Prelude

Few things are more nerve-wracking than students attempting to ask their teacher or mentor a question right before exams. Students who are in pursuit of attaining knowledge will require more assistance than what exists in the legacy educational systems. As it is humanly impossible for teachers/professors to assist students every hour and every day for their convenience, AI agents were introduced to fill such gaps.

However, deploying and managing AI agents has made the education system even more challenging. To address this issue, Microsoft introduced Copilot Studio, which makes it easier for users to create and manage custom AI agents for their needs.

This blog provides a walkthrough of the groundbreaking technology—Microsoft Copilot Studio and its role in education. This blog illustrates the technology’s function, its use cases in tutoring and administrative tasks of the education sector, and how to deploy it.

Microsoft Copilot Studio: An Overview

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a low-code/no-code and Gen AI agent platform that enables the users to design, build, configure, test and manage conversational AI (especially AI agents) at request. It collects the data from the user through a conversational pattern leveraging connectors, workflows, custom topics, and AI prompts and designs the AI agent based on the use case.

A common misconception about Microsoft Copilot is the confusion between its three different versions.

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Microsoft Copilot Studio for Education

Educational institutions require AI agents in this rapidly evolving world to improve student academic experiences and maintain a competitive edge. These intelligent systems perform tasks and assign tasks on behalf of a mentor or for a mentor.

1. Test Preparation and Practice Quizzes

Dynamic Quiz Generation

The Copilot’s AI agent can generate assessments from the provided database based on the subject, difficulty level, type of tests, learning objectives, and the marking system. The test model can be modified differently for each student to avoid cheating during the test. It also adapts to the difficulty of the mock tests based on the student’s ability.

The test can be altered as the student answers them in real-time, considering their level of knowledge to measure their capacity. For instance, if the student answers a question regarding World War I correctly, the next question will become more challenging to test their competence.

Personalised Study Plans

The student’s performance on tests and quizzes forms the basis for generating a personalised study plan that targets weak areas. It also provides resources and exercises to support the study session, optimising time spent searching for content.

2. Language Learning Support

Conversational Practice

The Copilot is tuned to assist all language speakers in learning any language in the world. It provides text-based, voice-based and visual-based teaching for students with special needs. With inbuilt NLP, the AI agent recognises the speech and suggests changes in intonation, pitch, and slang to the student, which could possibly change the meaning based on the context.

Vocabulary and Grammar Exercises

The AI agent can coach the students’ vocabulary and grammar by providing them with exercises, charts, and infographics to enhance their understanding. Copilot’s virtual tutor (AI agent) can incorporate gamification elements like badges, leaderboards, and rewards to make learning more engaging.

3. Teacher Assistance

Automated Grading

Copilot allows educators to automate administrative tasks, like grading assignments and entering marks in sheets and reports. The Copilot agent’s streamlined workflow allows for immediate grading following the test.

Answering Frequently Asked Questions

As the Copilot’s agent provides 24/7 assistance, it can clear doubts, explain topics and answer repeated questions on behalf of the educator at any time and place. It collects data based on frequently asked questions to study the area in which students are struggling and provides a report to the educator.

Creating Study Material

By leveraging generative AI from Copilot, the educator can generate study material with the teacher’s thorough supervision and can edit and refine it according to the class.

4. Lesson Planning and Content Creation

Curriculum Design

Educators can design lesson plans, curricula and teaching methods tailored to particular learning goals and time periods.

Content Generation

The Copilot’s agent can create flashcards, games, study guides, charts, mind maps and summaries to keep the students engaged and educated simultaneously.

5. Proctoring and Cheat Detection

Online Proctoring

Copilot uses features like real-time video surveillance, screen recording, browser lockdowns, and AI monitoring to prevent students from cheating.

Plagiarism Detection

Copilot can provide plagiarism checks by analysing the database with the necessary tools, libraries, and APIs.

6. Providing Feedback

Instant Feedback

Copilot’s agent provides instant feedback and suggestions by reviewing the conversation, tests, and contents in real. This feature allows the students to rectify their mistakes immediately.

Constructive Criticism

Copilot’s virtual tutors can provide detailed and unbiased criticism, which will help the students to focus on the improvement and avoid any concerns about any emotions involved in it, as it does in the traditional method.

7. Progress Tracking and Reporting

Performance Dashboards

The copilot can create a performance dashboard that can track students’ attendance, grades, remarks, performance and reward points.

Student Progress Tracking

The Copilot can track student progress and provide teachers with insights into their learning patterns. It can identify students who are struggling and provide targeted interventions.

Building Virtual Tutors for Education

Building virtual tutors with Microsoft Copilot Studio involves the following steps:

Setting up: Microsoft Azure needs to be integrated. The configuration of the Copilot Studio environment, including data loss prevention (DLP) policies and security settings, is essential to set up to get started.
Designing: While building conversational flows, training NLU (Natural Language Understanding) models and integrating knowledge bases are two core steps to follow.
Implementing: Then educational logic, adaptive assessments, and LMS (Learning Management System) integration needs to be added
Customising: The top feature (customisation) of the platform relies on this step: using custom actions, generative AI, and optimising for performance.
Guaranteeing: Next, designing the platform to adhere to ethical guidelines and best practices for regulations and data privacy.
Testing: Finally, utilise the built-in testing tools in Copilot Studio for unit testing and end-to-end testing before deploying.

No matter how perfect the platform is, the solution provider’s sincerity towards its customers and product determines the outcome. Choosing the right provider is crucial to fully benefiting from the solution.

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Closing Remarks

In this ever-changing and unpredictable world, where pandemics, wars, political unrest, natural disasters, and climate change have become daily occurrences, education is often the first sector to be disrupted until the situation stabilises. It is the collective responsibility of society to prevent disruptions to students’ education through the adoption of advanced technologies such as Microsoft Copilot Studio. This AI agent platform stands out as a powerful solution for the gaps in the educational sector, not only during times of crisis but also as an efficient method of learning.