eLearning Authoring: Taking the Next Step with xAPI

Authoring tools enable instructional designers (ISDs) withoutprogramming skills to create eLearning products. ISDs use these tools to createand sequence pages, enter content, add media and interactivity, and assemblecourses.

The authoring tool marketplace comprises a wide variety of constantlyevolving tools. Responsive design, gamification, avatars, animation, socialnetworking, and many other capabilities are available. Yet many of these toolshave not done much with the Experience API (xAPI). Some tools simply usebuilt-in xAPI statements to replicate SCORM’s tracking mechanisms and give youthe choice to export your course to xAPI instead of SCORM. This approach trackspage visits, module completions, and test scores, but it does not tap into thefull power of xAPI.

In this article, we will discuss a new vision for how authoringtools can support xAPI, enabling ISDs to create more effective and engagingonline courses.

Some typical scenarios

Let’s start with some scenarios.

Scenario one: A stockroom course

Stockroom employees must be able to retrieve items from thestock room quickly and accurately. A new-hire classroom course covers stockroomprocedures, equipment, and safety. But after training, employees are on theirown, spending the first two months on the job gradually discovering how toreceive, organize, and store stock in ways that make it easier to retrieve.

Using xAPI and a handheld package-scanning device, it ispossible to track package check-in times and entries in the stockroom computersystem. Comprehensive collected data provides information about the accuracyand speed of each employee’s performance. This data becomes the basis forjust-in time performance support, personalized for each employee, including acompetitive workplace game that motivates employees and rewards rapid andaccurate job performance with a spot on the leaderboard.

Scenario two: A first-aid course

An organization determines that it has a need to teachnon-medical emergency responders how to administer first aid to someonesuffering from a life-threatening asthma attack. Identifying the problemaccurately, performing the right steps in the right order, and working fast areall critical to saving a life. The ISD would like to deliver this trainingthrough a series of online simulations, but typical SCORM-based authoring toolsdo not provide adequate tracking capabilities.

The ISD creates a series of virtual-patient simulations anduses xAPI to measure speed and accuracy of aid administered. If the userhesitates, takes incorrect action, or does things in the wrong order, thesimulated patient may not survive. After each simulation, the system canprovide detailed feedback to help the user improve performance.

Scenario three: a hazmat course

Novice welders must learn how to secure and store gas tanks,mix gases, and light and extinguish the welding torch safely. In the past,welders have taken this training one-on-one through an apprenticeship with anexpert. However, the organization wants to minimize the amount of time expertsmust spend training novices.

With the Experience API, the ISD can track the use of performancesupport that incorporates video demonstrations, procedural walk-throughs, andjust-in-time coaching. This allows the novice to train on the safe handling oftanks and receive feedback without the need for an ever-present expert. Oncethe novice has mastered the process, an expert is called in to observe theend-to-end process and sign off on the novice’s competence.

The future of authoring tools and xAPI

In this section, we share our thoughts on how authoring tools can provide morerobust support for xAPI in the future.

Viewpoint: Andy Johnson

Future xAPI tools will:

• Ask me questions: Think TurboTax, askingbasic questions about the last tax year. This would set the stage for automatedrules throughout the creation process. Rather than writing statements for each“object,” we’d only have to create statements and code requests for exceptions.
• Take advantage of online vocabularies:Future tools would allow users of that tool to self-identify with onlinedomains such as medical, military, K-12, etc. The tool would then import verbs,activities, and results based on that domain. A tool’s ability to pull in dataand dynamically change is going to be crucial.
• Have an intuitive and dynamic UI:Building on the integration of vocabularies, the xAPI component of theauthoring tool UI would be customized based on the subject matter and intendedaudience. While there would be some deviation from the “standard” way to usethe tool, the iconography would be much more familiar to the user based ontheir profession or field or study, making the tool more intuitive.
• Integrate self-reporting: A tool of thefuture wouldn’t only generate a course. It would produce a log of the author’sexperience while creating the course.This log would give the author ideas on how to improve in using the tool or, ifthe author is an expert, something to publish to novice authors.

Viewpoint: Craig Wiggins

The future of authoring tools in light of xAPI is one that:

