# Moodle LMS Integration with Amazon Alexa: A Practical Experience
## 1 Introduction  
Education is continuously challenged to achieve improvements on its learning processes and student performance [1]. The needs of learning have been changing over time, due to the rapid adoption of instant communication and the increase of information availability [2]. New teaching and learning methodologies have drastically altered education during the twenty-first century [3], with the integration of technological resources such as virtual platforms and hypermedia resources within the teaching-learning process, as well as other methodological techniques such as project-based or problem-based learning [4, 5]. Pedagogy supporting deeper learning, which involves collaborative, informed, and personalized learning [6], has been determined to be more successful when helping students in achieving a more detailed understanding of modern skills [7]. The core will be a combination of personalization, collaboration, and informalization (informal learning), with traditional institutions finding the need to experiment with new formats and strategies for educating, providing them with the possibilities to offer relevant, effective and high-quality learning experiences [8]. However, while it has been identified improvement towards the student outcome brought by the use of collaborative learning [9, 10],additional factors have to be considered by teachers and instructors to achieve an effective and guaranteed learning [11; 12]. Learning Management Systems (LMS) are considered a critical and decisive key of modern e-learning [13; 14; 15], and while sometimes they are regarded as just a tool to deliver content, LMSs provide the means to create engagement between the students, the instructors, and the content [16]. There is a continuous increase on the frequency that teachers and students interact through LMSs [17], and even though institutions have customized their own LMS instances to meet the instructors' needs [18], recent studies highlight the challenges presented in current LMSs to meets the specific needs of the student, regarding usability and learnability [19; 20], which can cause a decline on their engagement with the platform and impact their learning outcomes [21; 22]. The need to innovate and experiment with cutting-edge technology provided the opportunity and motivation to develop an Alexa skill to support the research effectiveness of utilizing a VUI for education, delivering notifications and upcoming events related to student's courses, and study if, and how, VUIs could be used as an educational tool to enhance the student's experience [23]. To such end, the Alexa skill would need the capability to integrate with Moodle. Furthermore, the Alexa skill would be developed to a production-ready level, to be released as soon as it is ready, and become publicly available to any user of Amazon Alexa. Finally, as the relevance of a robust architecture for IPAs is trending with several IPA architectures proposals in recent years [24], this project would aim as well to validate the existing knowledge available from scientific studies of similar nature, testing that such knowledge helps in our development to overcome issues we might encounter, and provides us with guidelines to implement a solid foundation for our application. Our work and findings would then be presented to provide new scientific insight for helping and guiding researchers on future works of similar characteristics, disclosing the successful and failed decisions and technical implementations taken along the way, along with the analysis and results of the usability of the skill itself. Based on the research and motivation noted above, the research questions in this study are as follows. (RQ1) To build the basic architecture for an Alexa skill for educational purposes, including its integration with Moodle; (RQ2) to establish whether Moodle currently provides the necessary tools for voice-content creation for developing voice-first applications. The remainder of this work is structured as follows.