What's New in Microsoft EDU webinar - August 2025
Join us on Wednesday, August 20th, 2025 for our latest "What's New in Microsoft EDU" webinar! These 30-minute webinars are put on by the Microsoft Education Product Management group and happen once per month, this month both 8:00am Pacific Time and 4:00pm Pacific time to cover as many global time zones as possible around the world. And don’t worry – we’ll be recording these and posting on our Microsoft Education YouTube channel in the new “What’s New in Microsoft EDU” playlist, so you’ll always to able to watch later or share with others! Here is our August 2025 webinar agenda: Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat for students 13+ M365 Copilot updates for Educators and Students Learning Zone public preview and the Copilot+ PC Microsoft 365 LTI for Learning Management Systems Learning Accelerator updates Microsoft 365 app updates AMA - Ask Microsoft EDU Anything (Q&A) We look forward to having you attend the event! How to sign up OPTION 1: August 20th, Wednesday @ 8:00am Pacific Time Register here OPTION 2: August 20th, Wednesday @ 4:00pm Pacific Time Register here This is what the webinar portal will look like when you register: Look forward to seeing you there! Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EDUStudy and Learn Agent: your study coach, built for learning
It's 11 pm. A student is at the kitchen table with a chemistry problem they can't crack, an essay due tomorrow, and a quiz in the morning. They open their laptop, open an AI chatbot, and in thirty seconds, they have an answer, an essay, and a study guide. The thinking didn't happen. The grade might still come. That moment is why so many educators and IT leaders feel a knot in their stomach about AI in the classroom. The concerns are real, and we built with them firmly in view. Now picture the same student, same kitchen table, same 11 pm. This time the Study and Learn Agent is beside them. Patient. Tireless. Knows the material because the student is studying with their own notes. Asks the right question at the right moment. Pushes them to try first, then helps them see what they missed. Quizzes them. Introduces flashcards, fill-in-the-blanks and matching activities. Helps them build and check their understanding. The student does the thinking. The Study and Learn Agent coaches the thinking. Most students have never had access to that kind of support. The ones who have are the ones with parents who can afford a tutor or a teacher with the bandwidth to sit beside them. Today, with the general availability of the Study and Learn Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, every student K12 and Higher Education with a Microsoft Education license can get personalized coaching when they need it, where they need it, at no extra cost. Study and Learn Agent is in the left navigation and works across any subject the learner is studying. It explains concepts, supports writing without doing the writing for the students, gives step-by-step coaching on problems, generates flashcards, runs quizzes, and creates activities to build and check understanding. The agent is designed to lead with a question so the learner stays in the driver's seat. It is available in English (US) and coming to additional languages in the coming weeks. ⚙️For IT admins — read this first Study and Learn Agent runs inside Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. For your K-12 students aged 13–17, Copilot Chat is OFF by default. You have to turn it on. Until you do, students in your tenant cannot access Study and Learn. The good news: Study and Learn is available to all licenses A1 / A3 / A5, and the agent is available from the left navigation bar of M365 Copilot app and in the Chat dropdown at https://aka.ms/studyandlearn. Action: Enable Copilot Chat for your 13–17 student group in the Microsoft 365 admin center using these resources: Full step-by-step video tutorial: https://aka.ms/enablecopilotchatvideo IT documentation: Education Tenant Identifier Student Age Groups 🎉What is available at GA Conversations that coach: Scaffolded conversations on any subject or topic K12 through HED for: Understanding concepts Working through step-by-step problems Getting writing support The agent recognizes the kind of help a learner needs and adapts the conversation accordingly. Soon, images will show inline in explanations to make abstract concepts concrete — especially for visual subjects like biology, geography, and chemistry. Practice activities that stick: Flashcards to learn terms and definitions, vocabulary, and recall facts Quizzes with multiple choice and open-ended questions with per-answer explanations Fill-in-the-blank for understanding how things work, or the sequence of connected events or facts in a process Matching activities that connect terms to definitions, causes to effects, concepts to examples — building the mental web that makes knowledge usable All activities are created with the learner’s own materials, or with just a topic name. Quizzes can also be created using a web-linked resource Students can chat with the agent during and after completing an activity to get immediate and remediation help with the agent still not giving away answers Responsible AI and data privacy: Study and Learn is built into the Microsoft 365 Education environment that schools already manage, giving IT administrators familiar controls and enterprise-grade data and privacy protection rooted in Microsoft's responsible