AI in higher education: build the institution, not the gadget

UNESCO's new programme with Saint Joseph University of Beirut treats artificial intelligence in universities as an institutional problem rather than a procurement one. Instead of buying the tool of the month, it builds governance frameworks, trains staff, and integrates AI around human judgement. The wager is that absorption — whether a faculty can actually metabolise a technology — matters more than mere access, and that is precisely where most education-technology efforts quietly fail. For Muslim institutions in the Global South, the lesson is concrete: capacity is a curriculum and a governance question before it is a budget line. It is a working template for doing this deliberately.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at UNESCO: https://www.unesco.org/en/node/217106.