Amplifying the Experience API: xAPI Camp at DevLearn 2015

It was packed at the Seattle xAPI Camp at Amazon Headquarterson July 21, 2015. This event highlighted new use cases, implementations,collaborative exploration, and product showcases. Attendees ranged fromsolution providers to startups and obvious players like event sponsor Amazon. HostMark Oehlert (manager of learning technology and networked learning at Amazon)remarked, “We want the tools to build a really rich profile of users. Thistechnical specification will allow us to build, around our systems and learners,the ability to bring the data from these systems in incredibly powerful ways.”

Attendees gained a clear understanding of the business case andtheir technical options. Leslie Redd (co-founderof LearnBIG) stated, “Small companies like ours don’t have to reinvent thewheel. We can tap into a community structure with technology that canaccelerate us toward measurement and assessment along the continuum of experienceswe deliver to people with multiple technologies.”

The future

Myra Travin, educational futurist at METAImpressions, said,“The future is already here … the task of xAPI is to allow interpretation ofmeaning of the total data created by the learning ecology and providepredictability.” Bill McDonald (managing partner of Sabashiro Beach) explainedthat the “…xAPI will transform the design of digital learning activitiesbecause you can record ANY DATA YOU WANT. Imagine a world where a learningactivity can record audio, video, and other digital documents (in addition totext data) and have them easily retrieved for analysis.”

Shelly Blake-Plock (CEO of Yet Analytics) further elaborated,“xAPI provides a foundation on which to build an organization’s Mission Controlfor all human capital data … a means of capturing the data of formativeexperience. That’s the key. What we used to think of as ‘learning data’ now becomesa vibrant form of business intelligence.”

USE CASES

Software Usage—Sean Putman (VP, learning and development, AltairEngineering) instrumented their CAD software to track usage via click patterns tofind bottlenecks and diagnose software usability issues. They compare users to“expert” behavior and make recommendations based upon that gap. Their use ofxAPI to assess software competencies is paving the way for many similar usecases.

Adaptive Learning Ecosystems—Michael Hruska (CEO, ProblemSolutions) co-presented with Nick Washburn (director, learning division, RiptideSoftware) on a variety of research surrounding adaptive learning ecosystems. Theyare capturing data from live systems (e.g., firing ranges), simulators, and evenhandheld assessment tools via xAPI. Other systems with xAPI support, like theGeneralized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT—www.gifttutoring.org)—an open-sourceintelligent tutoring system built by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL)—areable to harvest the data and make recommendations based upon deficienciescollected across many systems. Nick Washburn said, “We have already proven theability to mine activity streams to trigger immediate feedback or remediationusing xAPI. The world is full of proprietary, disparate systems in and aroundeducation and training that can easily output xAPI, as well as theirproprietary language, and so we are on the path to better learning anddevelopment.”

Teacher Education and Learning Analytics—Kirsty Kitto (QueenslandUniversity of Technology, science and engineering faculty, information ecology)said, “We have an xAPI-based platform that enables teachers to design classesand assessment items with interesting learning analytics off of that data (in realtime).” Russell Duhon (CTO, Saltbox—makers of WaxLRS) stated, “A world ofpossibilities open up for the experienced designer who wants to do new andbetter things. We are constantly learning new ways to make better data and dobetter things with it.”

Skill Gap Closure—Ben Erlandson (CTO of the McKinsey SocialInstitute) is closing the skills gap for young people worldwide. He stated that“…our approach to global standardization isdependent on inherent local flexibility of disparate systems and data sourcesin each of our countries, for a variety of reasons it is imperative that werely on the data standardization capabilities of a protocol orframework such as xAPI.” He is targeting 75 million unemployed, under-skilledindividuals in the US, Spain, Kenya, India, and Mexico. They aim to train one millionpeople for new jobs over the next five years. (www.generationinitiative.org).

Connecting Learning and Performance—Duncan Welder (director of clientservices at RISC) is bringing enterprise data into their LMS to connectlearning and performance. He stated, “The open structure allows us to mapperformance data from multiple sources like control systems, customer relationshipmanagement (CRM) systems, and/or HR information systems, and compare that toemployee behavior—not just training.”

Community activities

Aaron Silvers of Connections Forum, one of the organizers ofthe Seattle event, said, “With more and more diverse applications of xAPI,there are also more challenges in making sense of how different communities usexAPI. Profiles defined by communities of practice and our systems of registrieswill need to be stronger.” Looking ahead, Aaron explained how the community hasbeen “working with vendors to bring tools and technologies to the market thatfill needed gaps in our learning and working ecosystems.”

How to get involved

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative is continuing to supportcommunity engagement around adoption. ADL is supporting industry by hosting “recipes,”communities of practice, controlled vocabularies, and domain profiles.

If you are planning to attend the upcoming xAPI Camp atDevLearn in September, Aaron Silvers states, “There are lots of ways to learnabout xAPI and more ways to try out ideas than ever before. As we’ve seen from theSeattle xAPI Camp, the time to adopt is now, and frankly, it’s only going toget easier from here.”

Want to learn more?

The next xAPI Camp will be held in conjunction with The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2015 Conference & Expo (LasVegas, September 28 – October 2).