Typical systems of practice capture (if they capture at all) “solo” and “facilitated” events. But development opportunities are about more than events and the interaction scale extends into rich areas that our formal systems ignore. Solo > Pair > One-To-Many > Many-To-One > Work Unit Group > Community > Society > World.

The LRS is a database. One of the problems with the current iteration of xAPI / LRS is the way queries are run. To get the right data, an xAPI query is only going to work when you have a relatively simple query. To run a complex query using xAPI you’ll either need to return A LOT more data than you need and filter at the client or run multiple queries and combine them. I anticipate this will get better. To get good analytics out of an LRS, we currently need to fallback to the specific features of the LRS. It’s an interoperability shortcoming that I hope we see movement on sometime soon.

What I’m most excited about is using xAPI to personalize experiences and shape content based on previous experiences. So we could map one activity to another and present specific elements based on what someone has accomplished before. With most technology mediated learning activities, we are fairly limited in how we can shape “e-learning stuff.” Especially with SCORM content. By adding xAPI, we can get information outside of the sealed container. Declare an accessibility preference at some point? We can add that to your profile and pull it out anywhere. Pass a proctored exam last year that proves you know a lot about Y? When the module on Y appears, the module can know you did that and give you advanced topics instead of the basic stuff. You’re an instructor teaching a course on Z? You can get a little bit of background information right on your iPad and use that to provide extra help where it’s needed or to pair folks up in the lab.

Lots of possibilities to use insights both for management decision making and to help adjust interventions to meet the participant where they are. Exciting stuff.

I totally agree with you that data mining is not the way to go, especially because xAPI is supposed to be LEARNER centric as opposed to DATA centric.

Also, another thing that I have learned when working on the project: when designing statements it is mostly the object and/or context that provide most meaning; not the verb.

Thanks for taking a stab at this diagram. I think it’s certainly possible that an org could implement xAPI in this way. What we’re seeing in practice with the organizations we work with though is that it’s not just learning data that gets brought into the LRS, but performance data too, often with a connector to translate this data from non-learning systems into the xAPI structure. The kind of correlation between learning data and performance data you suggest then happens inside Watershed LRS. There’s a few case studies that illustrate that approach here: https://www.watershedlrs.com/success-stories

I hope that’s helpful!

Andrew

Thanks, David. It’s clear that a finer and richer granularity gives us greater insight. I like the analogy to fitness trackers; I may steal it ;).

This is where analytics must go. It really isn’t much different than these activity trackers and diet logging really exposing things that significantly help, and/or sabotage a healthy life. I think we can apply the same rigor to L&D. Not as prescriptives, but as potential opportunities to consider for one’s own development, or to offer as an organization to achieve goals (and weed out less effective methods- no need to buy an deep, expensive course catalog for the LMS if those items do not have ANY correlation to results).