AI Assistant for Teachers: a smart plugin for your browser
The first tool is the ‘VU Education Lab AI Assistant for Teachers’, a Chrome extension developed by the VU Education Lab by student employees. With this extension, you can ask AI to generate quiz questions, quizzes, or lesson ideas from any web page. This means you always have an assistant at hand when preparing your lessons.
The extension can be downloaded from the Chrome Webstore. After installation, you log in via Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This means that the tool is only accessible to employees of VU Amsterdam and Amsterdam UMC. The extension works anonymously: data is not stored and is not used to train AI models. More information can be found on the Canvas Tools for Education page about AI Assistant for Teachers. Information and the privacy statement for this tool can be found on this page at vu.nl.
Cogniti: build your own AI bot for Canvas
The second tool is Cogniti. This allows teachers to create their own AI bots, called agents, and share them with students via Canvas. During the Student and Educational Affairs (SOZ) project Scaling up AI applications, it became evident that there is a clear need for this in education.
Cogniti is an open-source system, developed by the University of Sydney and is now also in use at Leiden University and Inholland University of Applied Sciences. The system runs within the Azure environment of VU Amsterdam. All data remains the property of VU Amsterdam and is neither shared nor used for model training.
The use of Cogniti is being scaled up step by step. The tool requires a brief instruction, and for the time being, a bot in Canvas is made available via an administrator. More information can be found on the Canvas Tools for Education page about Cogniti.
Future
VU Amsterdam is deliberately using these tools as an experiment. This way, the VU Education Lab and the AI Competence Network (AICN) are gaining experience in the areas of didactics, management, costs and data protection. The technical landscape is changing rapidly, with national initiatives for similar platforms such as EduGenAI (via SURF) also under development. The VU Education Lab is keeping an eye on all of these developments. Which platforms and applications will ultimately become structurally available for education in the longer term is still subject to change.
Privacy and security
Privacy and security have been incorporated into both tools from the design stage onwards. More information can be found on this page and in the accompanying privacy statement.
Want to experience for yourself what these experiments can mean for your education? Come to AI at VU Show & Share on February 11, drop by the VU Education Lab (NU 1A-25), or send an email to onderwijswerkplaats@vu.nl. We would be happy to discuss the possibilities with you.
