Applications, Integration, and Data
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.
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 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.
August, 2020 Getting Things Where You Need Them To Be As we have worked with organizations to support their learning requirements during recent months, we have found several
June, 2020 THE CHALLENGE The impacts of COVID-19 have been felt by all sectors of society. Since Unicon is focused on education, we reviewed a number of surveys given to K-12 and higher education institutions that all provided helpful and informative perspectives from teachers, students, and administrators.
October, 2019 At Unicon, a common challenge that we hear about is this: “We have lots of data everywhere, but we want a way to bring the data into one place so that we can analyze it and use it to ‘see’ how we are doing, possibly to spot trends and ultimately to inform decision making.”
May, 2019 Background and Overview In my previous article, AWS Lex Chatbot in the Classroom, I began exploring how to incorporate machine learning (ML) in the classroom. The myriad technologies and frameworks provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) made it fairly simple to wire together processes and allowed me to focus on using the truly unique and valuable aspects of the chatbot to create a digital assistant that could provide definitions and a list of related terms in response to a student question.
April, 2019 Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a standard developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium. It allows instructors and students to launch courseware and learning tools