API’s in Education Accessibility
APIs are something you use whether you know it or not. They are found in everything, from websites you use to the games you play with. In short, API’s stand for an application user interface, and are a part of web servers. They are what allows your computer to communicate with any websites you want to access. For example, typing a URL into your browser is sending a request to the API for the HTML page. Although the example above is the most common use of an API, information only requests are made daily from other websites to make life on the web easier.
The commonality of API’s and their usability have made them a great way to make the web more accessible and easier to use for those who may not be familiar with technology like children. Web APIs have been used in things like connecting your google accounts to social media, accessing your location, or even adding google calendar events automatically. This accessibility of APIs means that people who need to access important things online like educational applications can work without too much effort.
Education is one of, if not the most important thing everyone needs. The more educated society is, the less oppression, danger, and unproductivity there is. With that being said, covid19 has put some restrictions on how and what we can learn. The best thing programmers can do is create applications that can help people learn more in this new life style. A big issue these programmers might run into is the lack of teachers and resources needed to create an effective website or app. Luckily, there are many API’s that allow programmers to access websites and request data to be used.
One example is the Khan Academy API that allows users to access the nearly infinite number of resources provided by their website. This API can be used if someone wants to link their Khan Academy account with the application so that your app can recommend lessons from Khan Academy, or any other learning resources provided by your app.
Another example is the google classroom API. You can access the data in your classroom like the number of students, assignments, marks, and so on. Users could take this information and display upcoming assignments, marks, and other things on their applications or websites.
These are just some of the available education APIs that can make learning online a lot easier. As students who may not have the ability to create our education apps yet, we can take knowledge of API’s and apply it to our code.
