Towards Empowering Educators to Create their own Smart Personal Assistants

Despite a growing body of research about the
design and use of Smart Personal Assistants such as
Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant, little is known
about their ability to help educators offering
individual support in large-scale learning
environments. Smart Personal Assistant ecosystems
empower educators to develop their own agents
without deep technological knowledge. The objective
of this paper is to design and validate a method that
helps educators to create Smart Personal Assistants
for their learning environments. Using a design
science research approach, we first gather
requirements from students and educators as well as
from information systems and education theory. Next,
we create an alpha version of our method and evaluate
it with a focus group before we instantiate our artifact
in an everyday learning environment. The findings of
the paper indicate that our method is able to empower
educators to design Smart Personal Assistants that
significantly improve students’ learning success.