tl;dr: Wednesday, 20 November at 1pm EST, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative will host a webinar on an xAPI Profile Publishing Tool & Server being developed for 2020. 

Since 2017, Megan & I have been pretty heads-down, laser-focused on doing what we can to harden our best practices to work with xAPI to further support ADL’s mission. We researched and documented conformance requirements for learning record stores (LRSs). We gathered best practices and worked with deep subject matter experts to develop a companion spec to xAPI (xAPI Profiles). We gathered the requirements for an xAPI Profile Server capable of publishing, validating and serving (via an API) xAPI Profiles. Now, thanks to ADL, we’re designing and developing a reference xAPI Profile Server with our friends (and former colleagues) at Veracity Technology Consultants!

How Will an xAPI Profile Help L&D Capabilities Scale?

Depending on how removed you are from touching anything that looks like code, if you’re reading this, you’re likely to have some idea of how much non-value-added work goes into how  L&D content and services are delivered today. Software integrations are difficult and almost always custom. Testing eLearning in LMSs (specifically SCORM or AICC) is manual and laborious. Reporting anything other than completions and scores from your LMS can seem impossible. Even if you’re managing content, you’re probably not managing what given learning content tracks, let alone reports to the LMS. This state of eLearning has stagnated over 10 years, which resulted in critical processes that must still be rigid (and often fragile) to author, publish, test, deliver and revise eLearning content everywhere.

xAPI Profiles make it possible to exercise some control for the quality and consistency of learning data generated by related learning activities. xAPI Profiles as specified today directly address how verbs, activity types, attachment types and extensions can be governed by xAPI Profiles. The xAPI Profile Server will provide a wizard-like interface to make authoring and publishing. The xAPI Profile Server will support publishing of the JSON-LD xAPI Profile so applicable technical rules that should govern any subscribing learning experience can be managed together with one tool. Users will be able to validate their xAPI Profiles. The application will serve xAPI Profiles via an API enabling workflows integrations with the means to revise and push changes in xAPI Profiles to subscribing systems and services.

On Wednesday, 20 November, Jason Haag of Veracity Technical Consultants and I will co-present on the work our teams are working on together. We’ll talk about some ins and outs of what you can do with xAPI Profiles, and some more details on what to expect from the xAPI Profile Server. Sign up for the webinar: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7745952068399329549