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xAPI and the Future of the LMS

If you’ve been to any e-learning, instructional design or learning tech conference there’s no doubt you’ve probably heard of xAPI. xAPI stands for Experience Application Programming Interface and it is the future of the Learning Management System (LMS).

So what is xAPI and how does it work? Well, first let’s talk about why we need a successor to the current standard: SCORM and AICC. SCORM and AICC only allow the capture of completions, time spent, scores and a few other minor things of interest. That means we are only capturing, essentially, if the course was completed or not, how long it took and if the knowledge check was passed. There is a lot of room for opportunity there. How, as designers, can we confirm understanding, changes in behavior, an increase in job performance, or the acquisition of new skills? Well, xAPI aims to fill that gap. It has the capability to assess learner performance on the job and will provide a slew of data on the learning programs we are deploying across a wide array of metrics.



xAPI can even track things like learning activities within the classroom. The goal is to understand a user’s learning experience and then tying that experience to their performance. There will be a host of data that xAPI provides and it is tied to an “Activity Statement”. The Activity Statement is the record of what someone did and what it was. The Activity Statement can track a ton, but the tip of the iceberg is score, rating, language, contextual information and just about anything else you can think of.


So what’s next? Well, currently a lot of LMSs don’t quite have the capability to accommodate xAPI. It is still being evaluated by a few but if you have the capability to run xAPI you definitely should be.

Comments

  1. Wow Jonathan, excellent job I was searching for the articles author, duh it's you.
    Well done, now I have a glimpse of what we can do with the blog.
    Val

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