About Alexa Education Skills
The Alexa.Education API is a set of interfaces that enable you to build education skills for your learning management system, student information system, or classroom management app. By using your education skill, your users can get information about their or their children's recent grades, upcoming assignments, school communications, and more.
Any education technology provider that maintains student information such as grades, coursework, or school communications can create an education skill. For example, if you manage student data in a classroom management app and your users already have a username and password to log in to the app, you can build an education skill to provide your users with another option to retrieve the information that the app stores. In other words, education skills don't replace the backend service that manages the student information — education skills enable your users to access the existing information by using Alexa.
en-US locale only.- Education skill utterances
- How education skills work
- Prerequisites
- Education skill interfaces
- Integration with Alexa reminders
- Related topics
Education skill utterances
When you use the Alexa.Education interfaces, the voice interaction model is already built for you. The following examples show some user utterances for education skills.
Alexa, what are my grades?
Alexa, how are the kids doing in school?
Alexa, what do I have due tomorrow?
Alexa, what does Hannah have due next week?
Alexa, do I have any chemistry homework?
Alexa, what did Hannah do in school today?
Alexa, are there any posts from my professors?
How education skills work
When a user asks Alexa a question that your skill supports, the user doesn't need to explicitly open your skill — they can just ask Alexa their question directly. Alexa interprets the user utterance and communicates it to your skill as a request message with a JSON payload. If the request requires further information, such as the name of the course or the name of a student, Alexa asks the user for the necessary information and then includes the information in future requests to your skill. When your skill responds to Alexa, Alexa converts the information in the response payload into a voice response. Alexa speaks the voice response to the user, and precedes the voice response with a prompt that indicates that the information is from your skill.
Prerequisites
Before you can create an education skill, you must meet the following prerequisites:
- You must identify students and courses by using unique identifiers.
- You must have an Amazon developer account. If you don't already have one, go to https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/console/ask and create an account.
- To write your skill code as an AWS Lambda function, you must have an AWS account. If you don't already have one, go to https://aws.amazon.com/account/ and create an account.
- Your system must have OAuth 2.0 enabled and support the authorization-code grant flow type. For more information, see Account Linking Concepts for Alexa Skills.
Education skill interfaces
The Alexa.Education API has the following interfaces.
| Interface | Description |
|---|---|
| Alexa.Education.Profile.Student | Provides student profile information, such as the name of the student and whether the linked account belongs to the student or a guardian of the student. All education skills must support this interface. |
| Alexa.Education.Course | Provides course information, such as the name of the course, description of the course, and so on. All education skills that support assignments or grades must support this interface. |
| Alexa.Education.Coursework | Provides coursework information, such as the name of the coursework, the due date, and so on. |
| Alexa.Education.Grade.Course | Provides recent course-level grades. |
| Alexa.Education.Grade.Coursework | Provides recent coursework-level grades. |
| Alexa.Education.School.Communication | Provides a list of communications from education institutes. Examples include announcements, alerts, and reminders. |
Integration with Alexa reminders
Alexa can set a reminder for a predetermined time, and then deliver the reminder to the user. For more details about how customers interact with Alexa reminders, see What are Alexa Reminders? Education skills integrate with Alexa reminders automatically.
The following example illustrates how education skills integrate with Alexa reminders automatically.
User: Alexa, what assignments are due this week?
Alexa (data from your skill): Michelle has two assignments due Thursday. In French 3, Worksheet 6 and in Algebra Concepts, Problem Set 3.
Alexa (automatically): Do you want me to send you a reminder one day before these assignments are due?
User: Yes.
Alexa: OK, I’ll remind you Wednesday about these assignments.
