xAPI for Non-Technical Learning Professionals

The Experience API (xAPI) has been around for several years but many learning development professionals are still trying to understand what it is and what it does.

In this episode of Instructional Designers In Offices Drinking Coffee Megan Torrance offers some advice for starting to understand xAPI and all it can do for your organization.

As a starting point, it’s good to know how xAPI differs from SCORM.

“SCORM is the spec that (standardizes) how we talk about what happens in an eLearning course when you are logged into a Learning Management System (LMS) taking it. SCORM is super limited because it’s only tracking about five things instructional designers care about and they’re relatively shallow, but they’re super interoperable,” Torrance explains.

And SCORM is further limited because it can only track things that are launched from an LMS, she adds.

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“Newsflash – people learn away from eLearning! And we’re not tracking any of that at any kind of depth or scale or anything. And then (people) go do things on the job with what they’ve learned, and we’re not tracking that either.”

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xAPI is all about helping track what happens in learning experiences that aren’t contained in an LMS, whether that's job aids, helpful videos, games or almost any other learning experience.

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“xAPI advances our ability to track what's going on inside a learning experience. It broadens what kinds of data we can gather and use and it allows us to capture information from the performance experience and what people do on the job after they've learned or before they've learned to better inform that as well,” Megan Torrance explains.

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Here at dominKnow, we’re big supporters of xAPI. One of dominKnow | ONE’s most powerful features is the ability to create content for more than just formal eLearning SCORM courses for your LMS. And xAPI means we can help our clients track the usage of all those learning experiences that can offered be outside of the LMS.

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Want to learn more about xAPI? Here are some useful resources:

• xAPI.com
• ‍You can learn even more about xAPI with tons of resources on Learn xAPI.
• xAPI Cohort: Learn more about the vendor-neutral, xAPI Cohort that will help you learn more from industry pros, get more involved in the community, and interactive with xAPI hands-on yourself - all for free!

Going to ATD 2019?

Check out Chris Van Wingerden’s session: ABC’s of xAPI. The session will go over all the basics of xAPI from the perspective of an Instructional Designer. You can check out more of his session here.