but the overlap with community college work is real: small business development centers, entrepreneurship courses, and continuing education programs serve exactly this audience, and free vendor-run training and local academy events are worth tracking as a supplement — not a substitute — for your own curriculum. Read more →

Free & Student Opportunities

OpenAI Academy is running six free 30-minute Skill Labs through mid-August

OpenAI's education newsletter flagged a run of free, live Skill Labs on OpenAI Academy — half-hour online sessions on building presentations (July 28), automating workflows (July 30), planning cross-functional projects (Aug. 4), analyzing data (Aug. 6), managing daily work (Aug. 11), and building sites and dashboards (Aug. 13). Registration is free at academy.openai.com and sessions are livestreamed, so nothing here requires a paid plan or an institutional agreement. Thirty minutes is about the most realistic professional development commitment there is during syllabus season — and given that roughly four in ten instructors report no formal AI training at all, this is a low-friction place to start. Read more →

AI Competitions

A national AI video challenge is open to college students — deadline Aug. 3

The Chinese Institute of Engineers–USA is running its 2026 National AI-Generated Content Video Challenge on the theme "Engineering Changes the World," with a college division open to full-time undergraduate and graduate students working solo or in teams of up to three; entries are 3–5 minute videos made with AI tools, and submissions close Aug. 3. Registration costs $15 per team, so it isn't free, but the barrier to entry is otherwise low — this rewards storytelling and tool fluency rather than coding, which makes it a rare fit for students outside CS. If you teach media, communications, or an intro AI course, it's a fast, concrete assignment hook for the first weeks of fall. Read more →

This roundup was assembled with AI-assisted research by the EDUAIATLAS team. Spot something we missed? Let us know.