The University of Sydney utilizes the power of Azure OpenAI to allow professors to create their own AI assistants

“Very early on we recognized that AI was here to stay, and that we needed to expose our students and our staff to AI but expose them in ways where they could learn how to use it safely and ethically,” says Joanne Wright, Deputy Vice Chancellor of Education. “We needed to put some guard rails around it, so that both students and staff could experiment in this safe environment and use it to personalize learning and teaching. So, we were really excited by Cogniti to showcase AI to its best effect.”

Educator-directed AI

Cogniti is a standalone web app authenticated through Entra ID, embeddable into the university's LMS (Canvas) through the LTI standard for streamlined access and increased educational effectiveness. Developed by a professor and designed together with UofS educators, the platform empowers faculty to build custom chatbots loaded with their specific instructions and resources to help students learn in pedagogically meaningful ways.

Cogniti was also developed in partnership with students, and helps to break down the AI barrier because their professors build and provide access to AI ‘agents’ through the platform that can be trusted. Cogniti also aligns with UNESCO's guidance for generative AI in education and research, including ensuring that all learners have equitable access to powerful models that function to support pedagogically-appropriate and human-centered applications of AI.

An educator can develop several Cogniti chatbots that act like teaching assistants to help personalize education for students.

To help faculty and staff best utilize Cogniti, Liu designed the platform to allow educators to create their own AI ‘agents’ that worked as teaching assistants, where a professor could provide their agents with custom instructions, essentially an ‘onboarding package’ that might contain course notes, the agent’s educational purpose, guardrails for activity, and other guidance on behavior. He says this mindset has significantly helped faculty understand how to interact with their AI agents.

“Instructors have really valued being able to control and steer the AI towards particular roles,” says Liu. “It’s like having a stunt double. Stunt doubles do things that the actor can’t, enriching the movie experience. These AI agents act as instructors’ stunt doubles, working with the instructor to do things they can’t physically do like be with students 24/7, one to one. The tool empowers and augments human capabilities, enriching the learning experience for students and teaching experience for instructors”. 

Transparency with institutional privacy

Educators can analyze student conversations to gauge learning challenges and make better use of class time.

Conversations inside Cogniti are recorded, allowing faculty members to review their agents’ conversation history to see if the AI is performing appropriately and efficiently, and monitor for any potential abuse by students. Moreover, faculty can also identify any confusions, misconceptions, or “lightbulb” moments that students experience in their AI conversations, gaining valuable insights into what challenges their students face, and adapt their teaching accordingly. And since Cogniti is hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform, all information is private and owned by the institution. “Teachers can now use AI and steer it in directions they find educationally meaningful,” Liu explains. “Students see it as part of their learning journey, and they trust it because it’s provided by their professor. We’ve seen educators build all sorts of agents, from FAQ bots to role play agents, from case study simulators to Socratic tutors, and agents that provide curriculum advice and 24/7 personalized feedback on student work.”

Piloting AI’s potential for learning

In October 2023, UofS ran several pilots to gauge the real-world impact of Cogniti on learning. Use has since exploded beyond the initial pilots.

· An AI agent dubbed “Mrs. S” allowed occupational therapy students to role play with a simulated client, allowing them to design occupational therapy interventions and apply theory to practice. 

A chatbot named Mrs. S provides occupational therapy students with a virtual client so that they may experience interacting with a client in real-time.

· A coordinator managing large first-year units of about 1500 students faced issues with feedback consistency, quality, and efficiency. To address this, a Cogniti agent was designed incorporating the rubric, assignment expectations, and examples of valuable feedback. This agent helped markers to speed up marking time and gave students more consistent, better-quality feedback in the same amount of time.

Educators can prompt Cogniti chatbots to provide clear, actionable feedback to students based on specific assessment criteria.

· UofS teaches biochemistry to over 800 students, who bring thousands of questions every semester. With Cogniti, these students can engage in dialogue anytime with this agent, discussing the material, explaining their understanding, and receiving valuable feedback.

 ·  Due to legislative change in Australia, UofS has implemented a new student support policy. Tutors and faculty who meet with students and give advice on academic issues need to have impromptu discussions regarding well-being, health, or financial issues. Since tutors may not be equipped to handle these topics, the university fed a series of scenario-specific prompts to a Cogniti agent. Now, tutors receive instant help when students ask unexpected, off-topic questions.

Rethinking educational equity

One of the most important drivers for building Cogniti was the university’s mandate that students and faculty should not have to pay for access to the most powerful and most secure AI available. Cogniti is offered to all students and staff for free, reducing the barrier to equitable and inclusive access to AI. “One of the values of Cogniti is that it can be used in a number of different learning settings,” says Wright. “It can help students in particular disciplines acquire mastery by helping them practice and learn from any mistakes. Faculty can even personalize it to address their students’ preferences, their weaknesses, or indeed their strengths.”

Mapping the future

Looking forward, UofS would like to expand Cogniti’s use to more Australian institutions, as well as those around the world. Only six months after the soft launch within the university, there are already a dozen institutions in Australia and overseas piloting the platform, with dozens more waiting to get on board. They believe Cogniti’s controllability, stability, safety, and accuracy can help dispel the fear that many faculty and students have surrounding the use of AI in education.

“Cogniti promotes the ethical, effective use of AI feedback because faculty have control over the guard rails and the underlying rules,” says Adam Bridgman, Pro Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation. “They’re not being replaced by technology; their expertise is reflected in the way that it works. Cogniti provides the framework a teacher needs—a pedagogically informed framework—so that they can strengthen their relationships with students. We want Cogniti to be community developed: built by educators for educators. Cogniti cannot be a static thing. It must have life.”

Future plans for Cogniti include adding modalities such as voice, utilizing Azure AI voice services, and making continual improvements based on faculty feedback and working in partnership with other institutions. This commitment to faculty and their vital role reinforces that Cogniti is designed to augment, not replace, their work. Through the Azure OpenAI enablement of Cogniti, UofS faculty and staff can better meet the demands of education by leveraging AI to ensure equitable access, more relevant responses, inspire critical inquiry, and provide greater security for staff and students.