Aaron Silvers, President and Managing Director of DISC, the Data Interoperability Standards Consortium, was fundamental to the development of xAPI by the ADL. This presentation starts with the basics of what is xAPI, how it evolved and where the specification continues to evolve.

1. Vocabulary

2. What exactly is xAPI?

3. The Experience API, or xAPI, is a
common way of sharing information
about our experiences, using data.

4. The “x” in xAPI is for experience.

5. Data describing our experiences
can come from different sources.

7. The Experience API (xAPI)
• Can be used to to describe a wide variety of experiences
• Moves us beyond simple web-based, didactic models
• Promotes adaptive design and development practices
• Accelerates integrations with other systems (and practices)
• Encourages transparency in data capture and use

8. How do you use xAPI?
• How can I inform better business decisions?
• How do I avoid locking us into a solution?
• How can I make investments in learning development last longer and
more future-proof?
• How can I make sure what I evaluate today is useful in the future?
• How will I connect a learner’s activities across multiple applications?

9. How Does Experience API Work?
• People interact with “stuff”
(i.e. content, apps, business systems, etc.)
• These interactions are observed and described in JSON.
• The “stuff” sends the statements to a Learning Record Store.

10. What is a Learning Record Store, or LRS?
• It’s a database that stores activity statements - the “data”
• LRSs can be software (even hardware) that stands on its own.
• LRSs can be a function of other things:
data appliances, enterprise applications, LMSs

11. LMS vs. LRS
A Learning Record Store (LRS) addresses one capability of a typical
Learning Management System (LMS).
User Management Learning Records Scheduling
Course Management Statistics Grade Book
Tracking eLearning Content Storage Search
Assignments Sequencing Delivery
Preferences Reports Assessment

12. Someone Did Something
Activity Statements are “Observations”
Actor Verb Object
(To Someone) (Using Stuff) (With Some Result)

13. {
"actor": {
"mbox": "mailto:n3ed8rw7r39@adlnet.gov",
"name": "n3ed8rw7r39@adlnet.gov",
"objectType": "Agent"
},
"verb": {
"id": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/verbs/passed",
"display": {
"en-US": "passed"
}
},
"object": {
"id": "http://z2.vc/xapi/activities/passed",
"objectType": "Activity",
"definition": {
"name": {
"en-US": "HTML5 data attribute prototype"
},
"description": {
"en-US": "Example generation of a passed activity using an HTML5 data attribute with unobtrusive js"
}
}
},
"id": "d3574611-8092-4616-bfdc-4f48933a0d42"
}

15. Who owns xAPI?

16. xAPI is an open source specification. It’s
*licensed so that anyone can use it and create
things based on it without needing permission or
paying anyone.
*licensed as Apache 2.0, if you’re curious

17. Who’s in charge of xAPI?

18. is the part of the US Department of Defense that continues to
sponsor the collective open source work on xAPI since April 2010.

19. is the nonprofit organization bringing vendors & stakeholders around
the world, across industries to maintain xAPI and steer its evolution.

20. http://datainteroperability.org

21. What are other terms we might
hear?

22. An experience can be thought
about as a set of activities.

23. A profile is a set of rules that govern
how to use xAPI in specific ways for
specific experiences.

24. A profile can have one or more recipes in it. A
recipe ensures consistent data for a given activity
so that different tools can provide (and make sense
of) data on the same learning experience.

25. Interoperability is the expectation that what works
in one system will work for a set of other systems
by default with no configuration necessary.

26. For xAPI, interoperability means that data
created in one system can be shared with
appropriate security and used by other systems

27. A learning activity provider is anything
which generates activity statements
and then send such to an LRS.

28. Adaptive Learning assesses someone’s current
knowledge state and recommends a sequence of
activity that moves that knowledge state toward a
defined learning outcome.

29. CMI5 is a profile of xAPI that defines
“plug-and-play” interoperability between
learning content activities and LMSs.