AI with Heart: What happens when Australian schools co-create AI?
Presentation Summary
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in education, the central question is not just how we can use AI, but why and for whom. The presentation "AI with Heart: What happens when Australian schools co-create AI?" delves into this question by showcasing cechat, a secure, Catholic-informed AI platform developed by the Catholic Education Network (CEnet) for its community of over 800 schools in Australia. This initiative moves beyond the adoption of generic, public-facing AI tools to demonstrate a model of co-creation, where the technology is built from the ground up to reflect the specific values, pedagogical needs, and safety requirements of its educational environment.
The genesis of cechat, which began its AI service in October 2024, was a direct response to the challenge of integrating AI ethically and safely into the classroom. Unlike public AI tools that often raise concerns about data harvesting and misalignment with institutional values, cechat operates within a closed, school-managed ecosystem. Its design is anchored in four core principles: it is Ethical, aligned with the Catholic mission and human dignity; Safe, with no data harvesting and built-in guardrails; Targeted, using role-specific chatbots ("agents") to address clear needs ; and Supportive, designed to amplify teachers, scaffold students, and lighten administrative loads. This is not AI that replaces educators, but AI that reflects how they teach, lead, and care.
The success of this community-led approach is evidenced by the platform's exponential growth. Within a year of its launch, cechat onboarded over 42,000 users and saw the creation of 1,800 unique agents by September 2025. This rapid adoption underscores the powerful demand for an AI solution that schools can trust and shape themselves.
The presentation highlighted three primary use cases that form the backbone of the cechat experience. First, a Universal Chat function provides a secure, general-purpose interface for all users, ensuring a safe entry point for AI interaction.
Second, the platform empowers educators with Agents for Teachers. A compelling example is the "Achieve Bot," an agent designed to support teachers in formulating relevant goals and intervention plans for students with diagnosed disabilities, using official NCCD guidelines as its foundation. This transforms AI from a generic tool into a specialized assistant for complex professional tasks. Teachers can also create engaging educational tools, such as "ANT KING," a gamified maths chatbot designed to challenge Stage 2 students.
Third, Agents for Students provide tailored learning support. The "Year 5 European Country Research Assistant" serves as a prime example. An analysis of 502 conversations with this agent revealed deep insights into student learning patterns. The platform's analytics showed that students were highly curious about geography, culture, food, and sports across various European countries. The tone of these interactions was overwhelmingly informational and curious, demonstrating genuine engagement. This ability to provide educators with rich, qualitative insights into student inquiry is a key differentiator, closing the feedback loop between technology use and pedagogical strategy.
Safety and oversight are paramount. The platform includes robust features like a Flagged Conversations dashboard, which automatically identifies potential AI response errors or other issues for administrative review, ensuring a constantly monitored and safe environment. Furthermore, the system's privacy-by-design approach, which does not retain a memory of past conversations, is a critical component of its student safety framework.
Looking ahead, cechat plans to introduce advanced voice capabilities, student sandboxes for safe experimentation, personalized content, and customized lesson planning templates for teachers. The journey of cechat demonstrates that when a community comes together to co-create technology, the result is not just a tool, but an ecosystem—one with a heart, designed to serve and amplify the human-centric mission of education.
View the full presentation here:
Radhakrishnan, P. (2025, September 17). AI with Heart: What happens when Australian schools co-create AI?. AIEOU Inaugural Conference, University of Oxford. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17537824
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