What is Copilot?
Copilot is a conversation-based AI tool created by Microsoft. Think of it as Microsoft’s version of Chat GPT. The benefit of Copilot over Chat GPT is that Coventry University staff / students can sign in to use the Enterprise version. This means the data you enter into Copilot has the same protections as data stored in Sharepoint. It won’t use your data to train the AI model. See the Copilot page on the Teaching Knowledge Base for more information about Copilot and how to access it.
What is this website?
In general, you can just tell Copilot what you want it to do, and it (mostly) will do it. However, sometimes you can get better quality output by carefully constructing the instructions (or ‘prompts’) that you give it. To save you time, and to inspire you with different ways to use Copilot, the Education Technology team have created this website to curate a ‘cookbook of Copilot recipes’ – essentially, step-by-step instructions for how to use Copilot to perform different tasks. The short link for this site is bit.ly/copilot-cookbook.
How should I use this website?
The recipes on this site are divided up into different sections. Choose the section that is most relevant to your interests and try things out! You may find that some things work well for you, some work with tweaks, and some don’t match your use cases at all. More recipes will be added in time.
We also have general guidance for how to get the best out of Copilot:
…And recently we have added a section on ‘Copilot Agents’. These are essentially chatbots you can set up with instructions to perform specific tasks. They are powered by the same ‘large language models’ that Copilot uses, so they share its strengths and weaknesses (i.e. everything on the ‘Tips’ page still applies). However, they can be really useful to help your colleagues or students use AI in a more guided way:
These resources were created exclusively for educational purposes as part of work for Coventry University. © Coventry University. (2024). Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY NC 4.0), which is available on the Creative Commons website.