• Moves beyond the idea of a massive,all-encompassing authoring tool for learning experience realization. Modernauthoring tools are more or less built with the same goal in mind: courses withquizzes, markedly limited interaction—the antithesis of multimodal. Authoringtools of the future will also focus on specific experiences, but those toolswill be more like what we today think of as smartphone applications or plugins:contained and of limited means—but with specific effect.
• Focuses on tools made for a specific contextor use case. A focused tool is made for a specific use case or context—e.g.,a tool to design realistic coaching or scenario dialogue (with realisticfeedback and data inputs) or one that allows a designer to make video footageand create interactive video experiences that track all sorts of useractivities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that bundles of context-bound toolscouldn’t be made into a single offering (think video editing tools plus amyriad of plugins).
  • (Another possibility is the equivalent ofindustry or context-specific downloadable content, much like those for video games:function profiles that you download for a tool when you wish to createexperiences for a specific context or activity. These function profiles wouldinclude things like xAPI domain profiles, including vocabulary sets, trackingpresets, context-specific content, etc.)
  • Seeks to guide the design process. Theideal authoring tool might be a design guide as much as a tool equipped toexecute design imperatives. This can range from checklists of things toconsider when addressing “X” to full-on option-recommender engines.
  • Addresses new problems. Working withxAPI, your learning experience design can spread in any direction. These newoptions come with their own new issues. For example, figuring out where all ofyour learning experience elements are located (across servers and times) andconnecting them can be very difficult. Abstracting this process and making iteasier to manage would be valuable.
  • Sufficiently abstracts the user from havingto know how the sausage is made. The success of the major authoring toolvendors comes not simply from their feature sets, but rather from creating asufficient abstraction from having to know the underlying workings (SCORM,AICC, manifests, XML, etc.) and allowing the designer to focus on creating theexperience that they think is necessary for performance improvement to occur.(Again, in most of these cases this is traditional eLearning.) While xAPI doesrequire that learning designers know more than they historically have in orderto reap the benefits of the specification (e.g., fundamentals of data science,familiarity with learning analytics, the anatomy of xAPI statements, the basiccare and feeding of xAPI-enabled systems, etc.), there is no reason to believe thatxAPI-enabled tools cannot one day soon be simple enough to use that one willnot have to have knowledge of JSON, XML, linked data, etc.

Viewpoint: Peter Berking

Authoring tools five years from now will have the followingxAPI-enabled characteristics:

• They willfocus on performance-based assessment rather than multiple-choice testing.This includes stealth assessment, where the learner is constantly beingcompared behind the scenes (possibly without the learner being aware of it) toa “gold standard” of interaction with the content, based on the path andresponses an expert takes through the content. Rather than a simple test scoreresult, a much more nuanced profile of the learner’s ability will be availablethrough use of xAPI statements and data analysis engines. Test scores will bereplaced by probabilistic statements such as “Mary performed at 83 percent ofthe level of an expert.”
• Adaptive,personalized content will be standard. xAPI will be the key to create afeedback loop that captures and analyzes the user’s performance. This allowsthe content to determine optimal topics, media objects, learning paths, etc.for the learner based on their past performance.
• Authoringtools will achieve bi-directional communication between the content and theLRS. This means that a designer can insert a dashboard into the authoredcontent that pulls data from the LRS about who is doing what with the contentand how well, so that the learner’s interactions are “socialized” with otherlearners. Instructors or moderators, etc. can then monitor learner progress andintervene appropriately.
• Mediaobjects (graphics, video, text layouts, etc.) and interactive functionalityobjects (widgets, scripts) will provide standard xAPI data communicationscapabilities within the scope of their functions. For instance, videos willcontain the code to be individually configurable to report durations andlocations of pauses via xAPI. The authoring tool (providing the overarching“container” for these objects) will then overlay the xAPI-enabled sequence, tracking,and communicative aspects to interconnect and manage them as a single learningexperience and allow it to communicate with external systems
• Authoringtools will focus not only on learner performance tracking, but iterative,continuous content improvement through xAPI-enabled capture and aggregation ofusage patterns. In fact, one of the key purposes of the authoring tool willbe to author, integrate, and automate formative and summative evaluation of thelearning experience.

Viewpoint: Steve Foreman

In the near future (I hope):

• Authoringtools will provide more robust support for xAPI. Oneway this could work is by enabling authors to define any interactive object asan xAPI trigger. Once an object is defined as a trigger, the author would use anatural language xAPI editor to select one or more predefined statements toassociate with the trigger. The author would use the selected statement orcustomize it. Advanced authors would be able to create xAPI statements fromscratch.
  
  
  • Behindthe scenes, the tool would automatically convert the natural language statementinto JSON format as required by xAPI. Authors would be able to toggleto a JSON view of the statement just like current tools allow authors to togglebetween text and HTML in a WYSIWYG text editor.
    
    
  • Thepredefined statements would be intrinsic to the object defined as the trigger. Forexample, answer options for a multiple choice question could be defined astriggers. Predefined statements might include “<user> selected<answer text> to <question text>” and “<user> answered<question text> in <x> seconds.” The values in a dropdown listmight have similar predefined statements. A drag-and-drop object might havepredefined statements such as “<user> dragged <object label> to<placement label>.”
    
    
  • You willbe able to track any user action in a lesson, assessment, game, simulation,eBook, or app. How might this new, fully configurable tracking capabilityaffect your instructional designs?

Conclusion

In a few short years, we expect that authoring-tool xAPIfunctionality will grow significantly. In this article we have described a fewways this might happen. Enhanced xAPI support is likely to manifest itself inthe true spirit of authoring tools, so that you, as author, will not have toknow much about the technical details of how xAPI works. You will be able tocreate more complex xAPI-enabled instructional designs faster and easier. Youmay not even realize you are using xAPI. You will simply use xAPI-enabled authoringtools to design and build more effective and engaging learning experiences,free of technical distractions and complexities.

Want more?