AI principles. Students get a structured, accountable AI experience, and schools get a credible, learning-first option they can deploy with confidence. An AI literacy resource teaches responsible AI use from the very first interaction. Coming soon! Inline images: GA ships with links to images, images embedded in the flow of the conversation are coming soon Multiple languages: Study and Learn has been optimized for and Generally Available in English (US). Additional languages will become available in the coming weeks. Explanation and engagement callouts: Visual call outs for questions, tips and moments of persistence 💡Built on learning science The pedagogy is the product. The Study and Learn Agent is grounded in four research-based principles about what makes learning stick. They aren't a layer on top of the experience — they shape what the agent does in every interaction. Adaptive scaffolding: meeting students where they are by activating what they already know, then providing enough support to stretch them into what's next. In practice, this is why the agent opens a chemistry problem by asking what the learner already understands about molar mass — not by launching into a worked solution. It then tunes its support — worked examples, hints, or step-by-step guidance — to match. The result is a learner who stays productively engaged instead of overwhelmed or under-challenged. Productive struggle: asking before telling, so students retrieve, attempt, and reason their way toward answers. This is why the agent invites a first attempt before offering help, and why it surfaces a misconception as a question rather than a correction. Mistakes become data, not failure — the moments where actual learning happens. Active learning: practice that sticks, with retrieval-based activities including flashcards, fill-in-the-blanks, quizzes, and matching. The agent generates activities from the learner's own materials and lets them re-attempt the items they missed. Learners can pause during an activity and chat with the agent about a card they don't understand — building clarity in the moment, without the agent giving the answer away. Pulling knowledge out of memory, with feedback in the loop, is what builds durable understanding. Application and transfer: giving students the agency to go deeper, apply their learning, or reinforce it with an activity. This is why the agent invites learners to teach concepts back, apply ideas to new problems, and connect what they're studying to real-world contexts. It's the kind of work that builds flexible understanding beyond a single test. We built this with learning science researchers, cognitive scientists, and educators in the room from the beginning. 👩🏽🏫For educators The best way to understand what Study and Learn does differently is to spend a few minutes with it. Open it at aka.ms/studyandlearn and try it with your Microsoft Education account in the M365 Copilot app on a unit you're teaching next week. Take the professional development course at aka.ms/studyandlearnmodule to get a deep dive overview, and earn a badge! Most educators tell us this is the moment the design clicks — noticing where the agent asks a question instead of giving an answer. A few things educators in our preview have found useful: Pointing learners to it for a specific moment in an assignment can be more effective than a blanket "you can use this." Something as simple as "if you get stuck on problem 4, ask Study and Learn to walk you through it after you've taken a first attempt" tends to shape how learners engage. The activities lend themselves to specific moments. Flashcards before a vocabulary check. Matching for a unit on cell biology. A quiz the day before a test, with the agent's per-answer explanations as a self-review loop. The agent itself is a useful AI literacy artifact. Some educators use its behavior as a discussion starter — "notice that it didn't give you the answer? Why do you think that is?" — to open up conversations about how to use AI well. A short framing for learners helps a lot. Naming up front that the agent will ask questions before helping, push them to try first, and quiz them on what they missed — and why that's the design — shifts how learners engage. One small tip worth passing on: the more specifically a learner can name what's tripping them up, the better the agent can help. "I can't picture what's happening here" gives the agent more to work with than "I don't get it." Feedback shapes what we ship next. There's an OCV form linked from inside the agent, and educator input has driven much of the roadmap so far. 🫱🏼🫲🏾The bet For decades, the students who got one-on-one coaching outperformed the students who didn't. That gap was a function of access — who had a tutor, who had a teacher with bandwidth, who had a parent at the kitchen table. AI is the first technology in the history of education with a real shot at closing it. That's the bet we are making. AI as a coach. Built on learning science. Built into the tools schools already trust. Available to every student, not just the ones whose families can afford it. Study and Learn is the first move. Open Microsoft 365 Copilot. Look in the left navigation. The coach is there as long as Copilot Chat is enabled. Get going at https://aka.ms/studyandlearn Resources: Enable Copilot Chat step-by-step video tutorial Educator professional development Support documentation Anoo Padte is Principal Product Manager for AI in Education at Microsoft.
