Articles
March, 2022 React vs Angular, here’s what I learned and want to share about two popular framework options and the value they brought to our project.
September, 2021 LTI 1.3 has greatly advanced the integration of edtech applications. It offers improvements in security with the use of OIDC, Oauth2, and JWT tokens, and flexibility with the use of the LTI Advantages Services such Deep Linking, Grades and Assignments, and Membership.
June, 2021 You're starting a new software project, or you’re concerned that your current solutions may have significant limitations that you’d like to remove. You've heard about some dev teams choosing a "serverless" architecture, you've heard lots of talk about "cloud native", and every third article on Hacker News seems to be about Kubernetes. You begin to wonder if and how any of these new or established solutions can help alleviate your project’s pain points.
March, 2021 You’re an Instructional Designer or another flavor of content creator. You’ve attended a few meetings recently, big meetings that all the “technical folks” and your authoring team have been a part of. The topic was “DevOps” as a practice, how it’s going to speed up your ability to produce content, and allow your team to release your product more frequently.
January, 2021 Over the past few months, I have been working on a project to build an Alexa skill that could utilize PDF files that instructors already have to generate quizzes. First, I built the Alexa skill based off of a Lex chatbot that a previous group had created, using the Canvas API to retrieve a PDF test bank or glossary file that would get converted into a quiz database.
October, 2020 Machine learning allows us to consume large quantities of data in order to bring new life to expansive corpuses in a variety of industries, such as education. The sheer quantity of digitizable educational materials, including textbooks, lecture notes, class notes, and academic publications is astounding, not to mention all of the hobbyists and creators who have started making educational content specifically for the Internet via blog posts, videos, and games. With the growing plethora of information available at the fingertips of artificial intelligence (AI), it feels like it is only a matter of time before AI can generate highly coherent materials to present to a learner on a topic, providing invaluable assistance to teachers.
October, 2020 Voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, make it feel like we’re already living in a future that was once only science fiction. Today, the most effective use of voice assistants is to answer questions that people ask regularly. This makes for a perfect match with many issues in the education space, since the learning process presents uniquely recurring and time-intensive challenges.
September, 2020 The rapid shoehorning of education into the digital space The Preface In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we at Unicon have reached out to our network of instructors, students, parents, and learning institutions to better understand the changing landscape of education. Being deeply entrenched in all things teaching and learning,
September, 2020 A comparison of creating a course template in Canvas by Instructure with 1) only the Rich Text Editor, 2) a combination of HTML Editor and Rich Text Editor, and 3) using custom CSS. Each approach has pros and cons.
September, 2020 Prior to 2020, educational tool interoperability might have been a nice-to-have; however, with most schools having a large portion of their curriculum online for Fall 2020, it is now critical.