by Julian van der Kraats, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
That can be hard, but it can also be surprisingly easy!
At Leiden University in The Netherlands, the IT department where I work asked the University of Sydney if we could use the code they wrote for a platform to easily create ‘AI agents’ for educational purposes, called cogniti. They agreed, and a couple of days later we were up and running!
This platform is a web app running in Azure, and it has access to different AI models running in our own Microsoft Azure ‘tenant’. Which means the data is safe and you log in with your university credentials.
What you can do with this platform, is easily design new bots based on good templates. There is also an AI agent built into the platform that actually helps you create a new bot (how meta), so you don’t have to know how to write a good prompt yourself. And of course, you can add the syllabus and any other relevant digital materials. Students can then access and use the bot, and teachers can see how the bot is being used, but anonimised. Teachers can also export all the (anonimised) conversations, run them through another model, and ask questions like: what concepts do my students have the most difficulty with understanding?
For students, the great thing is that they don’t have to add all the digital materials themselves anymore (as they do now with options like NotebookLM), whilst at the same time getting access to the same state of the art AI-models as they can use themselves online, in fact we are offering paid models for free to them. Also, the bots are prompted in a way to better align with the learning goals, which should be a bonus to students – however if they are lazy and just want a bot to do their homework, they will have to look elsewhere.
For teachers the advantages are obvious; less questions (also about practical stuff, turns out adding the syllabus is a wise move), so more time for more important things, and also more insights on how the class is doing. Furthermore, the platform can be used for other things as well, like designing rubrics, practice questions, etc.
So we started some Proof of Concepts! The first one was a general tutoring bot. As it turns out, most students either use it for hard questions, particularly clarifying concepts, or for really dumb questions like when is the deadline for the paper …
But we also created a bot that is not used for transferring or clarifying knowledge per se, but more geared towards practicing skills. It turns out that while we don’t like bots hallucinating when transferring knowledge (that hardly ever happens by the way), we do like the other side of that coin, the creativity that is needed for role-playing. One bot we created is used by master students of clinical psychology, where they have to practice conversations with depressed patients with suicidal tendencies. The learning goal is to find out about the urgency of the suicidal tendencies, by asking really direct and awkward questions. As it turns out, the bot is really, really good at simulating this patient. And another bot we made for evaluating the conversations based on a rubric also turns out to be really, really good at doing so.
We are planning to make this platform grow, together with everything around it relating to people, processes and knowledge – at least we now have a platform where you can safely try things out, and share the experiences with others who might also want to experiment.
If you want to try this within your own institution, feel free to contact me, we can share our knowledge and even help with implementations. The recipe for success is:
- Get the IT department onboard
- Find some enthusiastic teachers
- Find some enthusiastic teacher support staff
- Start with some demos to get the inspiration flowing
- Work iteratively, build something, try it out, change your mind, build something else, try it out, make it better
- Work in a multi-disciplinary way, with everyone (IT, didactical experts, teachers) together
- Learn from your mistakes and celebrate your successes!
Author
Julian van der Kraats, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
