Why don’t we just use ChatGPT or Copilot or other generative AI tools? #
You and your students certainly can and should use as many generative AI tools as possible, that fit your needs. This way, we can all develop our AI literacy and figure out, together, how these varied technologies can benefit education and wider society.
We built Cogniti because we recognised some limitations of the general-purpose generative AI tools, particularly in an institutional context. These align with UNESCO’s guidance for generative AI in education and research.
Benefits of Cogniti for educators and students #
Cogniti is built to address some limitations of general-purpose AI tools.
Equitable access #
Not all students can access general-purpose generative AI tools. For example, this could be because they cannot afford access to the more advanced models, or do not wish to sign up for an account. This presents an important equity challenge in education as we strive to build all students’ AI literacy, highlighted by UNESCO as needing ‘to reduce the barriers to equitable and inclusive access to AI applications’ (section 4.1).
With Cogniti, educators and institutions can provision access to the most powerful AI models, such as GPT-4, without students or staff needing to pay for it.
More reliable outputs #
It’s well-known that generative AI models can ‘hallucinate’, or make things up. This is reduced in the more advanced models, and can be further reduced by providing the AI with specific documents or text that are related to the user’s prompt.
Cogniti allows educators to load resources into the tool, such as files and web pages and material from the LMS. This allows the AI’s responses to be grounded in the right content.
More control over how AI is used #
With general-purpose generative AI tools, students and educators can ask the AI to perform any manner of task. Often, this is a beneficial as it allows them to explore a wide variety of uses.
In education, it can often be useful to direct students towards a particular approach to learning, or encourage critical reflection instead of having someone (or something) else do the work for them. With Cogniti, educators provide a ‘system message’ to the chatbots they create so that the AI is steered towards pedagogically-meaningful approaches to teaching and learning. This aligns with UNESCO’s guidance for ‘human-centred and pedagogically appropriate’ applications of generative AI (section 5.2).
Institutional account provision #
With Cogniti, access is provisioned through institutional login systems so students and educators don’t need to go and create their own accounts on another platform.
More awareness of how students are using AI #
When students sign up for general-purpose generative AI tools, the way that they use the AI is invisible to their educators and institutions. This could mean that inaccurate responses remain uncorrected, or less-wholesome uses are unmonitored. UNESCO calls this out as needing AI use to be ‘carefully monitored and validated – for its ethical risks, its pedagogical appropriateness and rigour, and its impact on students, teachers, and classroom/school relationships’ (section 4.3).
Cogniti provides educators with visibility over the conversations that students have with the AI. This isn’t so they can spy on students, but rather so that they can identify any issues in the AI’s responses or identify common challenges that students are facing. This allows educators to stay fully in the loop, supporting their students in the way they know best.
An easier-to-use AI that is focused on education #
With general-purpose generative AI tools, students need to know how to prompt the AI in particular ways to produce suitable output.
With Cogniti, each chatbot created by educators is controlled by a ‘system prompt’ that takes a lot of the guesswork out of interacting with generative AI. This helps to alleviate barriers in knowing how to effective use these technologies.
UNESCO calls out a number generative AI uses including to facilitate teaching (section 5.3.2), act as a 1:1 coach (5.3.3), facilitate inquiry (5.3.4), and support learners with special needs (5.3.5). See a few early examples of how pioneering educators are doing this already with Cogniti agents:
- A 1:1 coach to facilitate inquiry and case-based learning: Meet ‘Mrs S’: a classroom teacher who helps budding occupational therapists hone their skills
- Facilitating educators’ provision of quality feedback for improved teaching: Enhancing and speeding up markers’ feedback on student work
Check out even more examples of how educators are using Cogniti to create ‘AI doubles’ to improve education.
