Getting Started with xAPI: Take a Hike with an Expert

All fired up about xAPI? Maybe you just got back from aconference, read a blog post, or checked out some demos, and you’re eager todive in. I hear you. It’s like having a new, shiny piece of equipment, andyou’re just itching to find a reason to use it.

“If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem lookslike a nail.” —Various vague citations

Someone offered to make me a gold-painted xAPI hammer inthose early years of the Experience API and the Tin Can Project. Everything Isaw that didn’t fall into strictly SCORM-based metrics was a bright, shiny xAPIproject to be had.

I quickly found that selling my dream to an organization—orto a client—was an entirely different story. New technology? Pre-version 1.0status? Is this just a fad? I spent a lot of time evangelizing. That was when Irealized that a more practical approach to implementation was going to berequired. Fortunately, years of organizational communication and changemanagement experience offered some approaches. When you’re making a bold andinnovative move in your organization, there are two routes you can take: a big,visible project, or a small and stealthy one.

With the “go big or go home” approach, you pick a large,visible, mission-critical project. This project will have lots of readyresources, leadership attention when you need it, and a splashy success storywhen it succeeds. This kind of project is like hiking the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail: It’sa big, time-consuming enterprise. You need special equipment, skills training,physical conditioning, a support system, and the ability to put the rest ofyour life on hold for six months. It’s a big deal when you make it. You mightrun into some experienced hikers with advice every now and then, but most ofyour hike will be spent alone. It’s exhausting. Many people fail to complete iton their first attempt.

Or you can take a “day hike” approach. A day hike project issmall, quick, and inexpensive. It requires only a few special skills and not alot of equipment. You don’t have to go too far from home to get started. Thereare guides, but you may not need one. You can easily find friends to join you.Win or lose, it’s not a huge accomplishment or failure, but you’re still ableto get out, learn something new, and maybe flex some new muscles. At the end, anap, a shower, a Facebook update, and you’re ready for your next hike.

Take a day hike

Day hikes are good training for big excursions. In this post,we’ll focus on what it takes to do one of these smaller projects to get startedwith xAPI, while attempting to keep the hiking metaphors to an acceptableminimum level. Here are four suggestions for setting out on the trail.

1. Pick the right project

A day hike should be small enough—in size or impact—to fail.For example: A large health system’s first xAPI project focuses on timemanagement strategy because that doesn’t involve medical delivery systems andthe private health information stored there. A food industry company is lookingfor small wins with supervisory skills, not on the manufacturing floor whereadditional systems and teams—and food safety—are involved. A multinationalorganization chooses to focus on the learning experience insights availablefrom xAPI rather than the performance-focused gains in field safety, wheremistakes cost lives. A manufacturing company’s L&D team examines theexperience in a gamified eLearning course before striking out on a larger effort.

I have a small number of criteria when starting an xAPIproject. There are other factors to consider, but this is what I start with:

• SCORM is not the (best) answer
• The project’s sponsor is on board and knows whatshe or he is getting into
• Failure is an option

In each case, the project sponsor sees the larger benefit inthe enhanced learning and performance data from a full-on xAPI solution, butthe goal is to see what works and what can be gained in an insulated, incubatorproject. The learning and development project team will learn in the processand gain actual data to make a business case for a larger project later.

2. Choose what questions you want to answer

In some ways, this can be looked at like an experiment usingthe scientific method:

• Chooseyour question. Why are you doing this in the first place?
• Form yourhypothesis. What do you think will happen? How will you know it willhappen? What data will you need to collect to be sure?
• Create anexperiment (your project). How will you set up your learning experience togather the data you need? What is your control group?

3. Decide what statements to send and how

Warning: I’m going to oversimplify things here. The natureof your project will influence this decision, but you’ll need to choose anactivity provider to send you your xAPI learning record statements. Thesestatements are the transactions that document what is happening in the learningexperience or on the job performance, and they are what you’ll be pulling fromlater on when you report on the learning. Here are some ideas:

• Use eLearningdevelopment tools. Captivate, Storyline, Lectora, Claro, Flow, and otherscan publish for xAPI. Your activity provider could be an eLearning course, oryou can build something creative into the development tool and just use it forthe xAPI statements it will send.
• Use abookmarklet. An xAPI bookmarklet is a button stored as a bookmark in a webbrowser that users can click to record their presence on a page and take somebrief notes to store for later. Tin Can API, TorranceLearning,and others have open-source bookmarklets you can copy, edit, and use as yourown.
• Use Zapier, alongwith this open-source code from TorranceLearning, to send xAPI statements as a Zapier action when a trigger is met.
• Sign upfor a free account at xapiapps, wherethere are a lot of nifty things to try for free (under 50 users).
• Writesome code (or find a co-conspirator). Nothing says you can’t do it fromscratch. Implementing the xAPI specification is not that difficult for the average front-end softwaredeveloper.

4. Set up a learning record store

The LRS will receive your transactions and report on them. Mostof the major LRS products offer a free trial of their Software as a Service-hostedsolution, so the setup is fairly easy and won’t bother most IT departments. OtherLRS providers offer open-source LRS options that you host yourself. If you’rein an organization that doesn’t use web-based software (usually for securityreasons) or you want to install and host your own, now is the time (if youhaven’t already) to bring IT along for the ride.

Free-trial or inexpensive LRS options include:

• Wax
• Yet Analytics
• Learning Locker
• SCORM Cloud—Don’t get fooled by the name, there’s an LRS here, too
• GrassBlade

The dictates of a magazine article are such that I havepresented these ideas in a linear order. The reality is that you will need tomake several of these decisions together as your project develops, in much thesame way that the types of trails you hike will influence your footwearselection and vice versa.

Easy starts

Looking for aneasy-access trailhead to start your hike? There are lots of resources out thereto help you get started, including the xAPI Learning Cohort and xAPI Party.

The xAPI LearningCohort is a free, vendor-neutral, 12-week learning-by-doing, project-based,team learning experience. It’s an opportunity for those who are new to xAPI andthose who are looking to experiment with it to learn from one another and fromthe work itself. Participants form teams based on shared interests and worktogether on an xAPI project. Cohorts are run in the spring and fall each year. Learn more.

The xAPI Party is a free, vendor-neutral mini-conferencethat wraps up each Learning Cohort. The xAPI Party showcases demos and lessonslearned from the Cohort teams along with some “what is” and “how to” sessions. Thenext xAPI Party is May 11, with options for both live and virtual attendance.

Happy trails!

From the editor: Want more help with xAPI?

At FocusOn Learning 2017 Conference & Expo in San Diego, you will find several sessions dealing with uses of xAPI, including:

• Responsive Performance Support with WordPress and xAPI (Brian Dusablon)
• Using Video to Lower Costs and Improve Customer Satisfaction (Paul Zahradka)
• Focus Beyond Learning: The Performance Ecosystem Context (Clark Quinn)
• State of the Industry: cmi5 Support in Authoring Tools (Art Werkenthin, DuncanWelder)
• BYOL: Tracking Video Behavior with xAPI (Jeff Batt)
• xAPI: A Swiss Army Knife to Craft Your Mobile Environment (Robert Gadd)