CREATING AN XAPI-BASED STRATEGY FOR TRACKING FORMAL AND INFORMAL LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Background:
As the xAPI standard continues to gain a broad recognition in the learning world, learning practitioners are very optimisticabout the promise of this simplified yet powerful potential replacement for previous generations of learning standards such as SCORM. However, much like its predecessors, the xAPI promotes a lot of possibilities without a wealth of existing meaningful use cases, roadmaps, and lighthouse implementations to guide practitioners along an achievable path to its practical use. This paper will examine the underlying drivers of the push toward standards and how xAPI can be a central component of bringing the advantages of standards efficiently to practitioners at every skill level.

Problem:
The apocryphal story of many a young employee or hire new to the learning industry is having their manager or a fellow team member stop by their desk their first day on the job with hundreds of pages in a binder and say “here, this is all about SCORM. Read this, it is very important.” For anyone who has experienced or observed this take place, the resulting level of frustration is clearly predictable.

This story is representative of the broad disconnection between the individuals and consortia who develop and promote standards and the practitioners left, often with very little support, to implement them. The typical outcome is very little of the standard being used and learners left with content that is typically more “eReading” than “eLearning” with very little interactivity, flexibility, customization, or meaningful data produced.

Methods:
The first step in building a comprehensive strategy for xAPI implementation is breaking down the tracking of training into two logical domains: formal online training and informal or non-internal training or learning experiences.

The formal or structured online training fell clearly within the legacy domain of SCORM-based content. The combination of the flexibility of the xAPI and CMI-5. Utilizing CMI-5 with xAPI allows content creators to implement the majority of the legacy functionality in their content that they were using with legacy learning standards such as SCORM to create interactive and trackable learning experiences.

Informal learning opportunities, such as reading journal articles, attending conferences, and posting blog articles can all be recorded and curated through a typical standalone implementation of xAPI using the easily implementable bookmarklet technique.
Starting at these two fundamental points and elaborating complexity and scope with subsequent iterations of each approach creates a foundation for a comprehensive standards-based learning strategy for your organization.

Conclusions:
The introduction of the xAPI standard needs to be curated within the learning community with a much stronger focus on supporting the population of learning practitioners who have the opportunity to implement the standard to improve the quality of training they deliver and amount of actionable data points that the training produces.

Reporting, analytics, and data visualization, potentially with the utilization of artificial intelligence, applied to the massive and diverse statements and other data points generated by implementing xAPI could usher in a new era of learning intelligence that could revolutionize the entire field.