Best-of-Breed: Service-Oriented Integration of Artificial Intelligence in Interoperable Educational Ecosystems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers great potential for optimizing learning processes, teaching methods, learning content, or organizational procedures. However, the success of AI components in educational environments is by no means guaranteed and depends on several conditions in their respective learning settings. In this article, we analyze requirements that are often addressed prior to introducing AI features. We address organizational, methodological, didactical, content-related, and technical challenges. The research question of this work is how AI features can best be incorporated into modern educational system landscapes to create sustainable system architectures that are accepted and perceived as added value by users. Thereby, the article discusses two approaches to software architecture: Best-of-Suite (for monolithic architectures) and Best-of-Breed (for service-oriented architectures). Monolithic systems offer a wide range of functions, can be offered by a single provider but can become difficult to manage and create dependencies. Specialized and service-oriented systems, in turn, consist of modular functions handled by specialized services, are more flexible and scalable, and can be integrated with a wide range of tools and services, but require more effort to set up and manage. We explain why the Best-of-Breed strategy is a sensible approach to the use of AI components, how this can be implemented sustainably with the help of a middleware component, and we report on the user experiences from a field test. While in this work we evaluate the implemented system with a cybersecurity training as an on-the-job course, the middleware has been successfully used in other educational contexts, as well.