ibl.ai: An AI Operating System for Educators

Universities don’t need one more chatbot—they need an operating system for AI: a secure, on-prem (or university cloud) platform that plugs into registrar and LMS data, lets faculty shape pedagogy and safety, and gives developers a unified API to ship agentic apps across campus.

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What We Mean By An “AI OS”

Think of it as your common plumbing layer for educational AI:

• LLM-agnostic, unified API. Swap OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and others without rewriting apps. Use the union of capabilities (e.g., code interpreter, multimodal, screen share) behind one interface.

• Runs in your environment. Deploy on your cloud or on-prem so student data, registrar records, and course content never leave your control.

• Multi-tenant + RBAC. Serve colleges, departments, courses, and cohorts with fine-grained permissions by default.

• SDKs for builders. Python and Web SDKs make it easy for campus teams to build their own mentors, tools, and UIs on top of the same back end.

Why It Must Live Inside The Campus

Personalization is only useful if mentors know the learner—major, enrolled courses, progress, goals, accommodations—and if answers are grounded in approved materials. Universities can’t safely sync that institutional memory to external SaaS; hosting the platform internally unlocks:

• Context-aware mentors that combine student memory with course datasets (RAG) for cited, syllabus-aligned answers.

• Governance and cost control at the platform layer instead of per-user SaaS fees.

• Data fidelity for evidence, accreditation, and outcomes research.

Built For Faculty Control (Not A Black Box)

Faculty decide how mentors teach and what they can access:

• Pedagogy & prompts. Instructors set the system and proactive prompts (Socratic vs. direct, hints vs. solutions, tone, scaffolding).

• Safety layers. Dual moderation—pre-request and pre-reply—adds policy guardrails on top of the base model’s alignment.

• Datasets & citations. Drag-and-drop notes, slides, readings; answers are always cited back to sources.

• History & visibility. See aggregate and thread-level interactions to spot misconceptions and close gaps.

• Disclaimers & scope. Constrain mentors to course topics and add contextual disclaimers when needed.

• What students see: a course-aware copilot in the LMS that remembers them and cites sources.

• What professors control: model choice, pedagogy, safety, datasets, memory, analytics—and exactly where the mentor shows up.

Inside The LMS, Where Learning Happens

Through LTI, the mentor sits natively in Canvas, Blackboard, or Brightspace—pinned like a side-panel copilot. It can respond to “Why is this war important?” with the right module’s materials because it understands course context. You can run one mentor per course—or even one per student per course when you want maximum personalization.

Agentic Features Students Actually Need

• Code interpreter for STEM so mentors can compute, simulate, and generate accurate plots/figures instead of describing them.

• Multimodal tools (e.g., screen share) for walkthroughs and troubleshooting.

• Programmatic actions via tool calls and external APIs when tasks go beyond chat.

Analytics That Matter (Separate, Comprehensive)

A built-in analytics layer shows:

• Where learners get stuck (concepts, steps, and resources).

• Mentor quality signals (coverage, citation integrity, escalation rate).

• Engagement by cohort, course, and outcome—so you can iterate pedagogy with evidence.

Beyond Tutoring: An Ecosystem Of Campus Apps

The same platform powers advising assistants, operations copilots, content and video creation (e.g., rapid faculty updates recorded as AI videos), skills and credentialing workflows, and more—all on the same back end, so maintenance and security scale with you.

For The Builders On Campus

Your teams can move from “demo” to “deployment” quickly:

• Unified API + SDKs to create mentors, attach datasets, define memory schemas, and wire tools—without leaking keys in the browser.

• Frontend freedom (React/Next, mobile, etc.) with fixed back-end permissions, so prototypes are safe by design.

• Future-proofing: as LLMs get cheaper and smarter, your value compounds in connectors, memory, governance, and UX—not in any one model.

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Conclusion

mentorAI operates as an AI OS for education: a secure, LLM-agnostic platform that sits inside your environment, infuses institutional memory into every interaction, gives faculty full control over pedagogy and safety, and equips builders with SDKs and a unified API to ship campus-ready, agentic applications—plus the analytics to prove impact. If you'd like to explore how mentorAI can personalize learning with campus data and deliver course-aware copilots in your LMS, visit https://ibl.ai/contact to learn more.