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Filling in xAPI’s Most Important Gaps

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2017 is a year that is really testing our capacities and limits. Politics, natural disasters, cyber security threats, budgets… even ADL has hit some road bumps. We formed the Data Interoperability Standards Consortium (DISC) a few years ago specifically to hedge against disruptions to ADL’s capacity for spec stewardship so that the people who rely most on xAPI wouldn’t be held back the way the learning industry was with SCORM 2004 (after ADL stopped innovating on it… in 2004). Anyone who’s worked in or with a government for more than a few years knows to expect that there are these hiccups which, for an indeterminate amount of time, stall progress.

Industry and momentum, let alone organizational strategies, shouldn’t be subject to the whim of such hiccups — especially when the industry could address these on its own.

Working hand-in-hand with ADL over the last year, DISC and the xAPI Community hit some pretty major milestones that really stabilized xAPI, in terms of implementation, to enable more adoption, faster. Also with ADL, we identified a series of priorities to work on together over the next several years. ADL’s funding situation means that those plans would have to be put on hold for us to work contractually with ADL. However, that (realistically) could be almost a full year in waiting to get started. As an advocate for its progress, I’d rather we work on these things in a different way, not needing to rely on ADL, so that when ADL’s budget capacity is restored, they can advance things much further afield. As an industry that depends on xAPI, it’s in the xAPI Community’s best interests to keep things going.

Megan and I are sharing the priorities for open source development and documentation we worked out with ADL with the hope that the xAPI Community will seize this moment for the opportunity it presents: to chart its own path to growth and ubiquity.

  1. Stand up a xAPI Profile server. With the xAPI Profiles specification released in June, the xAPI Community has finally addressed a huge gap in achieving semantic interoperability. However, without even a reference implementation of an xAPI Profile Server, the spec will never see its potential to scale xAPI across industries, and we will continue to have challenges of semantic interoperability across implementations. There’s a minimal development effort as a lot of the xAPI Profile Server leverages existing JSON-LD tools.
  2. Stand up a service to test for valid, well-structured xAPI Profiles. Right now the only way to create xAPI Profiles in JSON-LD format is to do so by hand, which is a laborious process that is prone to manual errors. It’d be helpful to have something available in lieu of tools that validated an xAPI Profile, highlighted where the errors are and the nature of them, so that the people producing xAPI Profiles could do so easily, and so those xAPI Profiles could be used by others with confidence. This likely requires a bit more development than the xAPI Profile Server requires.
  3. Stand up a tool to help people publish xAPI Profiles in proper JSON-LD format. What would be even better than producing xAPI Profiles by hand would be a web-based application with an interface that made it much easier for people to create valid xAPI Profiles, so that subject matter experts (or, more likely, data people working with subject matter experts) could generate profiles without needing to encode JSON-LD themselves. Not only does this require some development savvy — it would benefit from having a product manager and interaction designer so that this could be both usable and useful to many, thus encouraging more organizations to generate and share xAPI Profiles.
  4. Develop conformance requirements and a conformance test for xAPI Profiles and the xAPI Profile Server. Much like DISC facilitated with the xAPI Community in 2016, it’s likely that many LRS vendors (and probably authoring tool vendors as well) will incorporate an xAPI Profile Server and want to validate the data collected in their LRSs against valid xAPI Profiles. It would be wise to get ahead of inevitable interoperability challenges and develop (first) conformance requirements and (later) conformance tests that could ensure consistency in what we deem to be “conformant.” Related — if it’s a common goal by LRS vendors and stakeholders that LRSs will validate statements against profiles, that should be made explicit in the xAPI specification and additional LRS Conformance requirements must be developed, as well as additional unit tests in the LRS Conformance Test Suite.

That’s a solid list, and the community could rally itself to take this on and commit to seeing it done in the next twelve months. The organizations willing to commit resources to develop these efforts to a defined set of outcomes should be embraced by the community.

The things listed above are needed now. The market can probably tolerate a year without it impeding xAPI adoption, so long as these things are available to the market and implemented as organizations budget for FY19. There’s more for to do in the coming twelve months, but in the general category of making things, these are things with definitive outcomes that would help everyone.

So… who’s going to take on what in filling in these pretty important gaps?

Tim?

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