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 as learning tutors. 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 indicate that our method is able to empower educators to design Smart Personal Assistants that significantly improve students’ learning success.