There are a few things to consider when piloting or implementing Cogniti at your institution.
Please note that Cogniti is still an early-stage pilot being developed by a team at the University of Sydney, and we welcome collaborators from other institutions in our journey.
Governance #
It’s important to ensure that you follow all relevant governance in place at your institution. For example, this may include checking with your IT department, or privacy office, or educational technology group.
Our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are available on this site.
Cogniti currently uses Microsoft Azure services for hosting the application, database, document embeddings, and OpenAI AI models. Cogniti can access the OpenAI-hosted AI models, and these can be switched on/off for your organisation.
Adoption models #
There are a few considerations here, and the best approach for your institution will depend on a balance of the following factors. All of these are to be read in conjunction with our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
Control – your institution may prefer to fully own and control the underlying services (e.g. database, document embeddings, language models), or only some of these, or none of these.
Cost – because AI (large language model) costs scale linearly with use, we cannot pay for ongoing, scaled-up use of the AI in the long term. Our collaborating institutions will need to bear the AI costs for any large-scale deployments.
Data sovereignty – your institution or jurisdiction may stipulate where data needs to be hosted. Currently, the Cogniti cloud instance is hosted in the Azure Australia East region.
These considerations lead to some adoption models.
Pilot (extending through 2025): We host, and provide AI access #
For small-scale pilots, it may be beneficial in terms of ease and efficiency, balancing risk, for us to host Cogniti and sponsor some light use of the AI. In 2025, Microsoft are generously providing funding to support other institutions in these pilots.
Option 1 (DIY self host) – limited availability #
The University of Sydney can share the Cogniti codebase with your institution, under a licence agreement, so that your institution can deploy it on its own Azure infrastructure. In this case, your institution pays all costs (e.g. servers, AI inference, support, etc) and handles all support and maintenance. The licence agreement stipulates that as your institution makes improvements to the codebase, you will share it back so that all Cogniti institutions can benefit.
Option 1 is now available on a limited, invitation-only basis to institutions who have development expertise and/or are able to contribute to Cogniti development and advancement.
From Q4 2025: Option 2 (via Microsoft Marketplace in your own Azure tenancy) #
We are working to enable your institution to deploy Cogniti into your own Azure environment as a ‘managed application’, via the Microsoft Marketplace. This will attract a small licencing fee. Your institution will also pay the costs of running Cogniti and AI costs on Azure. Your internal team(s) will handle the deployment, maintenance, and support, via the Marketplace and Azure Portal. The managed application will handle automatic updates.
Option 2 is coming online soon. Please get in touch if you are interested in this option.
From Q4 2025: Option 3 (Cogniti Cloud, SaaS) #
We are working to enable your institution to have Cogniti hosted for you in a multi-tenant environment (similar to many other cloud software offerings available today). Your institution will be charged a yearly fee for this service.
Please get in touch if you are interested in this option.
LMS integration #
LMS integration can be arranged on a per-organisation basis. Your institution’s LMS administrator will need to reach out to us and we can provide configuration guides.
Cogniti currently supports LTI 1.3 integration with Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, and Schoolbox. Integration with Blackboard is under development. Integration with other LMS platforms can be discussed.
Cogniti supports API integration with Canvas.
