Moodle LMS Integration with Amazon Alexa: A Practical Experience

Abstract

The frequency of interaction between teachers and students through Learning Management Systems (LMSs) is continuously rising. However, recent studies highlight the challenges presented in current LMSs to meet the specific needs of the student, regarding usability and learnability. With the motivation to support the research of effectiveness when using a Voice User Interface (VUI) for education, this paper presents the work done (RQ1) to build the basic architecture for an Alexa skill for educational purposes, including its integration with Moodle, and (RQ2) to establish whether Moodle currently provides the necessary tools for voice-content creation for develop voice-first applications, aiming to provide new scientific insight to help researchers on future works of similar characteristics. As a result of this work, we provide guidelines for the architecture of an Alexa skill application integrated with Moodle through safe protocols, such as Alexa’s Account Linking Web Service, while our findings ratify the need for additional tooling within Moodle platform for voice-content creation in order to create an appealing voice experience, with the capabilities to process Moodle data structures and produce sensible sentences that can be understood by users when spoken by a voice device.

A Practical Experience on the Amazon Alexa Integration in Smart Offices

“…The (RQ2) of our paper is meant to understand which are the most accepted tasks to be performed with the help of voice assistants in a smart office environment. The initial survey has resembling results with other state-of-the-art papers [ 41 , 54 ], namely Amazon Alexa is seldom used by the users during a given amount of time, like one week. The survey applied at the end of the interaction test cases are meant to reveal this information.…”

“…Our research encourages further developments into this topic, especially when the testing conditions are not lacking noise or the spoken language is not native. The satisfaction of the user is proportional to the degree that the VA is able to complete the task, this being a result of our research, as well as the research in applying VAs to education [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 54 ].…”

“…We have followed the state-of-the-art literature in VAs which presents the methodology for usability evaluation [ 41 , 54 ]. Therefore, at the beginning of the research, we have applied an initial survey in order to determine if the participants were already familiar with Amazon Alexa technology.…”

“…The motivation behind developing this VAs was enhancing the usability of LMS in order to speed-up user’s tasks through voice commands. The projects in [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ] show practical uses of VAs to assist engineering students into completing each stage of experiments, controlling hardware laboratory instrumentation, but also presenting supplementary teaching resources when asked by the user. Work in [ 43 ] studies the impact digital assistants have on children, as these are adapting the language style of the software when talking to real people.…”

Valoración de la Ecología de Aprendizaje Autorregulado Virtualizada para la Didáctica de las Ciencias de la Naturaleza durante la crisis COVID-19

“…Además, estas técnicas, modelos y métodos permitirán al profesorado mejorar el diseño pedagógico de las asignaturas y reforzar las tutorías, consiguiendo una personalización del aprendizaje del alumnado (Sáiz-Manzanares et al, 2017). En este sentido, es previsible la evolución de estos sistemas hacia entornos con mejoras tecnológicas, como asistentes de voz integrados en estas plataformas de aprendizaje; lo que mejorará la retroalimentación profesorado-alumnado y promoverá el aprendizaje autorregulado (Ochoa-Orihuel et al, 2020;.…”