Your AI, Your Key: Using Your Institution's AI Agreement Inside Your LMS

A teacher asks the learning-technology team for an AI question generator in Moodle. The answer is no — not because anyone dislikes the idea, but because it means another vendor sending student work to another AI provider under another data agreement, and the last review took a semester. So the teacher goes back to what they were doing before: pasting questions, and sometimes student answers, into a personal chatbot account that nobody at the institution approved at all.

That is the worst of both worlds. The institution did the hard work of choosing and contracting an AI provider, and the AI that actually touches its courses runs somewhere else. Bring-your-own-key is how you close that gap.

You approved one AI provider. Then came the LMS.

Many universities, colleges and training providers now have an agreement with at least one AI provider — negotiated by procurement, reviewed by the data protection officer, and set up by IT. It covers how that provider may use the institution's data, where it is processed and what it costs.

Most AI tools for an LMS ignore that agreement. They resell their own AI, under their own terms, and the institution has to review those terms too — or say no. Teachers and learners lose either way: either the tool never arrives, or it arrives with a second set of data questions attached.

What bring-your-own-key means here

In EduGears AI, bring-your-own-key (BYOK) means your platform's AI calls go to your AI provider account, using a key your institution supplies. Every AI tool inside Moodle, Canvas or any other LTI 1.3 LMS — question generation, lesson plans and slides, AI grading, the AI Tutor, the AI Assistant, Cog, images and video — runs on that account.

• Your agreement applies. The calls are made on your provider account, so the agreement your institution already has with that provider is the one that governs them.
• Your provider bills you. You pay your provider at the rates in your agreement; EduGears AI doesn't resell that AI to you.
• It works on every plan, the free plan included. IT can test your key against real courses before anyone commits to a subscription.

Your AI, your key, your data agreement. If your institution has already done the work of choosing an AI provider, the tools inside your LMS should respect that choice — not ask you to make it again.

Setting it up

BYOK is set per platform, in the EduGears AI admin portal:

1. Open your platform and go to the AI Providers tab.
2. Add Key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek or Sarvam. Using a provider we don't list yet? Tell us — we're happy to look at adding it.
3. Choose a model for each capability — text, image, audio and video — so each kind of task runs on a model your agreement covers.
4. Validate the key, and optionally Set as default provider.

Once a key is active, the portal shows a BYOK in use chip. You can pause BYOK at any time without deleting the keys, and removing a key makes generations fall back to the platform default.

Who chooses the model

Some institutions want every course on one approved model; others are happy for instructors to choose. The AI Providers tab supports both: you can lock instructors to the platform default provider, or let them pick a provider per activity. Teachers never see a key, and students never see any of it — they simply use the tools.

Seeing whose keys ran each call

An agreement is only as good as your ability to show it is being followed. The AI Usage tab logs every AI call — when, which user, which task, provider, model, tokens and status — and you can filter it by whose keys were used. When the data protection officer asks which AI processed last term's essays, the answer is a filter, not a guess.

Plain limits

• Your provider has to support the task. AI video, for example, needs a provider and model that can make video; if yours can't, the video fails with a message saying so.
• BYOK covers AI calls. Your LMS data, course content and grades still live where they always have — in your LMS and in EduGears AI — under our privacy policy.
• Your provider's own rate limits and quotas apply, because the calls run on your account.

Where to start

Add EduGears AI to your LMS on the free plan, link the platform in the admin portal, and connect a test key under AI Providers. Generate a question set and a lesson plan, then open AI Usage and check that the calls ran on your key. That is the whole review: your provider, your agreement, your log.

FAQ