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